Heh.. these are always cute. In the spirit of lurking less and posting more:
Around 1992, when I was about 12 years old and already a computer geek, I asked for a rather expensive piece of equipment called a 'sound card' (heh). At the time, I was really into the Sierra series of adventure games (Space Quest, Police Quest, et al) and realized most of my favorite games would be a lot more fun with one of these sound cards- even though I didn't know much about them (no Internet, and no friends with computers.. so I was going solely on what information was included with the games of the time).
What I got.. for my birthday I think.. was an ATI Stereo F/X sound card. 8 bit, soundblaster clone (at one point ATI made just about everything). Included with it was Wing Commander 2 with the speech pack. The box art was absolutely amazing, and I read the included literature about a thousand times.
The bad news was that all I had at the time was a 286, 12 mhz I believe. The game took 6 hours to install and unpack, and crashed during the unpack stage 4 out of 5 times. It honestly took me months to get it installed... only to find out that since I had a 286 I couldn't load EMM386 (there's a 386 in the name for a reason) and thus couldn't see the vid screens, enhanced graphics, or even use the speech pack.
Well, I was still enthralled.. obsessed even. Over the next couple years I upgraded to a 386, but still couldn't get the speech pack working. What came out of it was everything I know today about resolving hardware conflicts (IRQ, DMA) and effective DOS memory management... as to this date I don't think there's ever been a trickier set of games to get working than the WC series.
So there you go... heh