The PC Sid Meier used in the '90s to create Civilization 1 has 16MB of RAM and still works

Two objects are displayed on a wall in Firaxis' lobby: an old leather desk chair and a PC and CRT display in a beautiful beige of the '90s. These aren't just old pieces of retro junk. These are the kinds of relics that game historians dream about, given the amount of lost history over the years due to bankruptcies and acquisitions.

Sid Meier created 1991's Civilization on that PC, sitting in that chair, over 30 years ago. It was the first in a grand-strategy series, and it will be getting its 7th number release in February. According to Firaxis Learning and Development Manager Pete Murray, the computer was a Compaq deskpro 386, which cost $10,000 at the time of purchase. This is about $23,000 in current dollars.

The Civilization series sold millions of copies, and the old fella was still wearing his boots.

What's in this bad boy? Firaxis did not have a complete spec list, but we do have some details. It would have had 640 KB usable RAM because that was a limitation of IBM-like computers at the time. Bill Gates famously denied saying, "ought to enough for anyone" Murray stated that the machine has "16 MB" of memory, which is the upper limit of the model. It's not known how big the hard drive is. The PC contains a Sound Blaster Audio card, which is the high-tech hardware you would expect to find in a PC that costs $10K from the early 1990s.

Firaxis' IT department was able to get the PC running last year with the help of parts purchased on Ebay and from "creative salvage".

The hard drive is close to its end, but if you fire up the machine, it will run a version of Civilization 1 that is just a few months before the official release of Civ. It is playable on this machine.

Bill Stealey, a business partner of Sid Meier, is believed to have been the one who came up with the leather chair idea. The first Civilization wasn't developed and published by Firaxis (which didn't yet exist), but by MicroProse which Meier founded in 1982 with Stealey.

"As I remember, Bill Stealey wanted an executive chair, and he decided that I should have one as well--apparently, ergonomics wasn't yet a thing," Meier says, using a description of objects printed on the walls above them.

Meier left MicroProse in 1996 and founded Firaxis along with two other people. It's not uncommon for development artifacts in such a transition to be lost, so it's great to see this piece of PC gaming history still in good condition.

On my earlier visit to Firaxis' office, I also walked past Meier’s closed but not unused office. I was told that the Civilization creator still works on prototypes of games, but he was on vacation at the time I visited.

2K Games didn't send a bunch press to Maryland to look at Sid’s old PC. We were there to try out Civilization 7, about which you can find my hands-on review.