What was your first pc?

I had a Commodore 64, later 128. My next PC was from a local builder, it was a 486 DX4. I started building them from that point on.

My parents bought a Commodore VIC 20 with a cassette drive for storage. Programmed basic games from the back of a computer magazine at the time. All those lines of code took forever to input just to see it fail from a spelling or punctuation error.

Then we got a Leading Edge Model D with dual 5.25" floppies and a CGA monitor. And then OMG, got a 10MB harddrive and marveled at the space! Partitioned it into two 5MB partitions! Of course I had to disassemble the computer completely and then panic as I had to figure out where all the connectors went. (no internet back then to look it up on!)

Obviously, this is why I am still in the industry today and have never owned a prebuilt computer since that first Leading Edge! Loved Microsoft Jet 1.0... taking off the carrier was easy, landing it was a whole different story. Ahhh, the nostalgia!

Timex Sinclair 1000. 2048 BYTES of RAM. I also got the 16k RAM expansion module (block handing off back of computer in pic). Took 5-6 MINUTES to load a 16k program from an audio cassette tape player.

I also had a commodore 64 as a kid but I was too young to appreciate it. My first real pc was an AT&T 6300 loaded up with a ton of 80's dos games. Rogue, Stargate, digdug, kings quest on floppy disk, pacman, space invaders, I can't remember them all...

Technically this is my first PC.



Then I bought a Commodore 64.

Given and Purchased computers:

Schools had Apple ][ and Apple //e computers and I had my own floppy collection for those. My stepfather was an electronics repairman though so we always had TVs and stereoes and things like that around the house (living in the country, I did not even know that was unusual as a child). It was not long before he got a TRS-80 Color Computer in 1982 or 83 I think. He later got me a Commodore VIC-20 though I didn't do much with that and did not have it very long before I got an Atari 800XL w/Cassette and printer instead. After that I got a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 w/64k Extended BASIC for my 10th birthday with multipak expansion box, cassette, 2 disk drives (and controller), printer, speech/sound pak, orchestra 90 music pak and the deluxe RS-232 pak. I saved up my allowance money to buy my first PC - a Color Computer 3 and later got given a CGA RGB monitor for it.

First built computer:

By the time I entered High School, my stepfather had switched over to IBM compatible machines, and Might & Magic II: Gates to Another World made me want one of my own. In 1991 I got a summer job and used the money I earned to browse Computer Shopper and build a 286-12MHz computer with EGA graphics, 1M of RAM and a 40M HDD. It was fun playing the original Warlords for a while, but my stepfather got a Thunderboard (SoundBlaster compatible), and Eye of the Beholder made me realize I needed a sound card. I painted a chain link fence over a weekend to get the money to buy a used AdLib card from a local computer guy I met through a BBS. That 286 system ended up with 4M of RAM (SIPPs, no less), VGA graphics, an 80287 math co-processor and a SoundBlaster Pro 2 compatible sound card before it was retired. I was using software called Stacker at the time to increase my HDD storage capacity (I got another 20M or so out of using it). I remember that the motherboard in it had a weird chipset that allowed me to create and use UMBs to load DOS drivers like the 386's did, so RAM availability was not a problem despite using Stacker.

I really loved playing Wing Commander I and II on that system, as well as Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2. I also really enjoyed a LOT of Sierra and LucasArts games on that computer...

Out of all of that, knowing what I know now, I wish I had held on to my old CoCo stuff though. A good chunk of it is worth a miniature fortune today.

Edit: All of my subsequent desktop machines since that initial 286-12MHz machine, I have built myself.

Oh... and an interesting tidbit. That CoCo2 I got for my birthday? It came in a kit and my stepfather built it for me. Literally the chips and stuff needed to be soldered onto an empty PCB and assembled into the case. I have always felt that was kind of hardcore.

My dad brought home an 80286 that his job was getting rid of for a 386, it had an orange monochrome monitor, 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives and no mouse.

This eventually led to me having a 486 with a 5X (5X!!!!!) CD drive so I could play King's Quest V... the rest is history.

First computer at home was an apple lle first computer I got to use was the grandparents office computer which was a wang.

My first family computer (in elementary school) was a Compaq Presario 9232. I still have it to this day and it works great. I recently refurbed it (cleaned it inside and out, new CMOS battery, overclocked the Pentium 120MHz to 133MHz, added a Dreamblaster S1 Wavetable, upgraded onboard VRAM to 2MB, added a Matrox Millennium PCI, replaced the failed 1.2GB Quantum Fireball with a 4GB Compact Flash IDE adapter, and added a Linksys LNE100TX NIC)

I also recently found the original restore media on Ebay. I threw away the original restore disks around 2001 like an idiot thinking I'd never need them again.. haha. (I remember doing it too) So, I'll be putting the original Windows 95 load on it. Right now I just have a generic Windows 95 install on there without all the lovely Compaq bloatware.

w1retap said:

My first family computer (in elementary school) was a Compaq Presario 9232. I still have it to this day and it works great. I recently refurbed it (cleaned it inside and out, new CMOS battery, overclocked the Pentium 120MHz to 133MHz, added a Dreamblaster S1 Wavetable, upgraded onboard VRAM to 2MB, added a Matrox Millennium PCI, replaced the failed 1.2GB Quantum Fireball with a 4GB Compact Flash IDE adapter, and added a Linksys LNE100TX NIC)

I also recently found the original restore media on Ebay. I threw away the original restore disks around 2001 like an idiot thinking I'd never need them again.. haha. (I remember doing it too) So, I'll be putting the original Windows 95 load on it. Right now I just have a generic Windows 95 install on there without all the lovely Compaq bloatware.

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That's a keeper!

dark_reign said:

Packard Bell 486 DX2/66. Bought it from some catalog. Started building my own a few years later.

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This was the first family PC in the house. I remember my dad buying it at Circuit City. I was with him, checking out the PC games while he was talking to the sales person.

First PC that was mine was an eMachines etower 600is. I hacked and modified the shit out of it until building my first PC 3 years later. One of the first things I did was ditch the included Windows ME install and go with a fresh upgrade to Windows 98 SE .

Armenius said:

This was the first family PC in the house. I remember my dad buying it at Circuit City. I was with him, checking out the PC games while he was talking to the sales person.

First PC that was mine was an eMachines etower 600is. I hacked and modified the shit out of it until building my first PC 3 years later. One of the first things I did was ditch the included Windows ME install and go with a fresh upgrade to Windows 98 SE .

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I seem to remember a fair amount of PC games back then were DOS based. Having to free up memory was sometimes a pain. But it's all a blur now.

Yeah, I read horror stories about Windows ME. Never used it since Win98 SE was still rocking it.

I used to play some games on Pentium 2 with 128MB RAM. Was a kid at that time so don't remember much of the specs.

kindasmart said:

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Timex Sinclair 1000. 2048 BYTES of RAM. I also got the 16k RAM expansion module (block handing off back of computer in pic). Took 5-6 MINUTES to load a 16k program from an audio cassette tape player.

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Same for me, although I never got it to load of a tape EVER! Only programs I had were typed in from a mag/book and lasted until I turned it off
First computer I ever bought, replacing my Atari 800XL from a few Xmas's before, was an Atari 520ST which I manually upgraded to 1MB of RAM with the help of a DIY article in Computer Shopper magazine, which was a phone book sized mag back in the day for those who don't remember.

My first was a Vic 20.
I remember typing pages upon pages of Dos code from a magazine (don't remember name of mag) just to make a bird looking thing flap its wings
all across the screen, and god help you if you miss typed something along the way.

The first one i actually paid for with my own loot was a gateway p3 something. The fact that i had soooo many component failures with that pos and had such poor support is why i started building my own rigs. Thats also when i became a forum junky haha. That was the best way to research components and of course how i learned to oc.

Gave that hunk o junk to my in laws before i had finished paying the cc off that i bought it with! Of course they never had a problem with it...

my dad used to run a programming business out of our basement when i was growing up. we had all kinds of computers from very early on. here's the earliest one i remember:



the iconic green screen. he got the upgraded version with a whopping 512k of ram. no hard drive, hence the two floppy drives. later he added in a video card and colour screen that sat next to it. mostly for games lol.

we had several 386s, commodore 64, later a 486 and mac (OS 3 i think maybe 4). time marched on and we had a pentium 1.

later we had a celeron 333Mhz as the 'family' computer. i overclocked the shit out of it of course! much thanks to this place even. however, the first one i'd call my own was near the end of high school. i needed something to take to college. i saved up my money from waiting tables at the local restaurant and bought myself the parts to put an athlon xp 1600+ together. served me well.

Armenius said:

This was the first family PC in the house. I remember my dad buying it at Circuit City. I was with him, checking out the PC games while he was talking to the sales person.

First PC that was mine was an eMachines etower 600is. I hacked and modified the shit out of it until building my first PC 3 years later. One of the first things I did was ditch the included Windows ME install and go with a fresh upgrade to Windows 98 SE .

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looks like a great deal to me. i mean it's never obsolete, right?

DrLobotomy said:

Technically this is my first PC.

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Then I bought a Commodore 64.

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Blast from the past!!! Loved my "150 in One," I also had the "50 in One." Moved up to a C-64 & 1541 floppy drive. I remember loading Infocom text based games. Zork, Planetfall, etc......and the iconic....."Please wait approximately 1.5 minutes to load" loading screen.

Then Apple ][e w/80 column card (that also bumped ram from 64k to 128k) and duo-disc drive. Also installed a parallel port card for the amazingly fast 250 cps Apple dot matrix printer. Name escapes me. Had a very nice NLQ (near letter quality) mode as sell.

Next was my hand built PC clone. 8088 w/640k ram. Ram came on individual chips: 18 (256kbit) chips for two banks of 256k and 18 (64kbit) chips for two banks of 64k. 9 chips/bank because 8+1 for parity. 256+256+64+64 = 640k. I also got a 12" Princeton EGA (640x350 res) color monitor and video card. WAY BETTER picture than CGA 320x200 res.

Gdam I'm old.

I think the early-mid 1980s was the most exciting time for personal computers. TS-1000, TRS/80, Ti99/4a, Vic-20/C-64, Atari 400/800/1200xl, Apple ][+, ][e, early hand build PCs. Fun times.

Loose Nut said:

My first was a Vic 20.
I remember typing pages upon pages of Dos code from a magazine (don't remember name of mag) just to make a bird looking thing flap its wings
all across the screen, and god help you if you miss typed something along the way.

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All good fun except for the trick-of-the-day was to INTENTIONALLY have an error so you needed to buy the next mag for corrections. Evil as you can get. Errata corrections were by design. Unless we believe they never tested the code? LOL!

Commodore VIC-20

First was a TI99/4A that I have somewhere.

Then came the venerable commodore 64, which I still have .

Then the first IBM was a genuine IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 with 30MB hd and 1mb of ram, although by the time we were done with it, it had a 486slc an additional 240mb SCSI drive and 4mb of ram and could run win 3.1 enhanced mode. Still have that one too, and the keyboard, which my hands fell in love with. I bought a lot of used Model Ms over the years when they were just regular keyboards (aka very cheap!) so I have 20-30 of them to use on any system I want. I'm typing on one now with connected to a Wyse thin client, lol.

IBM Aptiva with a AMD K6-2 Processor. I later added a 3DFX Voodoo card. I was 15, worked all summer to buy it. First computer I ever used was a old DOS computer, followed by one with Windows 98 my parents got.

Rat Shack Color Computer followed by an IBM PCJr. Later upgraded the Jr to 512K ram, V20 cpu and overclocked it to 8Mhz in 1989.

kindasmart said:

Gdam I'm old.

I think the early-mid 1980s was the most exciting time for personal computers. TS-1000, TRS/80, Ti99/4a, Vic-20/C-64, Atari 400/800/1200xl, Apple ][+, ][e, early hand build PCs. Fun times.

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Two things. First, no, you're not old, because then I'm old, and that's unacceptable. We're not old, we're... classic? Vintage?

Second, I agree, it really was an exciting time of computing. Nothing was overcome by horsepower (they were all anemic from a computing perspective), everything was handled with clever tricks and coding. I would pore over the disassembly of games I bought (or cracked), trying to figure out how they did things which seemed impossible. That probably sounds horrific to most, but it was really exciting in The Day. Holy crap, you can reprogram the graphics chip halfway through a scanline? I didn't know that was possible... okay, what can I do with that? Cool leapfrogging of knowledge was constant.

Everything works better now of course, but there was a real charm in the simplicity of those machines. And yes, they seemed a lot more like machines than we'd consider computers now.

PhaseNoise said:

We're not old, we're... classic? Vintage?

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This is us, right?

Had plenty of 8 bit Sinclair machines. Then a 512K Fat Mac in 1987 with the extra external floppy. It was cool looking but next to useless (no change there).

My first real PC that I bought with my own money was the following spec from a local PC supplier -

Intel Pentium 150 CPU
32MB RAM
Intel Triton Chipset with the max cache.
Soundblaster card
2MB Matrox Mystique
CD Rom
1.2GB HDD (maybe)
Windows 95 OSR2
14" Compaq monitor

I think it cost £1350 back in 1997 so £2400 in todays money.

I have to say I never really liked the machine. Just wasn't that great. About a year later I was given a 6 month old Gateway 2000 with a P200 MMX/64MB with the new fangled USB ports in it. So my machine was given to my Dad.

Mine was a custom-built pc that runs in Win98.

The question is interesting. What is yours? What quantifies as a PC? My parents purchased a Sears Intellivision and an Atari 2600 and an NES are they PC's? Most of us would say no but.. is that really true? Anyway lets move to what we would more traditionally call a PC. My parents purchased an Apple IIc that had an extra drive and 168K of memory. Is that mine? I used it extensively and claimed it but was it truly mine? When I went to college for the 2nd year my parents purchased me a Packard Bell Pentium 75 with a 820MB hard drive Cirus Logic 5430 onboard PCI videocard that i added 1MB of ram too (yes there were little push sockets on the board for that) a NEC 4X CDrom and a floppy drive for 1.44's. It also had a 14.4 modem that also included a Soundblaster pro Fake. This PC was overclocked to 90mhz with 60mhz bus and had a S3 Virge 325 2MB and a Canopus Voodoo 1 6MB Pure 3d before its days came to an end. I know I upgraded the memory to something like 16mb or 32mb but the exact figure eludes me as it has just been too long and it changed more than other parts. All of this jumped to an AMD K6 200 next which was quite the leap.

Today the Ryzen 3900X with 64GB of ram and twin Vega Frontiers on water loop with the cpu and nvme drives etc are quite the step up from those early days. But fond memories of Karatica and X-Wing abound. Looked very much like this.

Armenius said:

This was the first family PC in the house. I remember my dad buying it at Circuit City. I was with him, checking out the PC games while he was talking to the sales person.

First PC that was mine was an eMachines etower 600is. I hacked and modified the shit out of it until building my first PC 3 years later. One of the first things I did was ditch the included Windows ME install and go with a fresh upgrade to Windows 98 SE .

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I had the exact same one and remember we bought it at CompUSA...and the first thing I did was "upgrade" to Windows 98 haha! I can't remember but I feel like I also put a GeForce 2 graphics card in it as well

amd 386 sx 25mhz
4mb FPM ram
S3 1MB graphics card
50MB Harddrive

Dos 5.x Windows 3.0