Just for fun, what was your first PC?

Some oldass Mac...but seriously

Gateway G6-400
PII 400Mhz
9.48Gig Maxtor
onboard video
onboard sound
56K Dial-Up Modem

(see bottom of sig for what it is now)
 
My first computer, that worked, was a Commodore 64. One whole megahertz, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a 1MB floppy, no hard drive, but state-of-the-art 8 bit sound. It's still working to this day, 18 years later, along with the C128.
 
Well if we're talkin' about "first computers" instead of just PC's, I actually started on the TRS-80 (or "trash-80") as we called them. I still remember using the tape drive to load programs. Hell, it was just a regular audio tape recorder with an adapter. You could buy the thing at any electronics store (of course it only worked around 70% of the time)...

I also remember discovering that you could take your 5.25" floppy disks and cut another notch on the other side and double it's storage capacity! Oh man that was exciting!!!
 
Lol, I noticed we haven't heard about the 8" long (or whatever they were) disks yet. ^_^ I remember those floppies you could just flip over. My dad's old Texas Instruments "computer" became almost kind of mine (technically it wasn't, but it only myself and my sister that used it and we set it up in the basement where only the two of us really went anyway) and it had a tape drive and those two sided disks. I remember playing a game that made you flip the disk over every 5 minutes and drove me insane. I never figured out how to hook up the tape drive, but didn't need to anyway since we didn't have any tapes. We did have cartridges for the thing though. I swear, it was like an ultra-early game console to me with those cartridges and all. When I got a NES later I knew intuitively how to use it. d-:

Oh well, if you owned it and it was a real computer rather than just a glorified calculator, then it's fine.

BTW, I remember those CD-ROMs. It was just such a pain in the rear because you had to hook them up to an IDE controller built into the soundcard. Lol, I remember a crappy game called Megarace (which I thought was cool at the time) and thinking how nice it was when the system requirements test told me that I had a blazing fast 2x CD-ROM more than enough to run the game. ^_^ I seem to recall it had an exclamation point in there somewhere. Man it was a pain if you lost your drivers though. Drivers weren't NEARLY as standardized back then.

Probably the worst part of it all was all the stuff they kept trying out that failed in the end (like VESA slots rather than plain old IDE.) You pay so much for all that expensive stuff, then just a few years later you find out that it's no good anymore. *sigh* Oh, and anyone remember real EMS memory (not the normal XMS that memory managers would effectively emulate being EMS for gaming.) I never tried that, but I always wondered what the deal was.
 
My first computer was a AST advantage 622 P100 80mb ram 850mb hdd 4x cdrom with win98 which I got in 1999.

My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000LE 8086 10mhz 2mb ram 20mb hdd with ms dos 3.3 which I got in 2000


Our first family computer was a IBM PC-AT 286 640K ram no hdd and a dual floppy drives which we got in 1993 for free.
 
i cant remember, i think i was only 6 or something. it was only last year i threw out the motherboard it was an 8088. dont know any other specs. used to play zork on it.
i do consider it was mine, i was the only person to use it when it came into the house.

Otherwise i guess the C64 was it.
 
You wanna go way back, I had a Tandy 1000EX when I was 12. 768k RAM, all floppy :D
 
First Computer I used: Commodore 64

First X86 Computer I used: IBM 8086 (or maybe 286) in gradeschool

First x86 Computer family owned: Packard Bell 386 SX20/4mb RAM(Upgraded)/230mb hdd

first Computer I owned: Compaq Presario 5600i (P3 500, 128mb RAM/13gb/DVD/CD-RW)

first computer I built: Athlon 750/Asus K7V/GF256/512mb RAM/45gb/DVD/CDRW
 
My commodore i dont know what happened with. The rest i used for inventory when i started my store (i still have some old stuff!) I used the screws out of them, some of the older cards that are a pain to buy now like ISA, fans, memory etc. That kind of stuff is hard to replace. And hard to get when you first open.
 
nice to see a few old schoolers around.. my first was the EPSON PC, IBM XT clone with 2x5.25 drives and some pimp CGA graphics :0 I was so happy the day my dad upgraded it with a 10MB harddrive. Of course my dad was fairly computer literate at the time as he learned to program in university on punch cards :) still remember picking up some GW-BASIC and learning to code.. and still do it (for moneys now though). Geez, this thread is bringing back all my good memorys... THEXDER, space quest 1/2, silent service, Helocopter <- by far the hardest flight sim I've ever played (though the old school gravis 3 button joystick didnt help)
 
I still have my tandy 1000. It's not working but we have disk ( i think 7 ) of windows 3.1 :-D. I wish i could plug that system up and start playing loadrunner again :-(
 
My first computer was a little HP Pavilion model # XG843. It came with a 15" monitor. It had a 800Mhz Celeron processor in it. I definitely dont miss the days of gaming on that thing :).
 
my first computer was a compaq something

k6-2 475@550
256 of pc133
geforce2 mx400
and like a 10g hard drive

i got mad one day and got a 1 gal thing of gas ya the computer was gone...
 
Amstrad PC1640
8086
640K
Two 5 1/4 floppies
DOS

We later got another one identical except it had a 20MB hard disk.

teck9 said:
so what have you guys done with all your old gear?
Click to expand...

Still got the one with the hard disk and salvaged one of the floppy drives out of the older one.

2500+ Barton now :D
 
IBM XT (8mhz w/ 12mhz turbo)
256k of ram.. upgraded it to 512k (to play the oldschool Dungeon&Dragons games)
15" vga monitor
10meg hdd
5.25 floppy


favorite game was F19 stealth fighter...



damn that computer was a piece.. (of garbage)
 
The first family computer that I remember was a 486 DX2. The first computer me and my brother finally scraped together enough moeny for was a Cyrix PR180.
 
166 mhz cyrix
24 mb or ram maybe 16??
80 mb hd for the os
60 mb hd
win95 running on minumum install (69mb)
14.4 external intel modem (still works to this day)
16 colors was the highest the vid card went to, so i have no idea..

i think i used that for a month and the cyrix fried the motherboard... got a p200mmx and 4 mb video card... then got a 2.5 gig hd... i have no idea of the timeframe.. but that made a huge difference.. and since then i have been upgrading 1 or 2 things at a time to keep them somewhat current
 
IIRC the first relic box was a CP/M machine with a 4MHz 8080 CPU and 128kB RAM in two interleaved banks of 64kB each to speed up the memory access. Damn thing cost more than a new car.

Back before there was DOS or x86s or dirt. ;)

...and yes I mean 64k not 64M :eek:
 
Tandy 1000SX 7.16mHz, 384kb RAM, Tandy 16 Color 13'' monitor, dual floppy

no mouse...
no hard drive... ...
 
mattsmall said:
my first computer was a compaq something

i got mad one day and got a 1 gal thing of gas ya the computer was gone...
Click to expand...


OMG! Lol. I guess that is the best thing to do with a compaq though.

Man, I remember the days of things like Zork. Ironically, it wasn't until my mother got a 486/50 laptop that I ended up playing the thing, because I remember playing it a lot at my dad's friend's house. That's really one of the two text adventures I really ever played all the way through, the other being Zork Zero or whichever it was that had color, some pictures, and let you name your weapons (ah, I miss good ol' Stabby.) Lol, I still remember when you had to kill the troll by saying the exact right phrase and if you told it to kill any other way it didn't do it. (Can't recall if you had to say stab, slash, or just plain kill.) Ah, good old days, right?

Personally, I still play a few oldies. But I'm so spoiled by modern systems, I just won't touch anything that doesn't support MPU401 music (or digital in a few rare cases) and VGA 256 color graphics (320x200 @8bit, NOT 640x480 @4bit, I couldn't stand that.) Well, with the exception of the stuff I put on my laptop. It's ESS Audiodrive, naturally, and a P75 only goes so far, so not enough power to emulate MPU401 through windows or anything. BTW, it turns out that you can play MP3s on a P75. d-:
 
i actually read the post now... anwayays

AMIGA!... who here had one? i saw 1 person mention it.. i got an amiga 600? somewhere it is just a big keyboard with the computer built into the back.. my family had amiga's way back in the day...
 
compaq presario 4770

pentium 200mhz w/mmx, s3 trio onboard video, onboard sound, 17" monitor

i was like 11 or 12.
 
The first family computer I believe was an Apple ][e, it was sweet, with green monochrome monitor. It played games like Karateka, Loadrunner and Ultima.

Then we got an 8088 with I think about a 10 MB hard drive and AMBER monochrome

Next was 386DX 33MHz, 16 MB ram (maybe 32, not sure), about 100 or so meg hard drive, and 1X CD-ROM - It ran Doom like there was no tomorrow

Then many others after that

My first computer (which I still unfortunately have, although have changed just about everything) is eMachine (never again).

Started out with 566 celeron, 32 MB RAM, 10 Gig Samsung, 42x cd-rom and shared on-board video
Now has 1 GHz celeron, 384 MB ram, 60 & 30 GB maxtor, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 32MB TNT2 (pci) - I almost have enough $$ to get a new system, can't wait...
 
teck9 said:
so what have you guys done with all your old gear?
Click to expand...

The AST is now a table leg for my second desk.

The T1000LE is in a million parts after the screen backlight died.
 
The company name was AST they are long gone now.. but it was a screaming 166 Mhz Pentium 1 and 14MB of RAM (i think maybe it was 24MB.. i rememebr it was a weird number that wasn't a power of two..) Sound Blaster live... actually it was pretty sweet for it's time..

Can't forget the whopping 6 GB drive.. and for some crazy ass reason it came with a 3 CD changer.. you know like a CD changer you would have in your card...
 
RancidWAnnaRIot said:
screaming 166 Mhz Pentium 1 and 14MB of RAM (i think maybe it was 24MB.. i rememebr it was a weird number that wasn't a power of two..) Sound Blaster live... actually it was pretty sweet for it's time..
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, but, my P1-90MHz had 64MB of ram... I remember actually being able to get Unreal to work in software mode on that thing, but I think that was when I had that god-awful rage pro video accelerator, which needed a special patch for unreal to get it to not drop to a 1fps near halt the moment you saw fog. Amazing to see how far ATI has gone since those days with the Radeons. Back then, they didn't deserve to compete with the likes of 3DFX and nVidia. Lol, anyone remember how dissapointing it was when 3DFX suddenly folded and sold out just out of the blue like that? They said all this crap about continuing support, but, well, do you see any support for a voodoo5 or whatever? Yet, you can still find drivers for a "Riva" TNT2. Not that I care too much. The only voodoo card I had for long was a voodoo2 3d only card. I tried a voodoo3 for a short while, but it was such a flaming peice of crap I got rid of it in a hurry. Darned thing couldn't even handle DVD playback at 16-bit color on a 350! The rage pro I had before it could do 32-bit on the same system without skipping a frame. Replaced it a mere week later with a TNT2 and never looked back.

Interesting to know that the sblive has been around for THAT long though. By all rights, it really shouldn't be in use today, but creative labs has a sort of name monopoly at least in that when the AVERAGE user thinks soundcard, they think creative labs. Isn't it scary to think that creative labs used to be practically the best? Only stuff like gravis ultrasound could compete and who could afford that? Plus, it was just such a pain to get a non real SB16 to work without conflicts.
 
Emachines T1125:

Celeron 1.3ghz
384mb sdram
GF2 MX400
CD RW


Not a bad start...
 
Sinclair ZX-81. It was quite the machine. 1k of RAM combined with a raging 3.5 mhz processor. Eventually upgraded to a Commodore VIC-20.

i'm old... :(
 
first pc, commodore C=128 back in 1985/86 after that i got an amiga 500, then an amiga 1200, oh you said first pc only right? :)
 
Techx said:
first pc, commodore C=128 back in 1985/86 after that i got an amiga 500, then an amiga 1200, oh you said first pc only right? :)
Click to expand...


This is more a discussion thread than anything else. Especially about the nostalgic times of those PCs only us nerds could use. d-:
 
First comp..well actually my Dads (but I used it all the time)...80486, with turbo button :D = 33MHz, 2 quantum HDDs, one 200mb, the other I think 600mb, ATi something graphics card, 512kb mem :p
SB 16 :)...that thing rocked (2X speed CDROM)
8mb ram
 
I had a 50MHz 486 Packard Bell. Then a Packard Bell 266MHz Pentium. Although those two technically belonged to everyone in my family, I was the only one that really used them. The one in my sig is what I run now, and it's my 3rd.
 
My parents bought my brother and I an Apple IIe to help with schoolwork . lol it was a $3000 game machine.
 
Our first family computer was a Toshiba 100. 64k ram, 2 5.25" floppies, ran CPM. I'm not sure exactly when my parents bought it, but it was in the early '80s. Mom was pretty much the only one who used it. She typed up reports for work on it, which I think is the main reason they bought it. We dismembered it a few years back after the keyboard quit working & it hadn't been powered on in years. Up until recently the fan was still in service in my dad's PC. The thing had this AC fan in it that had such good bearings that you could hold it flat, rotate the chassis, and the blades woudln't move. It took a good minute to spin down after being powered off. Dad patched it into his PSU after the original fan died. That fan's currently sitting on a shelf in the basement along with the rest of the leftovers from his last upgrade, but the Toshiba 100 fan will live again someday!
Fast forward about 10 years to the next computer, a Gateway 386sx 16 MHz. After that, my first personal machine was a 486DX-33, later upgraded to an (AMD!) 486DX2-66.
My first build was a P200MMX (was going to be a K6 but that >32MB ram bug killed that idea).
 
My first computer was an old 8086 that some friends of the family had given me to play with. I learned q-basic on that bad boy :p I would've been about 10 or 11 at the time... I was a geek from a young age.

After that I recieved my parents old 486/dx with 24mb RAM, a 2X CD-ROM (with one of those disc caddies), a 512K trident video card, and a sound blaster 16. I am almost positive that cost more than my first car new!

By that time I had learned quite a bit about the hardware workings of a PC and build my first computer. A speedy Celeron 400, 128mb RAM, etc etc, but the "diamond in the rough" so to speak was my beloved Voodoo 3 3000 :) I used that card in my primary machine for a few major overhauls, until it was replaced with a voodoo5 5500! Aaaah 3dfx.
 
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