What was your first pc?

Joined
Mar 15, 2018
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21
How did you go down the rabbit hole?
For me it was in prehistoric times when I worked for a time share that was a dealer for Xerox 820 computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_820#Disk_storage

Xerox came out with an updated main board and did not want the original one back. So ....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_Big_Board

A home made plywood case, with a power supply and green monochome monitor was coupled with an 8" floppy drive.
Running CPM with the WordStar word processing system and the original Colossal Cave text based adventure game, I was set to go. You could hear the floppy seeking from across the room. Great fun!
 
The first PC I ever used was a Commodore 64. The first PC I bought with my own money was a Packard Bell Pentium 75.
 
Packard Bell 486 DX2/66. Bought it from some catalog. Started building my own a few years later.

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My first PC was an AST 486DX2/66 w/ 8mb RAM and a 420mb HDD that my parents were kind enough to buy me. The first one I built with my own money was a P166 w/ 16mb RAM. I ran that CPU overclocked to 200mhz and later added a 3DFX Voodoo to it :D
 
IBM PS/2 55SX

Intel 386, 16mhz
8MB RAM
60MB HDD, DoubleSpace'd to 120MB!

I wish I would have kept that keyboard...

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Gateway with a Pentium 3 1ghz. That was the first computer I bought on my own.
 
Packard Bell 486 DX2/66. Bought it from some catalog. Started building my own a few years later.

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This was mine, too. Bought off the shelf from Sears. My second one was a mom & pop shop build (P133 I think) and all future builds I made myself.
That PB was quirky as hell. I remember the video card, sound card, and modem all being slightly different than the standards at the time.
 
Atari 800 I bought for $250 at a garage sale. It was in mint condition and had all the original accessories, documents and boxes. Got me through college with AtariWriter and a Panasonic dot-matrix printer. Sold it to a collector for $2000 about 8 years ago.
 
Commodore 64 was my first computer, later on that turned into an Amiga 500.. as an 18 year old forking over 2 grand for a computer and 20MB hard drive (nope no typo there) I feel better choices could have been had. My first "PC" was one built from some guy in an office complex, you say what you want and he builds it from that, 486-66dx2 CPU, 8MB of ram, 500MB HD, and that was the time I found out about the UART chip and not being able to process information fast enough for my modem which kept dropping errors. Good times! That due in that office made me want to do that for a living, unfortunately wasn't that long later that Dell really hit the scene and building computers for people was not that viable
 
wow i feel young :LOL:
first computer i called mine was a Macintosh LC, 20Mhz 68020 (I think), 4MB memory, 20MB SCSI disk

first computer i bought was a PowerMac 6300, 132Mhz 603e (again could be off on the CPU model), 32MB memory, 1.2GB disk

first computer i built from new parts had a 1.3Ghz Duron, 640MB DDR, 20GB disk, and a Geforce FX 5600. Great choice on the CPU, bad choice on the graphics card.

in between there were a bunch of Silicon Graphics Indy, Indigo 2, and Octane systems that provided a good crash course in UNIX but i never really used them for much besides having the clout of being the only middle-schooler with a RISC R10K in their machine
 
First family PC was a Tandy 1000 my dad bought in 1989. I upgraded the RAM from 384KB to 640KB for $65 bucks of my Christmas money — purchased at Radio Shack so my games could be played in color. Sounds weird but that’s what I remember was the games required more RAM to be played in color.



First PC I bought with my own money was when I went to my first year of college in 1997.

It was an AMD K6 200, with soundblaster AWE64 soundcard. I paid extra for that sound card because I wanted the full/best midi capability with my games! I still have that card. ;)
I remember the PC cost me a little bit over $1000. I think that sound card was a $165 upgrade at the time. I don’t remember how much RAM the machine had.

I tried to overclock it to 233MHz via jumper, but it wouldn’t work so I ran it at 200Mhz. I remember being so disappointed I couldn’t overclock my first personal PC. :(
 
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First family PC was an 8088 with no hard drive. I don't remember when '85, '86 i would guess. Later, the next family PC came in '93 and was a Packard Bell 486 DX2-66.

First one that I bought was from Gateway. The first one I built was an intel core 2 duo E6850 with a Soundblaster card and EVGA 8800GTX Ultra. I had to take the rear fan out and mount it to the outside of the case because the cpu cooler was so big.
 
My first computer was a Compaq with a Celeron 500 back in 2000 I think. I was a late bloomer!
 
My first - Ibm XT around 4-5 MHz I think , with 20MB seagate 506 or so interface. Green CGA monitor.
 
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Then onward to IBM style later, and kinda rode through the generations. I remember getting a hard drive for the first time - 20 MB I think, but seemed amazing! And Hercules monochrome + CGA, bleck. My atari had better graphics.
 
My first PC was a Compaq w/ AMD Athlon 1Ghz CPU I bought back in 1999. Came pre-installed with Windows ME. I was running Windows 2k Pro by the end of the year 2000. Don't remember exactly what GPU I was using at the time, but I ended up with a Voodoo 3 3000 card in it. Unreal Tournament played so beautiful on that rig.
 
Our family bought one pretty late as we were pretty poor, I think it was 1998 but I've had hands-on experience with was was it I believe 486 computer which was his dad's at friends place (I believe it was the 486DX2-66 or 486SX-33 with something 200MB HDD space and it costed a fortune back then) when I was a kid and DOS was the shit back then still as Win 3.11 could be quite cubersome to use. Got to play a lot of classic DOS games that I have fond memories of. Had the lovely "Turbo" button too haha. Commodore 64 was still quite popular then too and it was quite commonly used back then still.

Anyway the first PC we bought in 1998 was using an AMD K6-II 350MHz CPU and the graphics card was a shitty 2MB Radeon Rage IIc and I don't remember if RAM was 256MB (I think) or 512MB but either or and I think 6.5GB HDD (I remember we changed it from 3.2 to 6.5GB when we picked it at the local comp shop) with Windows 98. Struggled to run most games due to having to use software render as Direct3D required a 4MB graphics card so had to run low resolutions most of the time to be able to get a semi good performance like with Unreal Tournament 99.

But that wasn't bought by myself, my first PC I bought myself was a AMD Athlon XP 1900+, Geforce 4 Ti 4200 64MB and 1GB of RAM. This was a fine investment as it would still run Battlefield 2 quite well, the GF4 series really aged well.

It's amazing how fast things advanced as I grew up.
 
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Commodore 64. My first actual PC I bought myself was a 386 SX 16MHz that didn't last long. I had a 386 SX33 after that and replaced it with a Cyrix 486 DX2 80MHz a short while later.
 
IBM Aptiva A90.
Pentium 166mhz
1.6GB hard drive (I think).
Windows 95.

Got it back in 1996 when I was 12. The OS crapped out so many times that I got a lot of practice reinstalling windows back in the day, haha.
 
my 1st computer was sinclair zx81. I can't call it a PC.
After that, I had commodore 64 ...

Ditto, but my replacement for that was a Specturm 48K!

First IBM compatible PC was an Amstrad of some sort with a green screen & 512KB of RAM! First PC I built myself was an AMD 486 DX4-100 with 8MB of RAM & a 40MB HDD! Was top spec with the 2x Panasonic Interfaced CD-ROM drive & sound card interface! Ran Windows 3.11 & DOS 6.22 like a dream!
 
First computer I ever gamed on was playing test drive off of a floppy on a 4 'color' 'portable' computer my mom would bring home from work to catch up on her Lotus 1-2-3 work on.

First computer I ever owned personally was a Pacakrd Bell 486 sx20 with 2 COUNT THEM TWO megabytes of ram. and sockets to add cache. Oh it also had 4 sim slots.

When it finally died I had it up to a 486dx266 with 6 mb of ram (for DOOM!) and a 512k video card (don't even remember the maker.) and a soundblaster (I think) old ass ISA card.

Went from that to be the first of my computer friends to own a Pentium with a P90. Moved my audio card over to it and bought a 1mb video card. I remember how BLAZING fast it was. lol.
 
TI 99/4a and I still have it

first PC I built was a Z-station 425sx back in 1994 (I worked for them and built it from parts)
 
First PC I used was an Atari 800 in school back in 1982 and the first PC that I bought for myself was an Amiga 3000 in 1992.
 
A 286 that we got through my moms work, after that a pentium 166mhz. The first one I built on my own was an AMD Athlon.
 
Tandy 1000 TX
4.7MHz
640kb of RAM
I don't think I had a hard drive... or at least not one big enough to save my game when playing Kings Quest 2.
 
First PC was a custom built Cyrix 133Mhz with 32MB of ram. I don't remember the hard drive capacity.
 
First PC was an AMD 386 DX-40 with 4 Megs of RAM, 8 Bit Sound Blaster and 130 MB Hard Drive.
 
My uncle built me a system from parts. I couldn't tell you a thing about it except it ran Windows 3.1. I must have been like ten years old. I have no idea if people built systems back then like they do now. The monitor was deeper than it was wide. Giant tank of a thing. But it ran Dune II perfectly.
 
Love hearing about these everyone.:cool:


Commodore 64 was the first PC I had. --First computer I purchased on my own was a UMAX Mac Clone (remember the short time when Apple let this happen?!) Here is a link : https://everymac.com/systems/umax/j700/supermac_j700_180.html

Not long after that I realized that building a PC was cheaper and a lot more fun. I have not purchased a single rebuilt desktop PC for personal use since.

First home brewed PC was a Slot A Athlon 600, FIC Motherboard, Creative sound card, Matrox g400 32mb , 20gb hdd and something like 384mb ram before I retired it. Went T Bird after that. s939, Phenom2, Haswell, Ryzen. Tons of "side builds" of all kinds along the way of course.
 
The first PC I personally owned was a Packard Bell Pentium 75. But I had been using computers as a kid on a Commodore Vic 20.
 
AMD K6 200MHz
64 MB Ram
4MB Matrox Mystique
2 GB HD
Not sure of the CD ROM Speed. Probably a 24x or something like that. The drive was generic.
But it also had a 3M Superdisk LS-120. Which had proprietary floppies. It was supposed to compete with Zip as a lower cost alternative but it never really got there.

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There were other computers passed to me before that one. I did do quite a bit of stuff on my Dad's old Tandy 286 (he had moved on to a Windows 95 based PC at that time. A Pentium 100MHz, which was costly in its day). I don't know all the specs on the Tandy. But it was running Dos 4.2.2 by the time I got to it. And I learned Wordperfect/hotkeys amongst other things on it.

Additionally I had a lot of exposure to Apple IIe's through my elementary school, which had a computer lab and typing classes as compulsory in the 4th grade.
 
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But it also had a 3M Superdisk LS-120. Which had proprietary floppies. It was supposed to compete with Zip as a lower cost alternative but it never really got there.

I lost count of how many of those drives I burnt out! Got expensive at one point until I replaced it with an internal ZIP drive. Granted the Zip cartridges were lower capacity, but they were more reliable than their external brethren which used to suffer big style with the "Click of Death" (in comparison to the internal versions).
 
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