What was your first PC?

Hello.

Just had one of those 'random thought' moments. What was your first PC, and what did you do with it?

My first PC (1998)
Cyrix 233Mhz
128Mb RAM
Win95
4Mb on-board graphics
AWE64 Gold Soundcard (which I paid over £100 for!)
6GB Hard Drive

This little 'beauty' featured a 56k modem with dial-up pay-per-minute internet courtesy of Demon Internet. My quarterly phone bills were in excess of £400.00.

I wrote Hole in One on it, and bought a new PC with the profits.

IBM 486
16MB EDO RAM
CGA Video
DOS
< 1GB HD
Sound + Video in one card, Trident something

I got the machine on Christmas from my grandmother when I was 8 years old. It got me started with QBasic and is what accounts for me using Blitz today. It was also used to play great ASCII games like Kingdom of Kroz.

Mmm, I think around 1998 too - IBM/Cyrix thing - 200MHz - not sure about the rest - I think 128MB - came with an ATI graphics card and a SoundBlaster card - paid £1,200 for it from PC Science.

I've still got - I use it as a back-up machine.

Not as cute as an Amiga or Spectrum.

Early 90's

IBM PS/2 386 (33Mhz)
40 Meg HDD
4Mb Ram

Or something along those lines. That was my first PC, but i had a speccy before that.

486 66Mhz
16MB Ram
800MB HD

Someone retrieved it out of a bin for me mid-2000.

What did I do on it? Blitzed, of course! For an embarrassingly long time.

And now I've got a decent computer, I have no time at all. [sarcasm] Hurray for The Way Things Go. [/sarcasm]

386SX - 16mhz
1MB Ram
40MB Hard Drive
512k Oak Videocard

Was back in college when I had to do four assignments in a week, and that meant working at home, so I Bought the PC, got the work done and after college got massively into PC adventuring with LucasArts and Sierra ( back when LucasArts and Sierra released amazing games. )

Do you mean IBM PC compatible. Or Personal computer?
16K ZX Spectrum 1982

Doesn't count.

IBM 468/66mhz DX20
DOS6.1
8mb EDO Ram (god EDO was so $&@#ing expensive)
120mb HD
Sound Blaster Pro
0.4mb vid card (cant recall brand)


Spent so many hours toying around with all the tools Duke3d shipped with on it....ahhh, Ken Silverman, you were my god back in the days for making the BUILD engine.

My first PC was (I swapped it for my Amiga A1200)

Intel 486 SX/33
4mb RAM
270mb Hard Drive
Sound Blaster 8bit (pretty sure it was that)
1mb Trident Video Card
4X CDROM
14" monochrome monitor (max res 1024x768)

I loved it. It had Windows 3.11, MS Word 3, Corel Draw 3, Links 386, Doom II, plus other stuff.

I remember thinking how much better the apps were compared to the Amiga. I was amazed at having a whopping 270mb of hard drive space.

I played with Impulse Tracker (Music) and QBASIC for a long time before the upgrade process started.

Heaven arrived the day I installed Visual Basic 3 - I'd never seen anything like it on the Amiga.

I remember getting my first 14.4 modem and spending 8 hours getting it to work ( ouch!!!! ) for my first venture on the internet. I knew very little about hardware back then and IRQ's and COM ports ment nothing to me. The next day I bought a 33.6 modem and internet heaven had arrived. The phone bills went mad but atleast I had a job at the time to pay for them.

Why doesnt it count. A PC is a personal computer. If by PC they mean "An IBM personal Computer compatable", then they should say so

But ok, (But I cannot really remember) 8086XT, 640K (I think), No hard drive, an amber mid-persistence monitor and Two 5 1/4 Drives

Tandy MC-10 or Celeron 466Mhz, 64MB, TNTM64 gfx, onboard sound, 20GB HDD depending on the definition of PC.

H&K I think GfK means your first IBM compatible PC :)

Yes, that.

My first was an original IBM PC XT. I paid an arm and leg for it but it still works when I take it out of the attic. My next PC was an Amstrad PC clone, which was anything but compatible and worked for full three days before showing everybody that electronic gadgets work on white smoke. I quickly moved to one of those incredibly expensive (company was paying for it) GRID laptops with magnesium cases. I still have the GRID, the case is still intact but everything else is in a mess.

Barney

Nice thread. I could waffle on for pages and pages about my early PC experiences, but restraint is the key. It good to hear about the "early days" when PC's were exciting and new and the diferences between 286, 386, 486, Pentium were HUGE!!!!!

Your first modem and the upgrade to a blistering 56k. The sound quality of an 8bit / 16bit sound card. The change from Voodoo1 to Voodoo2. A CD Writer in your own PC, woooooooot!!!

It's a shame the changes are not the same. These days every little bit extra gets released and spoils the big changes to the extent nothing is amazing anymore.

And the beer is thinner nowadays as well

I drink Carlsberg Special Brew, so thats definately not thinner :)

You do not you stinky liar. And even if you did, that there is a modern "thin" (in essence) beer.

(Anything that needs to be chilled is a modern beer, and the only reason its not thin, is the same one as for syrup)

C64

I bought beer instead of a pc. ok, i bought a... um

433 duron mhz, 256 mb ram, 32 mb radeon ve, ~1999.
i still have roughly the same pc today except i upgraded the cpu to 1.1 ghz duron and the ram to 384 mb. i know it's out of date but i don't care.

and yeah c128 was first personal computing device. :)

IBM IntelliStation
Dual 500Mhz PIII
1GB RAM
FireGL 1

Early 2000.

Mostly used for playing Quake 2 (as it was one of the few games that ran in OpenGL at the time).

IBM compatible
Intel 286
8Mhz and 16Mhz in Turbo Mode!!
EGA display adapter
5.25" Floppy disk
Monochrome monitor

Intel 286 - 10Mhz.
Vga Adapter.

IBM PC XT (8086 Mhz) Monochrome CGA Graphics, 2 5.25" disk drives, 20MB HD, 640kb RAM, 4.77Mhz or 10Mhz with Turbo on, - first 'family PC' we had - used to play old Sierra Adventure Games on it,

although the first PC I bought was in 1998 -

Pentium ?? 166 Mhz Win95, CD Rom, No 3d Card if I remember, 64MB RAM, 2GB HD, think it was used to play games on and not much else.

Pentium 100, 16mb ram, 1gb hd.

Built it myself (I worked in a computer shop):

486 AMD DX4-100MHz (bus speed 33MHz)
4MB RAM
500MB HD
No CD-ROM Drive!
Floppy drive
VESA video card
Soundblaster 16
14" CRT

This was around the time when DX-2 66 was considered good so my machine rocked. I build it specifically to play Doom and it was awesome. When Doom2 came out I upgraded to a 486 DX4 120 (40MHz bus) and 8Mb RAM and also got a Quad speed mitsumi CD-ROM Drive. At that time CD-writers were £3000ish and cardboard box sized :-)


My Amiga 1200 really pretty much never got used again :-(

Almost the same as Matty, only it was a "cut-down" version.. the 8088 (half the size of the data bus).
It had monochrome Hercules graphics card (which was very good. :P)... 1 5.25" disk drive, 20MB HD, expanded to 1 MB RAM, could increase the freq. to 9.54 MHz with a software program (yes!).

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=195 Amstrad PPC 512, it was "portable" ;)

8mhz, 512k of mem, dos 3, didnt have a hard drive, but had 2 floppy drives!

First thing I did on it was play Digger, then jason jupiter (the ascii one)

486... I think it had 170mb HDD and TsengLabs HiColor videocard - dirty expensive but I wanted more than 256 colors! :)

I bought also at the same time Logitechs handheld color scanner and color inkjet printer. My HP ColorJet cost whopping $750, today I could get two Color LaserJets for that price...

Celeron 733Mhz, 128mb, 20 GB HD

My first was some 286 with a 20MB harddisk and 5.25" disks ...

Circa 1992:

Ti'ko
386SX 25Mhz
1MB RAM
20MB HDD
Dual 3.5"/5.25" floppy drive
Orchid graphics card
No sound card
MSDOS/Windows 3.1
14" AOC Colour monitor

Took out a £1000 bank loan to buy it which took me 3 years to pay off. :/

ouchies, paying for that three years later must have hurt a fair bit! :o

Yep, it seemed like I was paying for it forever, at the time. I don't plan on ever taking out another bank loan. The only good thing about paying off a bank loan in full, is that it puts your credit rating through the roof. :)

BTW, we used to have a couple of those 'portable' Amstrads where I used to work. I borrowed one for a weekend and almost gave myself a hernia carrying it home. :P

http://members.aol.com/suprdave/classiccmp/2121a82.htm

I found a picture and article about my first PC

God, I'd forgotten just how ugly those IBM PCs were. Did Stevie Wonder design them?!

Home built Pentium 100Mhz - 192KB RAM - ATI All In Wonder 4MB 3Dcard, 9GB SCSI HDD.

Yeah, not that long ago but hey I've only been programming on the pc for about 3 years.

out of the box: 486 dx2/66, 4MB, 420MB
Later on I added another 4MB, a 2-sp.CD, a GUS, a networkcard.

What I did with it:
- QBasic
- watching demoscene things
- Warcraft 2, endlessly and endlessly playing Warcraft 2, using Win95 as network driver :P
- Screamtracker, Impulse tracker. Did my first movie-score with IT.

Later computers were:
AMD 166, overclocked to 180, 32MB, monster3d
later replaced the AMD with a p233 cpu

Celeron 466, 256MB

Athlon 800, 256MB

Athlon 2Ghz, 256MB, geforce4mx < current system

Notebook sempron3000+, 512MB

and on the virge of getting a new system..: intel dualcore, 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB, RAID for doublespeed. But I'm not sure yet about all this yet..

they were called PC Jrs... i remember... i had one...

i wound up throwing it against the wall and stomping it to death, after i had spent a small fortune on a add-on hard disk drive unit, which, a month later proceeded to shred a 2 weeks worth of work i was just about to finish up for a deadline...


in short, that was the last straw in a multitude of idiotic things about that machine... i never bought another ibm machine again...

... and i learned the value of making backups :)


--Mike

Hmm, wow... I have to go aaaaalllll the way back to 1992... It was as follows:

386 DX/40 MHz
4 MB RAM (I think)
40 MB HDD
ATI Graphics (not too sure)
Sound Blaster
3.5" Diskette
5.25" Diskette
14" CRT
MS-DOS 5.0/Windows 3.1

Wow, I can remember it very vaguely, but it was a rather expensive price tag at the time (considering that it was 15 years ago, practically). I remember that my most favorite games of the time were F-117A Nighthawk (ahh, Microprose, how I misseth thee!), and Stunts (Broderbund was big on games during those days, I miss those days for sure). Too much reminiscing on things loved from a different era. Now it's all FPS games, Gran Turismos, and MMORPGs. Ahh well, better than no games at all.

This is making me feel old. I remember useing software emulation of 4bit colours, just so I could play Elite on my Hercules 1Bit card.

(skipping over the TI-994/A, C64 and Amigas)

IBM SX 25
4MB RAM
120 MB HD

It came with a monitor, mouse and keyboard for the super low price of $1500!!

I had 2 games (adventure) in the beginning: Star Trek and Indiana Jones. I remember that I only had room for one at a time so I'd have to uninstall and reinstall depending upon which I wanted to play vs. which was currently loaded. And they were on like 10 floppies so loading wasn't exactly *speedy*.

same here... still got em... and they still work, well, i think they still work... i might fire one up later on and play a lil Parsec or Silent Hunter or enjoy an Amiga session of F-16 Combat Pilot :)

--Mike

@red
http://www.winuae.net/

Also skipping the old TI-99/4A I had,
My first PC was a Packard Bell 486 DX2-66 in 1994.
It had a whooping 4MB of ONBOARD ram, and a 1MB onboard video card. Featuring a 427MB harddrive, 2x CD-ROM, soundblaster 16 soundcard, 2400bps modem and a handheld 256 tones of gray scanner.
It rocked like hell. Mainly played games on it. But I used it to make games in QBASIC and go on bulletin boards with my powerful modem.

Can't remember when, only the price of £1600 which I was still paying for many years later ( tears up credit card )

From Evesham computers in Milton Keynes UK

486 dx2 66 ( pentium was too much )
2 speed CD drive
Diamond Stealth 64 2MB graphics card
4MB RAM ( again 8 mb was too expensive )
Some basic soundblaster card.

Had to take it back immediately, when I switched the resolution to a decent size there were red vertical lines on the display...a great 'sign of things to come' introduction to PC ;)

A friend of mine also bought a PC from there and found it already had several applications installed for free! basically it was a unit someone else had returned lol

If we're skipping the TI-99/4a computers, then I'd have to go with my Tandy 1000 EX with DOS 2.1 on it. It had a 5 1/4" drive, and that's about it.

First actual "IBM compatible" PC was a 386SX 16MHZ in 1991.
It originally had 1MB RAM. Later I added another 4MB for $220 USD.

I just recently threw this in the garbage as I have been doing a big clean-up. I tried it out one last time, just out of curiosity. It still works.

It had been so many years that I had to search for where to plug in the keyboard. The port was on the side of the case, not the back where I was looking. And you wouldn't believe how big the connector is. Man, those pins are fat! They are about half the thickness of the pins on power supply connectors inside a modern PC.

First ever computer was a ZX81, first PC was a IBM XT I used to write C code on :)

Pentium 100Mhz, 8MB Ram.

Playing Warcraft 1 (Which you couldn't buy on Amiga) and The Settlers in highres made me finally ditch the Amiga after over 10 years of loyalty.

ZX81 for me. 24 Years ago!

My first computer (I think) was a spectrum and is better than my first IBM-PC cyrix-2 200mhz+ etc, what a piece of sh*t you couldnt do anything with it except make endless coffees while you waited for app's to start.

Can I suggest one thing here; Bring back ROM BIOS - That will f*ck those hackers

I suggested that as a joke at a computer shop, the guy threw back, "what about drivers and updates", I say thats still possible, the box would have a small Dip instead of a CD or windows would come as a ROM cart that you plug in,(again ROMs are harder to pirate than CD)

Think of it, how many times have you had to re-install you very easly broken OS, or if you harddrive went down your PC would still boot... got a virus, no problem hit the reset button and its wiped instantly; the list goes on... no waiting for OS to be moved from Harddrive to Memory, its already there.

I will wait here for somebody to make it.

well, if 80's homecomputers are allowed to be mentioned:

I vaguely remember a commedore, but that's really long ago and I only did some games that loaded very slowly, I actually only remember Pitstop orso. :P The first computer I really considered mine/to_be_used_creativily was http://www.gondolin.org.uk/hchof/machines/toshiba-hx10.html later on to be replaced with: http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/D_NMS8245.HTML, and current MSX2 in use is: http://home.hetnet.nl/~peter.verhaar/philips_nms8250.html .. but it's boosted with more RAM, an OPl4 24ch soundchip with 640k sampleRAM/2MB GM, a videochip with bitmapmode and patternmode, 32768 colors, 512k vram, hardware sprites, dualplane, CF interface.

Oh yes, I should've known you would count this one:

Yeah, the TI-99/4A, I did do some game design in that back when I was in kindergarten, but grew out of that in the early 90s when I was in 5th grade, so that's nothing new.

IBM clone (Called Hi-Sense)
6 or 8 Mhz Intel 286 Chip (Could change speed while running using the "Turbo" button!)
640 KB RAM (That's all Bill figured anyone would ever need...)
5.25 " Floppy drive (Disks soft as Tortillas)
20 MB Harddisk (I never filled it up!)


First computer was the mighty C64 which I bought
myself for my birthtday the 2nd of september 1983,
but I fiddled a lot with my best friends TI99/4A
before my own purchase.

The TI99/4A was brill. For all those who cannot remember it, it was 16bit (And competed against the Vic 20,Spectrum and later comadore64 all 8bit).

AND it was a console games errr console as well as a computer.

Don't forget Atari, they made a PC somewhat out of that, too...

Edison 386 SX 16MHz
256Kb Oak Video
512MB RAM
80MB Western Digital
VGA Monitor
5.25" and 3.5" floppy

This was around 1990.

I think the year was 1996, I ditched my Amiga 4000, bought a pentium 120, with windows NT 4, to run Lightwave 3.5.
This accidentily put me onto the road of Microsoft certification (NT frightened me, so I did some reading), bringing me where I am today.

Skipping the Speccy and the Amigas... In the late 90's Pc's were advancing at an incredible rate. Managed to 'Get by' with my Miggy till 99 or so (mainly due to BBasic running apps at 512 x 1200 ) then...
733Mhz evesham vale jobber with 10Gig HD and onboard video. My first foray into IBM land was littered with dodgy motherboards and much to-ing and fro-ing via couriers...

Anyone else remember when hard discs were known as "Winchesters"... or did I just dream that?

I remember dropping a bunch of my hard-earned cash to buy a really fast new 3X NEC CD-ROM drive. For the week before the 4X drives came out, it was the fastest thing around.

Nope, Winchester was the early IBM hard drives but this was 30+ years ago.

Ah, maybe the name just stuck, then. I'm sure people used to sometimes call them Winchester drives at a computer company I used to work for, back in the late 80's / early 90's.

I've been on PCs where you have to type Park before. And I've seen windows pre V3.1 and it was horrid.

heh, I'd forgotten all about having to park the HD heads before moving the machine. And yeah, we used to sell the early versions of Windows - there was a special version called Windows386 (or something) that was brought out when the 386 chip came out. They were, indeed, dire.

The name Winchester stuck, because they had FULL page adds in all the comp mags (And errm the "Adult" mags) for years

those were the fun days... all gone... all but forgotten...

just like the 1964 NY World's Fair... the newness and excitement of those days are gone forever... the anticipation of loading a cassette based game into a C-64 or TI-99/4A, an Atari or Radio Shack machine, and actually seeing it start to run after waiting for, what in some cases, seemed like an eternity... will, for better or worse... be another one of those inescapable realities that shall dissapear into the forgotten memories of those who actually experienced them, and never be known to those who have not had the experience or had it related to them...

... for worse i would have to say, albeit today's systems are much faster and much more reliable and much more internet connected and... well, there was something special about those days... i'm glad i was able to be a participant...

ole nostalgia's got me...

stop your laughing...



--Mike

Loading from cassette tape was the devil's work. I guess it beat punch cards, though... just. :P

I can certainly remember HDs being called Winchesters, and I'm not *that* old. When I was an apprentice, we had a massive 10MB (I think it was) Winchester Drive, which must have been about 12-18" square (the box contained the PSU and controller), hooked up to the Econet network (anyone remember those!). We imaginatively called it 'Winnie'.

I can certainly remember HDs being called Winchesters, and I'm not *that* old. When I was an apprentice, we had a massive 10MB (I think it was) Winchester Drive, which must have been about 12-18" square (the box contained the PSU and controller), hooked up to the Econet network (anyone remember those!). We imaginatively called it 'Winnie'.

[edit]
I found this...



Just to prove I haven't gone completely senile...Yet! ;o)
[/edit]

For an Acorn computer?! I bet that cost an arm and a leg, back then.

486 dx4 100MHz ^^

Earlier computers ->
-Videopack (don't ask me, I was too young but I do recall the keyboard and the joysticks ^^!)
-Alice (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=60)
-Amstrad cpc 6128
-<<<Console moment...Megadrive/SuperNes/GameBoy/Lynx Atari...>>>
-and then my 486 dx4 100MHz ^^

@Yan my comment was more at


And was just pointing out that all through the Early,Mid 70s, Winchester had full page ads in PlayBoy every month. (And they were for big cabinet drives 5ft rather than 5 1/2 inch)
And that BIG dreampt about them rather than the other pictures in the magazine


Edit: This entire Joke has probably dated hasnt it?

Ah, the Philips Videopak. It actually did have a couple of decent games. I seem to remember Terror Hawks was pretty good (for the time). My mate had one. He got really pi**ed off when we - somehow - made it malfunction so that it said "Melect Game". Ahhh, the memories! :)

Yeah, the keyboard was the bastard child of a ZX81. :)

My first pc was an IBM PC XT. I bought it with the advance money I got for programming a POS system on it for the tourist trap town of White's City, New Mexico (outside Carlsbad Caverns).

My first computer purchase was a Commodore VIC-20, with tape drive. I even bought an expansion card for it that would hold 4 more expansion cards, and an expansion memory card that pushed the 4kb of ram all the way up to 32kb. I was smokin'. You could only have one expansion card active at any time, though (you'd have to turn the vic-20 off, flip dip switches to choose which card, then turn it back on). I used to participate in a competition for 1-line Vic-20 games, but don't remember who it was that held the competition (some magazine, I think).

After that, I moved up to a Commodore 64 and then an Atari ST. Somewhere along the way, I also had an Apple 2+ that I got on loan to produce some financial software on.

One of the most maddening things to me is how much these darned things cost back then compared to what they cost now, but we paid it to upgrade our machines.

Examples:
Model 1541 Floppy drive for Commodore 64 - around $300.
I forget what i paid for a 20Mb hard drive for the Atari ST, but it was at least a couple hundred.

Yeah, I had a Speccy, but REALLY wanted a BBC model B. It was just so sexy. :) I think it was about £400 back then, so there was no chance of me ever getting one. :(

dotlink pentium 1, 133mhz, 16 Mb ram,windows 95, 1 Gig hard drive.

Crashed more often than a drunken ram raider .

Mine was free, my school upgraded their systems so I got the old one

It was an Intel 486-100mhz, 16mb memory, no HDD and a win98 boot disk.

Back then I didn't know 486 machines would recognise a normal HDD :P

> It actually did have a couple of decent games.

Take the money and run. BEST GAME EVER!

Some Kit from HEATHKIT (really old no storage)back in 1978 than a APPLE I singleboard kit that never worked well then a Atari 800XL and a 286 then a 486SX then DX then Pentium 3 then ATHLON64 which is where I sit now... tomorrow? Who knows!

Originally a VideoGenie (clone of a Tandy TRS80), then after many 80's machines, hit a P133 Intel box from Mesh (can't remember when), which I bought specifically to play Quake and Mechwarrior.

Oh yeah;




£300 back in 1992.

Vic20 with tape drive.
Then a
Tandy TRS 80
Then a
386SX with 2 mb ram, 100 mb hard drive. Vesa GFX

My first IBM Compatible PC was an Atari PC1 running at 4.7Mgh, with an Amber Screen and a 5.25 Floppy Disk Drive :)

Cheers

Garion

First PC was a Zenith with no hard drive, a 5.25" floppy and monochrome screen. Just like this one:
http://williambader.com/museum/zenith/zenith.html

Had it around the early-mid 80's

Mine was one of the Amstrad clones. Like this but more powerful I think:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=183
..bought it in ~98 [I meant ~88], and remember playing StarGlider on it. Bought my Amiga shortly after.

"Beaker" lies - his was an abacus and he was most proud of it.

Originally a commodore 64. Then a Commodore 128. First IBM Compatible was an IBM PC XT of some kind, and worked my way up the PC ladder since then. Funnily enough, I still use a Commodore 64 Emulator in Windows to play the 'classics'.

if there is a prize for being the real computer pioneer, then i must say, Rook Zimbabwe has a good claim for it...

my hats off to anyone who has built and used a working Heathkit machine...

--Mike

Oh my! you kids don't know you've been born! I twisted my parents arms in the late '70s, into buying me a Commodore Personal Electronic Transactor (PET). For those of you with 1 or 2 Gigabytes of RAM, the PET had 8 Kilobytes of RAM (only 7 usable!). Operating system was in an 8k ROM. lean, mean, tight coding essential!
Huge fun, and it set me off on my eventual career with (IBM spit!) PCs.

Go see this very heavy bit of kit at http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=191

Around the same time this thread was created and ended. ;)

Dang... I thought Gfk was back.

486 (50MHz)
3.5" floppy drive
No CD-rom
No soundcard
8192bps modem
Oh I remember those long hours downloading stuff from the BBS's, and playing Stunts with the sounds from the PC beeper.

Mine was a 233Mhz Packard Bell which I got from PC World (I didin't know these guys were dodgy back then). I must have paid over £1200 for it and they sold me additional rubbish such as extended warranty and their after sales support called "mastercare".

I think this was around 1997-8 and it was touted as a "multimedia" PC back then (Pentium/MMX). Came with ATI Rage card and Windows 95. I have no idea what else that machine had(soundcard, RAM, HDD space) as I had just moved from an Amiga 1200 and PC's were pretty new for me.

The PC also came with the latest game (MDK) which was quite popular back then and I later bought a flight sim called Total Air War which was quite addictive for its day.

486 dx 33Mhz
4Mb RAM
120MB Hard drive
14" VGA Screen

I did actually get it online using AOL, worked pretty well. But had to upgrade after starting Java programming at college, as it was taking 37 seconds to compile a simple program.

heh, that comment made me get flashbacks from my AMOS programming back on the Miggy.. though it didn't compile, it took ages to interpret larger programs.. :D

mmm, I used AMOS, loved it. Shame it was so slow.

IBM 286
4Mhz & 8Mhz in Turbo mode
1 MB RAM
Floppy Disk 5.25"
Monochrome monitor

Old threads never die,
- they just wool not lie down.
- they just get wound up, reely!
- they don't cotton on to the idea.

Sorry, i'll post again in a decade or so!

My first personal computer was a Sony Hitbit MSX with a tapedrive (Squiecky noises included!).
My first IBM PC compatible computer was an Intel 486 DX4 100Mhz with 4Mb internal RAM and a 400Mb Harddrive. Soon I upgraded RAM to play more games :-)

8GB divided between two hard drives
96MB RAM
CYRIX II-366MX Processor (366 MHz)
ATI 3D Rage II AGP Graphics w/ 4MB SDRAM
Windows 98

Still plugging along today, its my main dev machine. I have a laptop to browse the internet but its awful as far as developing goes. My e-machine (circa 1998) is the only computer I trust.

I missed the 16-bit era...

But, my first PC was a Tiny laptop, cost £1300... Broke three times in one year, the final time it didnt make it back to Tiny as they went bust.

It had:-


2Ghz CPU
256MB of RAM
40GB hard drive
A fan with a working life of 6 months... Offical!!!

The fan problem frazzled the board, sold it for £125... As it was filled with crap!

I saw that Tiny resurfaced as Tiny.com on the TV... Never in my whole life until that moment have I felt like chucking my TV out of the window! :)

Dabz

I was going to reply to this thread, then I realised it was me that started it - a year ago.

isnt that two years ago gfk ;)

Yes. I can read reading but I can't read writing. :/

OMG, he's only got two posts in his profile, and both are in this thread.....

Can't remember what my first PC was, but one thing I can tell you, it was crap !

My first PC:

80286 12mhz
2MB RAM
40MB HDD
ATI videocard with 512KB
Soundblaster

Bought in early 1990

My first PC (after a flurry of Atari machines culminating in a dear, departed Falcon030) was a P75 system, and I can't remember the other stats, other than it running Win95 reasonably well.

My first PC (IBM compatible) was an Amstrad 1640, 640Kbytes, 08086 processor at 8Mghz with a monochrome Hercules video card, no sound, no HD, and a couple of 5 1/4 drives (low density). It was early 1990. There I started coding with QuickBasic 4.5.

I got my first PC when I was about 2 years old.

Cyrix 233MHz
96MB RAM
VooDoo 4MB graphics card (with 3dfx if I remember correctly)
2GB HDD
No speakers. Got those about 2 years later.

This was in 1991 and it was hella expensive lol.

Oh and I used it for playing Dyna, Moto Racer and NFS 1. What did ye expect for 2 years old? :o)

OT: This old baby actually ran NFS: Porsche Unleashed very well. I miss it...

My first PC is a Mac - running Vista.

Something doesn't add up. Cyrix 6x86 CPUs weren't available until 1996 and the 233 didn't materialise until 1997 or 98.

The Voodoo graphics chip also wasn't invented until 1996.

So either your facts need a little revising, or this "wonder PC of 1991" was actually a time machine.

Your quereing all that except him getting his first PC when he was 2 years old. :D

2 years old... LOL!

Voodoo 4MB graphics card in 1991? NOT! (3DFX founded in 1994) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx
96MB RAM in 1991? Absolutely not!
2GB HDD in 1991? Definately not!
Cyrix 233Mhz in 1991? In your dreams... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix

This system would make much more sense if it were built in 1997.

the computer I am on right now is the first one that I can actually call mine and I got it in hmmm... late 2008

lenovo thinkpad laptop
2 GB ram
nvidia and somethin else I forget and I dont know how to find these things out
90 GB harddrive
dual core

hmmm I really cant remember all the stuff about it but the one thing i have always been confused about is why my mom's computer 2 GB ram quad core and some nvidia gfx card is like a million times slower yet it has similar ram and it is quad core...???

i had something ludicrously slow in the late 80's. 8mhz ibm compatible with 8 colour graphics.

Cheers
Charlie

I thought that by pointing out that he couldn't possibly have had that PC in 1991, the rest would speak for itself. ;)

Dick smith vz300

4 colors, no saving device, but i did learn to program

I sold my amiga 1200 pretty late. Was at university and got a P133 with w95 as my first PC. Was a tough choice, PC or Mac, but the PC was years ahead of the Mac for graphics in the mid 90's

My first PC was a 4.77 Mhz IBM XT clone. CGA (16 colours) graphics, green-screen monitor, twin floppy drive (no hard drive). Ah, those were the days – good old GW-Basic and MS-DOS.

Oopsie! I guess some of the data there is actually wrong. That's what my PC looked like last time I checked, and I don't remember doing any upgrades after 1996 (except a CD-ROM).

You asked for the PC I first had... well, that was the one, but ofc I wasn't monitoring all the hardware changes in there :P By the time I was old enough to understand what was in there, my dad already upgraded it a few times I guess, I just never saw him doing it so I thought that was how it looked in the first place.

My apologies for what seemed like a space/time continuum anomaly :o)

Now if you are asking about the computer that I used my own money to buy as the firs one, it was my laptop earlier this year (soon after I got hired): Toshiba A200-23K

And the second one is in my sig.

My first PC was a 386SX33 with 2MB RAM and a 130MB HDD.
I was 13 years old and saved up half of the money for it. My parents and my grandmother paid the other half.

My dad already had a 386DX40 with 4MB RAM for his newly started homebusiness. Within a year i learned some great lessons:

1. At that time 2MB extra really made a difference in games.
2. Windows 3.11 and Wordperfect run perfect on 2MB RAM.

:)