My first computer was a commodore 64 back in 1984. I was 6 years old at the time and my dad was in IT. While not "top of the line" back in 1984 since it came out in 82, it was still a fun machine back then to play with. Used it for a few years until the first nintendo came out which we got after it had been out in the states for a bit. I think that was 87 for us. My dad ended up getting a 486 in 1990 with windows 3.1 on it. That was a fun little machine. Playing wolfenstein and other games like it back then was the bomb.
Was using pentium 66's at school when they got new ones back in 1994. Those were the latest and update comps. Awesome stuff to learn pascal and C on when I was in high school.
Finally when I graduated high school in 1996, my parents bought me a computer as a graduation gift. Pentium II 133mhz with about 16MB of ram and a 4.3 maxtor hard drive running windows 95. That system was great as well. It was not nearly as cool as the machine listed in this article as a "dream" machine, but it worked great for me. My parents got it as a package deal through radio shack I think. Was about $2.5K for the system which came with 19" monitor, printer, and a ton of software. Having the encyclopedia on CD was great for starting school that my friends all had to go to the library to use. The only problem I had with it at first was convincing professors that I was writing papers for that I was using my CD rom as reference. They all wanted footnotes and annotations from actually physical books they could look at themselves. Which was a pain in the butt when they wouldn't budge and let me list my CDs as a reference.
I didn't start building computers until after I joined the AF. Built my first one back in April of 1998. Man that was a fun experience. The Pentium II's had just come out a couple of months prior with the top end speed just coming out that month of 450 Mhz. The cost of the processor was around $800. I picked up one of the newly released Celerons that were pentium II's running at 66 Mhz front side bus speed instead of 100. They were technically slower, but not. At least it wasn't when I paired it up with an Abit board that allowed me to manually adjust the front side speed on my own up to 100 Mhz. Really was the first time consumers were allowed manual overclocking of a computer. I took a celeron 333 and pushed it to 500 Mhz which was faster than anything anyone else had at the time for the most part. I also only paid $60 for the celeron. MUCH cheaper than $800 450Mhz PII that was also slower than my computer
Also purchased the very first Maxtor 64GB drive then as well as 512MB of SDRAM to go with windows 98. Found awesome deals on those as well. Everyone thought I was nuts. Saying I wouldn't be able to fill that big of a hard drive and never need to use that much ram for anything with windows 98. To bad they didn't know that the porn, movies, games, and music filled that bad boy up in about a month even back then.
Remembering correctly, I spent $60 for the CPU, $90 for the motherboard, $150 for the memory, $75 for the Enlight case, $50 for the DVD drive, $190 for the hard drive, $50 for the sound card (older sound blaster at first), 300 watt FSP power supply for $30, and about $100 on the Voodoo card. I upgraded a few months later to the 3Dfx 32MB banshee card which I used for a bit for about $100 after selling my voodoo 1 card off what pretty much what I paid for it. My first "Dream" machine that was seriously kick ass back in the day and cost me only $800. I used my old 19 inch monitor with 12x10 resolution. I only used the banshee card though for about a month before upgrading to an obsidian card. At $600 bucks it was almost the cost of the rest of the PC, but having 2x Voodoo 2's on a single card was the shit!
When Everquest came out in March of 1999, I had just recently upgraded to a TNT2 Ultra for my video card again with a $250 purchase. Was able to sell the obsidian card I had for $300 luckily.
About 4 months later, I finally upgraded that "old" celeron system that I built the year and a half previously to an AMD K7 system. My first GHz computer and man did I LOVE that system. Paired that up with 2GB of ram, a GeForce 256, and I was zooming! I sold my old system off to my parents for $500, which was still cheaper than anything a store would sell something comparable for even used. Used that $500 and about another $200 to put together that AMD K7 system. Luckily newer video card prices were coming down compared to previous gens. I think too many people got spoiled about that. Starting in 2000, the top end video cards were typically $150 or less.
I could go on and on about the fun adventures of computer building and upgrades (yes I know that I am a geek), but I stop here as that is everything prior to 2000. I am so glad I never started trying to build $5K computers back then. To watch everything become obsolete and cheap within 4 months after a purchase would have crushed me. To illustrate, remember my mentioning of the computer my parents bought me for graduation in Janurary (they got it for me before graduation so I could use it for the rest of the school year) of 1996 for $2.5K? I sold that in May of 1998 for only $70. That was the most I could get for it. I think my parents were still making payments on it!
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