So, what was your first build? The one that started it all?

[bladedwing]

Was looking through old desk drawers today, and lone behold...I found my good ol' 5.25'' floppy drive, and along with the thing, was a box of those big diskettes...they always did get bad sectors after 2 times of use, and messed up all the excitement of copying a game from a friend, just to find it won't work cause it corrupted yet again. But all the best games were there in the box...Dune 2, Star Control, King's Quest...some of them still my faves!! Amazing the best entertainment back then used to only take 5 mb of space.

So began my nostalgia...I'd kept it from my first computer my parents bought me...a $3000 top of the line build -- 386DX!! A 33 Mhz machine with 4 MB of ram and a whoppin' 100 mb of HDD space. Made all my friends jealous!

Amazing the stuff that changes...back before the Internet itself, when baud modems were only owned by those priveleged few that could afford one just to browse a BBS (Try telling your kids what that is). Well, come to think, back then just ''sound'' for that matter was considered a LUXORIOUS extra...that's why I remember Star Control 2 as one of those amazing gaming feats -- the only game that could 'play' music without an AdLib card and not having it sound like someone playing on a touch tone phone!

Anyway, anyone care to share your old computer memories? What was the machine that brought you into it all?

 

[chimaxi83]

I think I can safely assume I'm quite a bit younger lol

My first build, "from scratch", was something I dove head first into in the winter of 03/04:

-Extreme Edition P4, cooled by a Prometeia and overclocked close to 4.8 GHz at ~150F below zero. I had an absolute blast playing with that thing.
-Not sure what mobo I had, but it was an Asus.
-4 gigs Corsair DDR.
-Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. I felt so badass dropping what, close to half a grand for this?!
-Soundblaster Audigy
-XP, my first real software purchase.

What did I end up doing with it all? Sold it after about 3 months of fun, had my first kid on the way.

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

 

[oynaz]

Commodore 128D

 

[fastamdman]

I don't remember what the very first PC was that I had, it was something pretty ratty and ran down lol. The first machine I have that I recall well that "started it all" was an AMD Athlon 800mhz SLOT A machine with a tnt 2 in it. Man gaming on that back in the day was so much fun. Moving up from there I dove into building my own socket a rigs, 478 iirc. Then got into benching and overclocking with 2500m's, time went on to getting some records with the ol 9800pro ati card. Moved up to socket 939 times, had a blast there with the 3000+ venice. Gamed on a laptop for a long time after this. Had a core 2 duo t5450 and a 8800gt m so it did the job well. Currently on this 2500k machine

I have had more rigs but thats a really brief short upcoming from where I started =D. I buy/sell a lot of my rigs just to keep things new. I have a 2600k on the way in fact =P

 

[GoStumpy]

My first 'family' PC was a 486DX with 8MB ram and a 320MB HDD... I remember that being ~$3000 as well... Then we spent some $$$ upgrading it.. Bought a CDROM when they came out, bought 32MB of ram, upgraded to Windows 95, bought a 1GB HDD...

My first build was when I was 13 or 14, I saved up 'allowance' on a sheet on the refrigerator, doing odd jobs to add $2 or $5 to the sheet... Once it was at $1200, my parents would buy me all the parts I needed to build a computer... Ended up building a Pentium II-233, 256MB Ram, 8GB HDD, VooDoo2 video... Then later upgraded to a GeForce2 GTS 64MB video card...

 

[WT]

First build I remember was a Pentium 200 (no MMX IIRC) and a pair of 4gb SCSI drives I picked up for a super cheap $139 ea. on Ebay.
Video was ... hmmmm ... STB Riva 128 4mb I think ?? I didn't go 3dfx until about 2 years later, which was a mistake. Ohh, and 32mb of RAM was just a decadent indulgence !

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

In 1980 or 81, I built a HeathKit with a mighty 8088 processor and 2 megs of ram hard soldered to the PCB. It had no hard drive but did have 2-3 1/2" floppies and 2-5 1/4" floppies plus a color screen (as long as the color was Green).

 

[DaveSimmons]

In 1980 or 81, I built a HeathKit with a mighty 8088 processor and 2 megs of ram hard soldered to the PCB. It had no hard drive but did have 2-3 1/2" floppies and 2-5 1/4" floppies plus a color screen (as long as the color was Green).

You win! My first computer was a TRS-80 model 1, but it was prebuilt. But I did build the printer interface for it to connect an old RO33 TeleType.

My first x86 was also prebuilt (12 MHz 80286), though I ended up adding RAM, a math co-processor, VGA card, and a mouse (which required its own card in those days).

 

[JackMDS]

These two.

I bough the boxes, but in order to really work with them One had to build around additional components otherwise they were rather useless.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/Sinclair-ZX81_Desktop-PC_review

Storage on a cassette recorder

---------------------

http://oldcomputers.net/coco.html

Initial Storage that was available was in 4K plugging module.
later on their was a 5.25" few KB floppy.

Price at it pick configuration was over $1000.

Use it for inventing the new era of computerized Cognitive Rehabilitation with Head Trauma Patients (written in GW basic that I think was the first Microsoft product).

 

[Paperlantern]

My first machine was a ~$3000 IBM PS2. Blazing fast 11Mhz 286 processor. 512KB of RAM (YES... KB) and a 20MB HDD. it ran DOS only and had a word processor hooked to a impact printer, a color monitor (wooohoooo!) and a 3.5" floppy drive (all state of the art back in good ol 1988 or so. played hours of LL2, Snarf, Wheel of Fortune, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Midnight Rescue. It really did start most of it all... near 10 years later i bought my own machine "for school" (i was going to college and needed something to do research with and homework) and bought a pieced together Pentium 166MHz with 32MB EDO memory and a 3GB HDD. it also had a VooDoo1 card in it, jumpered to the 2D card. Shortly after getting HEAVY into Quake II at 30fps, i bought a VooDoo Banshee combo card and made Quake II run at a screaming 60fps... 180 ping on a 28.8 modem... oh those were the days. Where your skill was based on your ability to "lead" your targets to compensate for ping, rather than just being able to track them.

I went from the 166 to a PII 350, then to a AMD Thunderbird 850MHz, then to a 2600+ 2.06GHz, then to a P4 HT 3.6GHz, and finally to my current machine a Pentium D 3.0GHz with 3GB RAM (I am poor), but those are all stories in and of themselves.

 

[GrumpyMan]

An old Packard Bell something or the other that was given to me.

 

[TheStu]

My first build was;
AMD Athlon XP-M 2500 Barton (Thermalright SLK-947u copper heatsink)
Abit AN7 Socket A
1GB (2*256 & 1* 512MB) Geil Golden Dragon PC-3200
GeForce 4Ti (later upgraded to a 6800LE, unlocked to 16 shaders

I had that sucker at 220*11 (up from 166*11) and it was a screamer for its time.

 

[sandorski]

8088 XT to a 286. Wasn't really that much Hardware wise, just a Motherboard and Drive Controller swap, but it took about a week to complete(partially because I stopped out of frustration at one point for a couple days) as basic information, such as Jumper settings, was impossible to find pre-Internet. Eventually I did it by just trying, literally, every possible combination.

Now a days there are so many more parts to contend with, but the process is so much more simple.

 

[slightlyhuman]

oh man, good memories. the 6800LE, 9800PRO, i remember when i climbed the laddder from 4200ti->4400ti(leadtek with a massive heatsink)->4600ti!

gah, good stuff. played quake 2 with a 400 ping then got a local isp around 200. i play quake 2 every tuesday nights with a 60 ping now!

 

[slightlyhuman]

and omfg i shit gold bricks when this card came out:

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

P4 423 socket 1.3Ghz Rambus system

 

[mfenn]

and omfg i shit gold bricks when this card came out:

What card? :awe:

 

[mfenn]

First computer was an Apple IIc, man I played a ton of games on that thing. First PC (as in IBM compatible) was a prebuilt 286, logged a ton of hours in F-19 Stealth Fighter, Command HQ, Gunship 2000, and TIE Fighter. Had a prebuilt Pentium 90 and PIII 500Mhz after that.

The first PC I built was (let me see how many of the specs I can remember ):

Athlon XP 1900+
ECS VIA KT266A-based mobo (I was dumb back then)
512 MB of DDR266
Geforce 4 MX 440
20GB IDE HDD
Some CD-ROM (yes, CD-ROM)

That's actually the only PC that I've ever built completely from scratch. My current i7, 8GB of RAM, 6950 2GB unlocked, SSD, yadda yadda build can trace its lineage back to that original machine through continuous upgrades.

 

[queequeg99]

First computer was an Apple IIc, man I played a ton of games on that thing. First PC (as in IBM compatible) was a prebuilt 286, logged a ton of hours in F-19 Stealth Fighter, Command HQ, Gunship 2000, and TIE Fighter. Had a prebuilt Pentium 90 and PIII 500Mhz after that.

The first PC I built was (let me see how many of the specs I can remember ):

Athlon XP 1900+
ECS VIA KT266A-based mobo (I was dumb back then)
512 MB of DDR266
Geforce 4 MX 440
20GB IDE HDD
Some CD-ROM (yes, CD-ROM)

That's actually the only PC that I've ever built completely from scratch. My current i7, 8GB of RAM, 6950 2GB unlocked, SSD, yadda yadda build can trace its lineage back to that original machine through continuous upgrades.

We must be of somewhat the same vintage. A IIc was my first machine as well. I recall playing Montezuma's Revenge and Chopper Command hour after hour. I eventually sold it in 1992 for $150 or so.

My first built was based on an AMD Athlon 1200. For one reason or another, I've built all of my machines since around AMD except for my media server, which uses a Celeron of some ancient vintage.

 

[Danimal1209]

OH boy I remember Dune 2 just like the OP. I remember there was 5 install diskettes. I didn't have the game manual so the game kept closing on me when I answered the questions incorrectly for lvl 2 and lvl 9 (I think it was).

 

[biostud]

my parents had a 386sx 16Mhz for which I got 2mb of extra ram and a Soundblaster 8-bit soundcard, and a joystick. Used a Stacker to get extra drive space and did a lot of autoexec.bat and config.sys editing and boot menus, and used QEMM to free up memory.

My first build was a Pentium 75 @ 90Mhz

 

[mvbighead]

The first rig I actually owned was a barebone kit from a local computer shop. AMD K6-2 500MHz with nothing but PCI slots. I think I had something like 192MB of RAM and threw in a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI or something. Was a nice little computer and I had lots of fun with it.

Some 14 or so year later, still building my own and still having lots of fun. But being a grown-up means no more LAN parties. Makes a guy kinda sad really.

 

[Paperlantern]

OH boy I remember Dune 2 just like the OP. I remember there was 5 install diskettes. I didn't have the game manual so the game kept closing on me when I answered the questions incorrectly for lvl 2 and lvl 9 (I think it was).

i remember games like that. Indy motor speedway was liek that, but so was Sim City... the absolute barebones original. I boosted both of those games off of friends and used the copy machines at school to photocopy the manuals. Aw good times.

 

[Rifter]

AMD k6-2 400Mhz, some Asus mobo(p5 something maybe), 128MB ram, Nvidia TNT 16MB GPU.

 

[SithSolo1]

The first one I consider mine is the one I bought in high school with some stock money my grandparents had given me. It was a Dell w/ 500mhz P-III, 128MB ram, 16MB TNT1, TV tuner, DVD-Drive, Atlec Lansing 2.1 speakers, and a 19" CRT. Forgot the HD size but I don't think it was that big.

The first one I built was in '01 right before graduation from HS. Iwill KK266R, 1ghz Athlon Tbird that I managed to get to 1.2 with a pencil and a Alpha Pal 6035 w/ Black label Delta, 2x256MB ram, 64mb Radeon engineering sample, 2x30GB 7200 rpm HDDs, DVD-drive, CD-Burner, same 19" CRT, and one of those huge black steel Antec cases.

I've built many systems since then but you'll never forget those first few seconds after hitting the power button for the first time on your first build. A crazy mix of fear, hope, anticipation, and relief.