What was your first PC like?

[cuteybunny]

Mine was a 386sx 20mhz packard hell with 130gig of harddrive, 2megs of ram, 512K Vga, 3 1/2 floppy and 5 1/4 floppy drive with 13' Xtended VGA monitor 800x600 which we bought at Circuit City for 800 bucks plus taxes, it didn't include any software so I went back to ask for something and they gave me Windows 3.0 and manual but was missing one last disk! so I had to hunt for it on the BBS and luckily I found it. They told me it was worth 200 bucks hehe, i find that hard to believe thought for something that is worthless as that. No one used windows at all at the time back in 92 not until 95 until bill gate put out win95 did it began to get really popular. What disappoint me was that most PC did not come with sound card or cdrom.

 

[Mitzi]

My first PC was a Pentium 60 with 8Mb RAM, 1Mb SVGA Trident card, 2x CDROM, Sound card (don't know what make) and 14" goldfish bowl monitor running Win3.11.

My friends and I used to get together and play Doom 2 player deathmatch over a serial cable. We all used to fight for my machine 'cos the other machine was a 486 DX2 66 with 4Mb RAM! They were the days....

 

[Looney]

An Amstrad.. 286, with no hdd.. don't even remember what the ram was, probably 128k or something. Two floppy drives. CGA monitor. Paid $2500 for it.

 

[mztykal]

<< Mine was a 386sx 20mhz packard hell with 130gig of harddrive, 2megs of ram, 512K Vga, 3 1/2 floppy and 5 1/4 floppy drive with 13' Xtended VGA monitor 800x600 which we bought at Circuit City for 800 bucks plus taxes, it didn't include any software so I went back to ask for something and they gave me Windows 3.0 and manual but was missing one last disk! so I had to hunt for it on the BBS and luckily I found it. They told me it was worth 200 bucks hehe, i find that hard to believe thought for something that is worthless as that. No one used windows at all at the time back in 92 not until 95 until bill gate put out win95 did it began to get really popular. What disappoint me was that most PC did not come with sound card or cdrom. >>



Hmmm, a 130GB? Damn, I don't even have that much now...

If you're asking my first PC, then I would say my AMD K6-2 380MHz Compaq. If you mean first computer, I had a Apple Macintosh 618CD or something like that. It had a 60MHz Motorola processor, 8MB of ram and a whopping 500MB hard drive. Damn that thing smoked. Plus it ran Doom and Doom 2 great!

 

[Jiggz]

It was a Commodore 64 for me. No HDD and an external Floppy drive (5 1/4") with a 13 inch TV as a monitor. As the model says, it has a mind boggling size of 64Kb of ram!

 

[Redwingsguy]

A keyboard connected to my hamster wheel

Then a compaq prolinea 486 33mhz 4megs of ram, 14" moniter, windows 3.1

 

[DN]

First PC I ever owned was a PC XT 8088-2 (8 Mhz of blazing power), 2 x 360k disk drives, 640k RAM, CGA card, 14" monochrome monitor -- cost was $1400.00 Cdn.. LOL..

 

[rbaibich]

Sinclair Spectrum. I keep it somewhere in the basement...

 

[cx32m4]

first computer I built with my own hand
cel366@550
abit bh6
128mb
CL Tnt2 ultra
maxtor 12gig

 

[nortexoid]

the first was Atari 800XL, but i don't really consider it the first, since it sort of isn't...

the first x86 i ever got was an ibm ps/2 286 w/ a 20gb proprietary SCSI hdd and micro-channel slots.
it had a 3.5" floppy, and 1mb ram running DOS 5.0

i remember I used this cool menu program from boot to access all my progs....it was sorta like windows for me...ah yes, how i remember.

actually had a VGA monitor and graphics cards using 256k video mem....wasn't too bad.

 

[Mitzi]

<< Sinclair Spectrum. I keep it somewhere in the basement... >>



Target Renagade for the Spectrum was the best beat'em up in its time - I used to love it!

 

[thermite88]

<< What was your first PC like? >>

It is like a boat anchor.

It is a Cromenco C-2, Zilog Z-8 CPU, 64K memory, 2 8-inches floppy, running CDOS and CPM operating system. It weights over 100 pounds.

 

[TheCorm]

<< It was a Commodore 64 for me. No HDD and an external Floppy drive (5 1/4") with a 13 inch TV as a monitor. As the model says, it has a mind boggling size of 64Kb of ram! >>



Before I got my Commodore 64, I have a Commodore Plus/4, I loved that old girl. Anyone know how much ram that had?

I never got a floppy drive for my C64, just had an external tape drive and a few cartridges.

 

[Mem]

Commodore 64 here as well, showing my age now but most of those games were awesome I wish they would be ported over to the PC and updated .

 

[teddymines]

In 1984, a VIC20 baby! I upgraded it with a cassette drive, and eventually sprung for the 3K graphics expansion cartridge that made purty circles. The display was a whopping 20-some characters wide on my parents color Zenith. I sold the thing for $50 in 1988!

Then came the Tandy 1000SX in 1986, with dual floppies, a small CGA monitor, and 64K ram. I think this had an 8088 running at 4.77MHz. Upgraded with a 30mb hard drive on a card and 640K memory. Ran windows version 1.1 (still have the floppies and manual in box). The 1200 baud modem made BBS surfing fun.

Made the leap in 1991 to a 486sx with 4 mb ram, a 220 mb hard drive, vga, 14" monitor. Eventually added cdrom and a 14.4 baud modem.

Upgraded to pentium 133 in 1997(?) with 16mb ram, 850mb drive, matrox millennium vga card on a Tyan Tomcat 3d board. See boat anchor link in sig.

Finally retired boat anchor with my new system a few months ago

 

[VTrider]

First computer: TI-99/4A (For all you old timers out there!)

Circa 1982/3

Massive 16K of onboard memory

No HD, used to save programs written in BASIC on cassette tapes

No monitor, used T.V

Everything was loaded from cartridges

Used to drink soda, stay up to 2:00am roaming nations BBS on my blazing 300bps modem (couldn't afford the $500.00 1200bps (1.2k) modem!)

First e-mail address was 17636,1577 (guess, it's like the first time you fall in love, you never forget)

ASCII code was my friend

Watched scooby doo episodes (the original ones) when wasn't geeking out trying to get speech synthesizer to work

Ahhhhhh the goold ole days

-VTrider

 

[culex]

Let's see if I can even remember what I had back then.

I believe it was a 486-DX 50MHz. I remember playing old Apogee and Epic Megagames stuff on it
Was running Win3.1... took like 3 minutes to friggin boot.

Had a 512 meg hard drive, slow as heck. Some weird crap trident video card, and killer 2 Megs of RAM. No CD rom, no sound card. I envied all my friends when Doom came out and I wasn't able to play it

 

[JackBurton]

I had an 8MHz powerhouse and even when it was the fastest machine out, I thought to myself, "this thing sucks!"

 

[RolyL]

Well, first I bought an abacus for 3 denarii. It was a bit slow so I bought some grease and oiled its runners - my first overclock I suppose. Its reliance on base 10 arithmetic was problematic though for working in Roman numerals in the market, so I was forced to upgrade. A friendly salesman from Rhodes sold me a wax-tablet and an Epson stylus with which to write: this was a massive improvement as floating-points were more easily represented than with the abacus. Its advanced Non-Volatile technology meant that its memory's contents were not wiped each time I left it off overnight. It was also pretty crash-resilient, although high temperatures caused data corruption (i.e. wax melting) just as they do today.

No, really, my first proper computer was Babbage's Arithmetical Engine. Wasn't exactly portable, but it did its job magnificently. It was only replaced when Commodore released the Amiga 500+, the biggest, badest-ass mofo going at the time. Motorola 68000, multi-way custom chipset (ECS), 1 Mb chip RAM (24 bit address space though), KickStart 2.04, 880K 3.5" floppy. Kicked the PC-of-the-time's butt with its 4096 simultaneous colour-palette, 1280x512 (+ a bit of overscan) screen resolution, AutoConfig device controller (bettered only by very recent BIOSes), pre-emptive multitasking scheduler, 22 kHz 8-bit stereo sound, Unix-oid operating system. Only cost £399, a tiny fraction of the price of substantially worse PCs. I kept my Amiga (and its bigger brother, an 68040 A4000 that triple-booted WB 3.0, MacOS 8.1, and NetBSD 1.3) until 1998. It took until Windows 2000 until I actually preferred my PC.

 

[Tomek]

Commodore 64

 

[astriy]

a compaq 486 @50 mhz, 8 meg ram. something like 600 mb hdd. 15 in monitor with speakers on the side!

anyway, I hated compaq's ever since

 

[aceO07]

My first PC was awesome!

IBM PS/1
386sx 20mhz
2MB RAM
40MB harddrive
MS DOS 4(?)

 

[fow99]

TI 486DX 80
16M RAM
QDI mobo (OPTi chipset)
Chips&Tech 64300(??) VESA 4M video
Maxtor 540M
Sound Excel 16 bit sound card (Great compatability)
14' Monitor.


Man I have good memory.

 

[microAmp]

I got to the game late Got mine from the Dell Outlet factory before they shut that place down.

200 MHz MMX
32 MB RAM
12x CDROM
3.2 GB HDD
4MB Matrox
Sound card

Told ya I got to the game late.

 

[Woody419]

I bought my first computer on July 16, 1990, a used Kaypro 2 for $150. The Kapro had two 5.25 double density floppy drives, no hard drive, 64K ram, and the CP/M language. By that time everyone was using Windows and no help at all, but I had all the manuals, the time, and the will to decifer them. Wordstar, Datastar, spreadsheets, I learned them all. They were written by Microsoft (!) and completly integrated, just like Office, only easier to understand.