Your first ever computer + an embarrassing story

[Fritzo]

I remember I was really depending on computer magazines back then. All the tips and tricks about optimizing your expanded/extended memory, what programs to use (QEMM, etc). Only place we'll find information like these are from the magazines.

LOL- remember Computer Shopper? It was the size of a 1950's phone book. The mailman cursed the day the subscription for those came in

I would go through its pages, looking for the best parts from each vendor, and they always had a directory of BBS's to dial into to get software.

 

[sandorski]

LOL- remember Computer Shopper? It was the size of a 1950's phone book. The mailman cursed the day the subscription for those came in

I would go through its pages, looking for the best parts from each vendor, and they always had a directory of BBS's to dial into to get software.

It was indeed awesome. I bought my first CD Drive from it. It was the only place I could find the Slot Load drive I wanted. That said, that was the only thing I ever bought from an Ad there.

 

[Aikouka]

This is a computer tale that haunts me even until today. I built my first computer when I was maybe 15 or 16, and I knew absolutely nothing about it. It really wasn't much harder back then than it was today, but there weren't many resources. If I remember correctly, it was an AMD Duron system with a GeForce 2 MX, and I was so excited when I got it all built up. I just... I just... had to turn it on! Except, it really wasn't all built up as the heatsink wasn't on yet because we didn't have any TIM. I thought, "Oh, a few MINUTES of running couldn't hurt it, right?" Yeah, it lasted a few seconds past POST before it shut down, and made the room smell like burnt plastic.

I don't think I've ever done anything quite so dumb and catastrophic since then, but that one always makes me cringe.

EDIT:

Oh, and my first computer was a 286 running MS-DOS 6.1 (I think that's the right version). Later on, we upgraded to a Celeron-based Compaq Presario with ATI Rage Pro graphics. The graphics were PCI-based and limited to 2MB of RAM, which meant any game that required more than 2MB (i.e. all the cool, new 3D games) wouldn't run (correctly) since memory sharing wasn't available until video cards started using AGP instead of PCI.

 

[sandorski]

This is a computer tale that haunts me even until today. I built my first computer when I was maybe 15 or 16, and I knew absolutely nothing about it. It really wasn't much harder back then than it was today, but there weren't many resources. If I remember correctly, it was an AMD Duron system with a GeForce 2 MX, and I was so excited when I got it all built up. I just... I just... had to turn it on! Except, it really wasn't all built up as the heatsink wasn't on yet because we didn't have any TIM. I thought, "Oh, a few MINUTES of running couldn't hurt it, right?" Yeah, it lasted a few seconds past POST before it shut down, and made the room smell like burnt plastic.

I don't think I've ever done anything quite so dumb and catastrophic since then, but that one always makes me cringe.

ouch

 

[Aikouka]

ouch

Luckily, the company sent me a new CPU, and I definitely had that HSF on before turning that machine on! :$

 

[mmntech]

My first computer was a handmedown Apple Macintosh LCIII I got from my parents in 1997. They bought me a proper desktop the next year, so I'd be reader for high school, which all used Windows PCs. It had a 233mhz Pentium II, Tomato Board mobo, 64mb of RAM, 8mb VGA card, 56k modem, 16-bit stereo ISA sound card (some generic brand), Windows 95, and a spiffy 17'' XGA CRT monitor. Wasn't cheap IIRC.

As for most embarrassing computer moment, probably when my dad found my girly stash back when I was 14. I didn't have any nudies yet thankfully.

 

[WiseUp216]

My embarrassing story

For my first computer i spent ages trying to install a floppy disk labelled "VL BUS DRIVER" which i thought stood for "virtual bus driver". It sounded fucking epic, i visualized a game driving a bus around, running over people etc... I never did get it to work. Later on another computer GTA 1 quenched this need to drive a bus and kill people

Many years later i find out it wasent a game, that was a driver disk for the Vesa Local Bus. Some weird interface that never caught on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus

Wasted so much time on that stupid floppy disk!

Great thread but this is the first one that made me LOL.

 

[Aikouka]

As for most embarrassing computer moment, probably when my dad found my girly stash back when I was 14. I didn't have any nudies yet thankfully.

I remember my dad yelling at me one time as I was perusing through IGN's Babe of the Day for the entire year. It probably wasn't a great idea to do that when the computer was in the living room and monitor pretty much wide open for anyone to see.

 

[jupiter57]

LOL!
My "first" computer was an IBM 386, unknown RAM, maybe 40 MB HDD. Bought ~1996.
Saw it for sale in the paper, ad said "Internet", and for all I knew, that was good enough for me. Paid $45 for it, Keyboard, mouse, monitor, & handset modem(!).
Got it home, had no idea what to do with it! (I was the first in my family to ever own a computer, so family was no help, knew few people with computers, and they all seemed to speak Portuguese whenever I asked about them!!! )
Played with it A LOT. Had MSDOS on it, that's all I remember.
Got a Dos commands book at the library & learned some commands, but was mostly lost.
In '98, bought a Compaq Deskpro, 133 Mhz., 1.2 GB HDD, 16 MBs RAM! Paid $600 for it.
Went to the local ISP, signed up & they were only supporting 33.6 K., so I had to buy a modem (They offered to sell me one for the low price of ~$200). 1 Month later, they started supporting 56K! Sure don't miss those dial-up delays!

My embarrassing story:
Circa 2002, I had been buying pieces & parts here at FS/FT & piecing systems together to sell to buy more pieces & parts.
I had only dealt with Pentiums at the time, so the first time I got hold of an AMD Motherboard, I paid a pretty penny for a K6-2(?) 500 Mhz. processor for it.
After getting everything together, with the exception of the heatsink/fan, I decided to see if it was going to work.
Yep, got it to post before the smoke started!

 

[Northern Lawn]

My first computer was an Amiga 500 in the year 1990 or so.

I had a lot of money so I bought everything and games and software, it came to about $2400. So when I set it up I realized I didn't have anything to do on a computer no internet or anything, not sure if there even was internet. I was in Syncrude oil Sand camp in Northern Alberta.

Anyway, 2 years later I only spent about 10-20 hours screwing around on the computer trying to figure out games and then it broke. Then I find out Amiga went Bankrupt and I couldn't get it fixed.

Threw it out, lol.

 

[bbhaag]

Families first computer was a Packard Bell 386sx. Came prepacked with MS-Dos 5.0 and a few utility programs. I remember booting up Wing Commander for the first time and thought it was the coolest game I had ever played.
Of course it moved like molasses on that old 386. If I wanted to move to the left by pressing the arrow key my ship would chop to the left instead. Still loved that computer though. Learning DOS laid a great foundation for a lot of the computer knowledge I have today.


Most embarrassing story is probably my first build back in 1999 or so. I bought all the parts needed but only skimmed through the documentation. Needless to say I screwed the MB right to the case chassis with no spacers in between them. It didn't short out the MB right away but eventually it did. My FIL still gives me shit about it.

 

[skyking]

Had one of those late 90's HP, toaster sized, celly powered, with a 5 1/4" format hard drive. I let the smoke out of several things, messing around, but my real learner was a socket 4 with the evergreen technologies 120 Mhz overdrive processor, two 10baseT NICs, and Freebsd for a firewall/router. I fumble-fingered the ipfw.rules a few times, locking myself out of both the box via ssh and the web, and had to dig out the dusty keyboard and plug in a monitor. That was embarrassing, especially when trying to open a port up to do some gaming or whatnot. "just a minute, I gotta go to console"
This lead to my first of many KVMs.

 

[jhansman]

1988, DOS 3.3, knew nothing about directory (we called 'em directories back then) structure. Had a program I needed to copy from 5.25" floppies on to C:. Called the place I bought the machine from (10MHz 80286, 512k RAM, 40MB Miniscribe, EGA graphics) and the guy guided me to the DOS on my C drive directory and walked me through the copy command. From then on, all new programs that didn't have an install executable ended up in the DOS directory. Wasn't until I finally learned DOS that I knew how all that should have been done. I kinda miss those days.

 

[Charlie98]

Vic 20 in the 80s. I wrote a random number generator program and used the results to buy a lottery ticket and won $400. LOL

I always wanted to do that... I figure it's just as good of a number picker as their machine.

The first real computer I ever worked on was in high school and our Digital VAX/VMS (that filled up a big air conditioned room in the lab.) I realized after I got a C- that computer programming was probably not my cup of tea.

Next was a Packard Bell PC, this was before the internet so I didn't do much with it. My mom's boyfriend had AOL internet service and he let me go on... I didn't know what the hell that was (or what I was doing I didn't understand how I could make plane reservations or pull up some person's website on a computer. I realized after that, that IT was probably not going to be my cup of tea.

Then I spent $1774 on a custom built HP PIII 850MHz computer... I still have the build sheet: $180 for 128MB RAM, $270 for 45GB UDMA HDD, etc. Oh, and the new Windows ME. Sweeeeeeet! POS didn't last one year. Warranty replaced the mobo, PSU and processor, but eventually it just wouldn't even function.

Embarrasing story? I actually had WebTV... and used it. :$

 

[brianmanahan]

I remember thinking I was a super awesome elite programmer when I copied the game code into Qbasic and actually got it working :awe:

lolol same here

 

[TechAZ]

Oh man, I remember setting up a bootable floppy disk that had a menu of various games that you could pick from. Each one had a different config.sys and autoexec.bat file customized so enough memory was available. Worked great for playing all those Sierra games! Biggest hassle was getting Space Quest IV CD-ROM to load up since it needed optical and mouse drivers.

I wish I remembered all those things I used to do to free up more memory. All I remember is messing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys....some @echo off stuff and changing memory values.

Do you remember the Sierra magazines that would come out? I used to check the mail whenever it was around the time they came in and reading every single word. The first game I remember having is Kings Quest II and my favorite of all time was The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I don't even remember how I found out about BBSs. Anyone remember how they found out about them?

 

[RossMAN]

1980's Commodore Vic 20 with Magnavox 19" TV as my monitor.

Analog tape, then upgraded to 5.25" floppy disk and super slow dot matrix printer.

BALLER!

 

[SparkyJJO]

First computer was a 286.

Stupid mistake was not parking the heads on the old school hard drive before powering the system down. It only lasted a few days. Oops.

 

[CZroe]

I wish I remembered all those things I used to do to free up more memory. All I remember is messing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys....some @echo off stuff and changing memory values.

Do you remember the Sierra magazines that would come out? I used to check the mail whenever it was around the time they came in and reading every single word. The first game I remember having is Kings Quest II and my favorite of all time was The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I don't even remember how I found out about BBSs. Anyone remember how they found out about them?

Had to connect to AOL's BBS to download AOL for DOS. I remember talking to some awesome tech support dude who helped me get it working on a computer it never should have been attempted on and I only even tried out of curiosity.

 

[TechAZ]

Had to connect to AOL's BBS to download AOL for DOS. I remember talking to some awesome tech support dude who helped me get it working on a computer it never should have been attempted on and I only even tried out of curiosity.

I wish my memory was better, I really thought I was into BBSs before Prodigy and AOL.

 

[Sea Moose]

i used to love playing that sail95 that came with windows 95. cant seem to find it anymore

 

[Demo24]

All I remember about my first computer is that it had an AMD k6-2 3DNOW! processor. I think the motherboard was a baby AT form factor made by shuttle or some other company of that ilk.

My embarrassing story is how I plugged the power cables in backwards (black wires facing out instead of in) and caused something to smoke on the motherboard. I had read in a dozen different publications that I should never ever ever do that, but it all slipped my mind in the excitement of the moment I guess. Strange thing is that I turned them around and the motherboard worked just fine after that. I guess I burned out something that wasn't strictly necessary, though I can't imagine what that could be.

I feel comps were a little hardier back in the day. I had a p3 mobo that had several caps bulge and some started to leak. Eventually it even had some corrosive streaks running down the sides. Still worked great for months, although at the end it was getting a touch flakey, so amd64 it was .


First comp in the house was a gateway 2000 running win95 so it must have had a 386 or 486 in it. Had a tendency of getting its power button stuck. I remember back in y2k mom told me our comp would be OK cause we bought a '2000', lol.


First comp I built for myself was a A64 back in high school. Ahhh, socket 939 . Lasted me a long time, hell I was playing bf2 with 512mb of ram for a long time, sure took a long time to load.

 

[Kaido]

I feel comps were a little hardier back in the day. I had a p3 mobo that had several caps bulge and some started to leak. Eventually it even had some corrosive streaks running down the sides. Still worked great for months, although at the end it was getting a touch flakey, so amd64 it was .

Oh yah, for sure. Remember DIP switches?

 

[sdifox]

Oh yah, for sure. Remember DIP switches?

DIP switches??? Try jumpers!

 

[JoeyP]

DIP switches??? Try jumpers!

I used to keep a little bag of jumpers, and would lose it when I needed it. So I'd end up stealing them from other devices.

Was I the only one who was confused by the ribbon cabling for hooking up floppy drives? I remember the terminators not being keyed, so you had to figure out the orientation by trial and error.