Well, my history starts with Spectrum 48, Commodore 64, Acorn A3000 (awesome machine), but first 'IBM compatible' PC was in '93. Back then £1000 seemed to be almost a minimum spend for a PC (shudder to think what that equates to nowadays with inflation - just feel sorry for my parents!). Pentium was just out, but for that money we got a 486 DX2-66, 4MB Ram (woah - 1000x less than now
), vesa local bus (or something like that) SVGA graphics - woo!, whopping 340MB HDD (which I later discovered had compression enabled by default to make it 'bigger' - no wonder it ran like ****e), 14" monitor. No sound card or optical.
Not long later we 'needed' to spend about £180 on a soundblaster 16 (about the length of a modern gfx card!) and a single or double speed CD ROM. Never understood why, but some outofdateedness on our MOBO meant digital sound effects that used DMA didn't work in some games. Heartbreakingly that included Doom, which was basically the main reason we wanted sound, so we were stuck with the FM music and PC speaker sound effects for a good few years after that
. Still - such fond memories of Sim City 2000, Indycar Racing, Monkey Island 2, X-wing, TFX, Worms... aaaaaahhhhhhh. Getting intimate with multiple versions of Autoexec.bat and Config.sys to free up all that precious sub-640K base ram... booooooooooo. Remember me and my bro saving for ages to get the £125 for the 4MB ram upgrade to 8!
My own first PC was when I was at uni. Another £1000 got AMD K62 450, 64MB. Having my priorites straight, I managed to convince the shop to ditch the bundle's scanner, printer and 'educational' software and give me a Voodoo 2 card instead! Pushed that AMD all the way to 500 in my first dabble with OCing. Demolished Jedi Knight and Half life, and with UltraHLE it could juuuuust about emulate the N64 well enough to annoy my housemate who'd spend hundreds on his console (as long as I only tried to play Mario 64).
Fun days
), vesa local bus (or something like that) SVGA graphics - woo!, whopping 340MB HDD (which I later discovered had compression enabled by default to make it 'bigger' - no wonder it ran like ****e), 14" monitor. No sound card or optical.Not long later we 'needed' to spend about £180 on a soundblaster 16 (about the length of a modern gfx card!) and a single or double speed CD ROM. Never understood why, but some outofdateedness on our MOBO meant digital sound effects that used DMA didn't work in some games. Heartbreakingly that included Doom, which was basically the main reason we wanted sound, so we were stuck with the FM music and PC speaker sound effects for a good few years after that
. Still - such fond memories of Sim City 2000, Indycar Racing, Monkey Island 2, X-wing, TFX, Worms... aaaaaahhhhhhh. Getting intimate with multiple versions of Autoexec.bat and Config.sys to free up all that precious sub-640K base ram... booooooooooo. Remember me and my bro saving for ages to get the £125 for the 4MB ram upgrade to 8!My own first PC was when I was at uni. Another £1000 got AMD K62 450, 64MB. Having my priorites straight, I managed to convince the shop to ditch the bundle's scanner, printer and 'educational' software and give me a Voodoo 2 card instead! Pushed that AMD all the way to 500 in my first dabble with OCing. Demolished Jedi Knight and Half life, and with UltraHLE it could juuuuust about emulate the N64 well enough to annoy my housemate who'd spend hundreds on his console (as long as I only tried to play Mario 64).
Fun days
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Despite only having 5 tunes on there... 
LOL. Seeing the same game just over a year later on my first own PC with Voodoo 2 @ 800x600 was the most blown away I've ever been by a leap in graphics quality.