First ever PC?

  • Thread starter Thread starter smr
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i had a 486 dx at a whopping 66MHz
8 mb of ram too!

i wrote my phd thesis on that pc - win 3.1 was a right pain in the arse.
 
I saved up all summer for my first PC. PII 233, 32mb ram, 3GB HDD. It was the best day of my life when this thing turned up. Cost me £500 back in 1998 I think, not bad really.
 
I was selling a Barco CRT projector and some guy contacted me and offered me a trade for a newly built Celeron 333mhz PC. He brought it to my place and showed me Rebirth music software and Quake 2..

It went downhill from there.
 
smr said:
By that I mean Pentium PC etc. (not commodore or atari)

I'll start, my Dad bought a Pentium 133Mhz (forget the RAM and hdd capacity etc.) (although 16mb of RAM probably lol)

What was your first PC?
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I've never had a Pentium CPU in my PC. Which is a bit odd, come to think of it, considering how many PCs I've had.

My first PC was second hand and had been a server for a small business. i386DX-25, 1MB RAM, 2 HDD (80MB and 40MB - who would ever use that much?) in a very large full tower case. Top quality graphics card too - VGA! Cost me £500, which was a lot in the 80s. I was over the moon with it. Serious performance!
 
P3 600mhz, Nvidia Diamond Viper 32mb, 1.5gb ram, 20gb hdd, creative sound blaster 5.1, (win 98 1st edition...).

Can't remember anything else about it really. The case was the basic, standard type, and the psu might have been a 250w generic thingy. The machine really flew, that is when the os wasn't being a bitch.
 
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Gateway P120 (clocked to 133MHz), 8Mb RAM, Win95... cost over £2000

Used it to get on internet for first time, it was like a ghost town but quite nippy on my 14.4k modem, 1.4K/s download speeds :)
 
I bought my first PC in January 1997; I custom built it from all of the top PC Pro magazine A-list components. At the time it was pretty much top spec costing £3k.
It took me 3 years to pay back the money for it, I was 18 and only working p/t, and taught me never to spend so much on computers again.

Intel P166
32 mb Ram
2 GB HD
Matrox Mystique graphics card (2D/3D)
Creative Labs AWE 32 sound card
Sony 17" Trinitron monitor
US Robotics 33.6k Modem
HP 870 Cxi printer
 
The first I actually remember the specs for was a 800mhz Duron I think with a 20gb hdd

We had 3 or 4 family pcs before that, but the Duron was my baby :p
 
Amd K6-III with 64mb ram and a 4gb hard drive running windows 98.

What a crap machine that was, built by complete cretins, hardware failure about 6 times over the first few months, although they did give us a 32mb video card after a while, it was slow as all hell, not even the remotest chance of gaming aside from the odd flash game.

But I was just happy to have a PC in them days, my parents did not earn a lot of money, it was a lot of of cash for my dad to fork out even though it was an incredibly basic/ cheap machine back then.

My first personal pc? Oh it was an ancient windows 95 machine, couldn't tell you the specs if I wanted, I paid £50 for it and basically used it for porn/ chatrooms and that was it (largely because it wasn't capable of anything else).
 
Ken said:
Pentium II 266 MHz with an ATI Rage card with TV capability. Was special when I bought a Voodoo 2 card for it. :cool:
Click to expand...

The most memorable upgrade for me was when I bought the original Voodoo just after it had been released. The only thing that used it at that time was the demo that came with it, which was a flyby of a tower. I gawped at it and phoned a friend, gibbering at him. He came over, gawped at it and went straight to the shop to buy one. It was that much of a change.
 
The first one I bought was a crappy 80386. It was surplus stock from Morgan Computers in New Oxford Street. Had used IBM PCs before that.
 
Mine was a Pentium II 233 MMX if I remember rightly, with a Matrox Millenium graphics card. I got a Voodoo 2 card later on but can't remember which one. I had a Sound Blaster of some description and pushed the boat out on a 17" Hansol(?) CRT.

The case it was built in was ****** horrible with loads of sharp edges. I cut my hands to bits on it. :mad:

The upgrade to an Athlon 1.2 down the line was a big leap, shame about the fact you could fry bacon on the thing and the noisy cooling I had. Loved my Visionmaster Pro CRT though. :D
 
For me personally:
486DX33/4MB/245MB/a 2x CDROM/8bit sound card/Cirrus Logic 5426 video/14" 1024x768 CRT.

But we'd had various PCs at home as my Dad worked in the industry ... mainly a
IBM XT-286 6MHz + 287 co-processor (286 motherboard (in our machines case it was a prototype lab motherboard with manually soldered jump wire fixes on it) in a XT case) with a 20MB full height 5.25" harddisk, 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives and EGA graphics.
 
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