First ever PC?

  • Thread starter Thread starter smr
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First PC - Olivetti 386sx - 16Mhz with a 20GB hdd. Used for college, specifically Turbo Pascal, Cobol, dBase IV and Lotus 123. Happy days.
 
Monserrat said:
What was the P3's clockspeed? I think they started at 450MHz, and the 32MB RAM would have dragged the processor down considerably!



Yeah, Tiny, Time, Gateway, Tempo etc would be ok as they don't exist any more.

Not sure about Evesham though. A few people have mentioned them in this topic and they were once our main supplier before we switched to Acer.
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Evesham are well gone. I used to work for them many years ago, initially in sales and then moved into technical support.
100% British and made machines that constantly came top of the various tests.
I'd left the company before it went "belly up". Chap called Richard Austin ran the company, he also had a side-line in racing GT cars (had a team - Win Percy used to drive for him). After he'd syphoned much of Evesham Micro's money off to fund his hobby it was always going to be bad.
Evesham were eventually bought by Tiny and that was the end of probably one of the best British PC makers.
 
First PC was a 286 something and then a 386SX20

First I put together was a 386DX40.
I paid £500 for 16 meg of memory and I got that very cheap.
 
My first PC was maybe a pentium or pentium II. I can't remember the spec, I probably never really knew.

My first video game and interaction with a pc was playing the game Zool, which is funny considering it was released the year of my birth (1992). I'm guessing I first played Zool aged 1-2, and my first time I used the PC properly was to unload drivers to play Zool in 1995-6, assisted by my dad.
 
Aye, endless hours tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to get to that elusive 600+Kb of usable RAM. All hail Dos 5 and it's E(x/panded/tended)MM.
 
Reminiscing about Evesham Micros.
In the 80s they always had 16 page adverts in every computing magazine so I decided to make a pilgrimage and there was basically nothing in teh shop which actually wasn't a shop.
I asked the assistant "I've come for a 40 meg hard drive for my Atari ST but I want to know how much faster it is than floppy disks".
He said he didn't know but rang the warehouse who said the 'expert' would be back soon so I waited over 1 hour.
I eventually asked the expert "I can't find any answers anywhere, how much faster is the hard drive compared to floppies?"
The expert said "It is faster".
I walked out :D

The second biggest advertised company was Leeds Computers so I rang them up and got sufficient answers so decided to make a pilgrimage using old technology of a road atlas.
I ended up on a rough estate, looked up at a house number that matched the 'shops' number and knocked on the door.
Leeds Computers was a shed in his back garden :D

the 40 meg hard drive cost £450.
 
stoofa said:
Evesham are well gone. I used to work for them many years ago, initially in sales and then moved into technical support.
100% British and made machines that constantly came top of the various tests.
I'd left the company before it went "belly up". Chap called Richard Austin ran the company, he also had a side-line in racing GT cars (had a team - Win Percy used to drive for him). After he'd syphoned much of Evesham Micro's money off to fund his hobby it was always going to be bad.
Evesham were eventually bought by Tiny and that was the end of probably one of the best British PC makers.
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Panrix computers were also up there, winning most group tests where they featured.
 
Brings back memories of having to decide if you wanted single or double sided, double or high density floppies. A box of 10 DSHD disks please :D
 
I saved up pocket money and bought a school friend's desktop "slab" of a PC, a Packard bell P120 with Overdrive processor. It took ten years to boot up and ran Windows 98 but the thing played the very first round of interactive Flash games in IE giving much amusement.

I remember the self hype build-up and endless talk with him in Maths about it.

Worst computer ever.
 
I had no money being still in school but back in 1999/2000 I was allowed to buy a PC with £200 and got some second hand HP Vectra with Pentium 166MX, 16MB EDO RAM and 2GB HDD. Only had 2MB on-board graphics chipset, no sound card or OS. Think it came with a 14" monitor too.

Before getting rid of it I upgrade it to 233MX, 64MB RAM, Sound Blaster 16 and a Voodoo 3 16MB PCI card. Don't think I upgrade the HDD.

With the Voodoo beast under the hood I could finally run Unreal Tournament (with some bots) quite smoothly. Unfortunately it had a tendency to freeze up with the sound card emitting a flat line like sound. :p I had to under clock it to 166MHz just to get it to stop doing it. The heat sink had no fan so it was probably overheating but I was to stupid to think of that at the time and it left me scratching my head.
 
First one i put together myself was IIRC

P166
16MB RAM
8GB HDD
3dfx GFX Card

something like that. Seems so long ago now.
That many changes i cant really remember. Shortly after i went AMD K7.
How crap were those machines :)
 
brummie said:
P166
16MB RAM
8GB HDD
3dfx GFX Card

Only used it to play 'Kingpin' :D

something like that. Seems so long ago now.
That many changes i cant really remember. Shortly after i went AMD K7.
How crap were those machines :)

EDit : double post DOH!! sorry
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