First ever PC?

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All home PC's have been "sef built" starting at 286sx.. Mainly to see what all the hoo har was about. I had a VERY heavily modded Amiga back then for Video Editing.

built a P2@ 300 mhz, Tyan Tsunami Mobo, Matrox G200 graphics.. Possibly 512mb RAM, And an horrifically expensive 4gb SCSI2 HD as a Capture/Render drive for the NLE.

That NLE card incidently also cost £1100 !!

O/s was (legit) Win95

Moved up to P3 on Asus CUBX on Win 98 upgrading to Win 2000 with twin 60 gb IDE Hard drives (capture & Render). Matrox G400 graphics.. NLE card transhipped into new build. 768mb RAM iirc (Belinea 21" CRT monitor)

Then firewire really took off making my NLE card redundant, So I built Msi Mobo on AMD cpu and so on and so forth...

The P3 got put in the loft where it's now a home for the spiders. I booted it the other day to try and find a picture. It booted fine if a little slow (gotta love win 2000 !)
 
Got mine in 1993 from some old skool box shifter in Southampton called Footprint Computers. Cost about £700.

Spec Porn.

CPU: AMD 386 SX 33 - Tiny thing and didn't even need a heat sink. Of course I didn't even know what one those were.
RAM: 2MB - Yep, 2 whole megabytes. Coming from 64k it impressed me.
HDD: 40 Megabytes. Looking back, this is probably the thing that makes me laugh the most.
SOUND: Internal speaker. Quite something.
GFX: Some awful Cirrus Logic thing. 256k?
ADDED AWESOME: TURBO!!1! button. :D

I can only imagine how much hardware and money I've been through since, as from 1997 I went self build only. :eek: Whatever the cost, it has been fascinating to watch PC's evolve.
 
Bought my first PC in 1996 - a Pentium 166 mmx. Think it cost about £1600 from PC World. It had a huge 2.4 gig hard drive if I remember rightly

I've been on t'internet ever since.

c
 
First actual modern PC was an IBM PS1 486 SX 25, I replaced it with a 486 DX2 80 I think.

Earliest 8086ish PC was a Tandy Laptop with no hard drive and a monochrome LCD screen. Used to play PGA golf on it off a floppy.
 
My first x86 was an Escom Pentium 60 with 4mb ram. 1.44 Floppy 14" CRT... No soundcard or CD rom. Cost 1000GBP They also sold it to me with PC Dos and OS2, instead of MS Dos and Windows 3.11, which was a bit of a scam, cos i had no idea what i was buying at the time. Being that MS Dos and not PC Dos was really needed to play games, i went about learning computers from then on, upgrading to a CD-Rom, soundcard and later on better graphics... Really found myself enjoying it so I started applying for jobs, that req'd computer knowledge and from there started making a career out of it. That was back in 1995.
 
Got bought an Amstrad PC1512 to replace my Sharp MZ80K (yeah - google it you whippersnappers) when I was a youngster - started me off programming, code design etc
 
My first ever one was a custom build rig that was originally assembled way back in 1998 and it was passed down to me by my Dad in 2001. Besides the graphics card being upgraded a couple of times between 1998-2000, here is the final spec:

Pentium 3 600Mhz ish - Slot A platform I think?
Some Abit board
128MB SD-RAM
300W PSU I believe
Philips 48X CD ROM - this was one quick optical drive!
Seagate 8 or 9GB IDE HDD
Creative Sound Blaster Live!
3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 AGP

I still remember the day in 1999/2000 when my Dad came home from that horrendous & popular PC shop with the Voodoo card, having just spent around £500 on it and my Mum going mad at him hahaha. I also remember that he occasionally had problems with it while playing Everquest on it as the card was that big and it kept sliding out of the AGP port ever so slightly because it hanged down at a slight angle.

When my Dad had it, it always ran on Windows 98 which I think it was best suited for as when XP came out, I upgraded to it and the machine did struggle to cope with XP some of the time, especially as by this point 3DFX had gone bust and never really released a working driver to support XP!

I finally retired the machine back in late 2002 as he passed another machine to me and I put it away in my cupboard. Fast forward last year when I needed a good clear out of junk I decided that the machine had to go but I decided to power it for one last time, and to my amazement - everything still worked! Even the old Seagate HDD which by this point was well over 15 years old and I've still got that HDD from the system stored away in my room.

Liam
 
valve90210 said:
My PC history:
Click to expand...

A few of you are doing PC histories, so here's mine:

1. 1999 - PII 350MHz, 64MB, Voodoo 4, Win 95C
2. 2001 - T-bird 1400MHz, 512MB, Geforce 2, Win 98SE
3. 2004 - P4 2.8 HT, 1GB, Geforce 6800, Win 2000 SP4
4. 2006 - Pentium D 3.4, 2GB, Geforce 7600, Win XP SP2
5. 2009 - Phenom II X2 550, 4GB, HD4850, Win 7
6. 2013 - I5 3470T, 6GB, HD7850M, Win 8

I realised later on that Geforce 6800 to 7600 was actually a downgrade. Didn't know it at the time of buying it though :( As for OSes, I stayed behind by 1 version for the first few machines as I wanted to over-spec the hardware but caught up with Win 7 when it came out in 2009. Win Me was skipped for obvious reasons :p
 
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A 486DX100 was my first PC.

My first 'computer' would have been a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I can still sometimes hear the sound of the tape loading. :D
 
First one I had use of was a 386 something or other? I have no idea what that number even relates to, I guess the cpu clock speed or some such.
 
Pentium MMX CPU, 8mb Voodoo 2 graphics card :)

Then I built a 1.3Ghz AMD Duron, 256Mb RAM with a TNT2 32Mb graphics card!

Seems like such a long time ago now
 
Mine was-

Pentium 4 1.7 Willamette
256MB PC800 RDRAM (later upgraded to 512MB)
GeForce 2 MX200 (later upgraded to a Radeon 8500)
SoundBlaster Audigy (the original one)

I've actually still got it all in a box somewhere.
 
godinman said:
First one I had use of was a 386 something or other? I have no idea what that number even relates to, I guess the cpu clock speed or some such.
Click to expand...

386 was a generation of CPU by Intel.

First, was the 8086 or something, around the same time as BBC Micro, Speccy, etc. Was prolly 2-4MHz.

Then there was the 286. Highest speed prolly 25MHz.

Then there's your 386. Think they went up to 40MHz, but my dad's 386 was only 16MHz... and 40MB hard disk hehe.

Then there was the 486. Up to 100MHz.

Then you had the 586, which Intel re-badged as the Pentium. Think they started at 75MHz and went up to 200MHz.

Pentium II - 200MHz to 450MHz.

Pentium III - 450MHz to over 1GHz.

Pentium IV - 1.4GHz to 3.8GHz (later models were hyperthreaded).

Pentium D - 1st-gen dual cores.

Core 2 Duo - 2nd-gen dual cores.

Then it gets more complicated, like they have i3, i5 and i7 but they run concurrently and you have generations like Sandybridge, Ivybridge but it mostly goes over my head these days as you're not just chasing the megahertz.
 
This bad boy

t3100b.jpg


286 CPU, 512kb memory, CGA graphics on a gas plasma display, oh and a whopping 20Mb hard drive
 
Came to pc's pretty late on. First rig i had consisted of.

A64 4000 s939
Msi k8n diamond + sli
4 gb ocz platinum
Nvidia 7900 gt
250gb western digital hdd
Enermax noisetaker 600w psu
Viewsonic vx2025 20" lcd
Thermaltake tsunami case

The monitor is still in use on my i7 930 setup.
 
crunchman said:
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
Click to expand...

Snap!

Well apart from the extra pc's, I had/have only one. But yes, exactly the same spec. Had 64MB of RAM iirc.

I've had computers since the 80's but I got quite late into PC's.
 
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