What was your first PC spec?

[wolfie138]

First puter was an Acorn Electron, then i upgraded to a BBC B, tape drive
got an Amiga 500 then a 1200, both of which are still up in the attic.

first proper PC was from Tiny, and i still have the order sheet!
Pentium II 266Mhz
AL440LX mobo [inc Wave sound!]
64MB SDRAM
6.4Gb HDD
15" CRT
3.5" floppy drive
4MB 3D Charger AGP vid card
32 speed CD rom
Epsom Stylus 300 printer
56k Internal modem
Win 95
and a bundle of game etc including the obligatory Dorling Kindersley stuff
all for the bargain price of £1119.00

edit - just reading back about Delta Force, yeah i was a hardcode fan of Novalogic, think i got all of the series. They started to get a bit naff towards the end though, looked like the writing was on the wall before Angel Falls became vapourware About the only thing i played online was Joint Ops, very entertaining introduction to the world of multiplayer, despite my modem bursting into tears every time i headed for the lobby.

 

[Guest2]

Late 1996 I think

Pentium II 133Mhz
8MB RAM
2mb onboard graphics (s3 virge?)
15” monitor
Soundblaster 16
Trust speakers
Keyboard & mouse
Cd drive
Windows 95 OEM
£1000

Came with Windows pre installed and bundled with a demo/shareware CD including Duke Nukem 3D, Terminal Velocity and Hi-Octane.

I had played Doom before on my aunties 486 but coming primarily from an Amiga 500 to Duke Nukem 3D was mind blowing.

640x480 was way too slow but 320x240 seemed find back then.

I think in 1997 a friend with rich parents got a Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo card and fired up games
My PC now seemed terrible.

Onboard graphics could barely run modern games at 15fps at 640x480, maybe 30 at 320x200.

3dfx hardware acceleration pumping out 30fps + at 640 x 480 and looked way better too.

1998 the same friend got a Voodoo 2 and Unreal. 800x600 on a ‘huge’ 21” watching the castle flyby made my jaw drop.
21” was unheard of really at this time but thankfully his father worked (owned) a company that had a CAD team / computers.

To this day the most amazed I have been by gaming graphics.

 

[turbot1984]

It was an Epson 80286 given to me for free in 1989. My mums company were upgrading so i got a 1987 model, 10mhz cpu and 10mb hdd S3 vga card, 256b i think.
I was at Uni doing my thesis, so it was brilliant, no windows but Aldus Pagemaker dtp Lotus 123 and Wordstar!! No more typewriter finger ache.... the future had arrived.

 

[LewisRaz]

First puter was an Acorn Electron, then i upgraded to a BBC B, tape drive
got an Amiga 500 then a 1200, both of which are still up in the attic.

first proper PC was from Tiny, and i still have the order sheet!
Pentium II 266Mhz
AL440LX mobo [inc Wave sound!]
64MB SDRAM
6.4Gb HDD
15" CRT
3.5" floppy drive
4MB 3D Charger AGP vid card
32 speed CD rom
Epsom Stylus 300 printer
56k Internal modem
Win 95
and a bundle of game etc including the obligatory Dorling Kindersley stuff
all for the bargain price of £1119.00

edit - just reading back about Delta Force, yeah i was a hardcode fan of Novalogic, think i got all of the series. They started to get a bit naff towards the end though, looked like the writing was on the wall before Angel Falls became vapourware About the only thing i played online was Joint Ops, very entertaining introduction to the world of multiplayer, despite my modem bursting into tears every time i headed for the lobby.

Sunk so many hours into joint ops. Remember upgrading my GPU to play it with more than 20fps!

 

[wolfie138]

it was stunning for a noob like me, even w/ a pretty naff machine [had a better one than the one listed by this time]
awesome fun in one map, you spawned on an island and everyone ran and piled into a Black Hawk and flew to another when there was a structure to capture. There were people flitting about in Little Birds and motorboats etc, i was just sitting at the doorway gaping like an idiot, , was like being in a film
the great thing about Novalogic was the mission editors, i did a couple myself. some were really good, some were just daft as a brush, you could create/amend stuff so there was one mission where all the enemies were clowns, and another where someone had changed the scrambler bikes to pushbikes w/ a jingle bell. even funnier was watching a pack of Delta Force warriors pile into the battle scene in a somewhat-less-than-intimidating tuk-tuk.

 

[Soupy]

Mitsubishi Apricot MS540 which had a Pentium 166MMX cpu. It didn't take long to learn about overclocking and I was able to have it running stable at 233 mhz ... I was amazed!

 

[Opisflap]

I wish I'd kept my 486 now, I've no idea what happened to it. I had a load of saved up birthday money and bought it from my mate's dad when I got appendicitis and played hours and hours of Dune 2 on it while I recovered.

 

[JRS]

Still have it in a box somewhere - a Video Genie (Tandy TRS80 clone). Zilog Z80 CPU with a speed of 1.76MHz, 16 KB of RAM, Microsoft BASIC on the 12 KB of read-only memory.

Lots of hours spent on games from David Ahl's book (which is also around here somewhere). Especially the old Star Trek game that was on every platform back then, with the 8x8 grids and the ASCII 'graphics' and the marauding Klingons - in my copy of Ahl's book, there are pencilled-in corrections on the code for Super Star Trek after my dad found an error and fixed it

 

[Angilion]

Still have it in a box somewhere - a Video Genie (Tandy TRS80 clone). Zilog Z80 CPU with a speed of 1.76MHz, 16 KB of RAM, Microsoft BASIC on the 12 KB of read-only memory.

Lots of hours spent on games from David Ahl's book (which is also around here somewhere). Especially the old Star Trek game that was on every platform back then, with the 8x8 grids and the ASCII 'graphics' and the marauding Klingons - in my copy of Ahl's book, there are pencilled-in corrections on the code for Super Star Trek after my dad found an error and fixed it

That's a collectors/museum piece now. My first computer was of a similar age and class - a ZX-81 with a 16K rampack plugged in. I taught myself BASIC (Sinclair version, obviously) by typing in programs printed in magazines and figuring out what typos I'd made to cause the almost inevitable errors. I still vaguely remember how proud I was when I changed a variable from the value it had in the printout and it had the effect I had intended.

The last time I saw a working Zilog Z80 was about 2010. The main board in a couple of very old fruit machines that were still in use up until about then had 2 Zilog Z80s. Dual processor system. High end kit

 

[iamwilf]

Amiga 1200 then various family PC's then my first PC was a Pentium III with a Geforce 2. Can't remember the RAM or HDD, but that Geforce blew my mind

 

[Twinz]

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

3Mhz CPU and 16kb of ram.

 

[WJA96]

My first machine was an Ohio Superboard 6502 machine with 4Kb RAM. Then I went backwards to a Sinclair ZX80 -1kb RAM,, 1kb ROM and a case that would have disgraced an egg packing plant. My dad built that for me from a kit. And when I say he built it, he actually soldered every component onto the PCB. From memory there was only one socketed microchip. The 24-pin ROM. Basic doesn’t describe it! I ordered it the first week the advert appeared in Practical Wireless magazine and it arrived 4 months later. So nothing’s changed much really....

 

[DireEmblem]

Acorn A3000

ARM2 8Mhz Processor
1mb ram
Floppy disk drive

I cant remember it having a hard disk drive, think that was the A3010.

 

[Angilion]

My first machine was an Ohio Superboard 6502 machine with 4Kb RAM. Then I went backwards to a Sinclair ZX80 -1kb RAM,, 1kb ROM and a case that would have disgraced an egg packing plant. My dad built that for me from a kit. And when I say he built it, he actually soldered every component onto the PCB. From memory there was only one socketed microchip. The 24-pin ROM. Basic doesn’t describe it! I ordered it the first week the advert appeared in Practical Wireless magazine and it arrived 4 months later. So nothing’s changed much really....

It didn't cost £1500 for just the part that handles the display, so something's changed.

Although prices overall might well have been generally higher, relative speaking. I had to spend 6 weeks labouring on a farm for 30 hours a week to buy my second computer (a ZX Spectrum 48K), with every penny going towards buying the computer. I was 13, so my living expenses were zero.

Or maybe not...I just checked the current minimum wage and it's £4.15 per hour. £4.15 x 180 = £747 which would, I think, be enough to buy a PC that would be broadly in the same position in the market that a ZX Spectrum 48K was in 1982. Or 1 graphics card that's out of stock and you might get in 4 months time.

 

[WJA96]

It cost £49+VAT for the kit. About 9 months worth of pocket money. I then had a ZX81, and a couple of Dragons (32 and 64), then Atari’s (480, 520, 1040ST) and then PCs. My first laptop (still got it) was a £2200 386SX with a 20Mb HDD. Black & white VGA screen and a built-in 3.5” floppy drive. It was the dogs danglies at the time. I think the battery lasted about 90 minutes. Lol.

 

[rockhopper_tm]

Commodore VIC20 with external tape drive was my first computer.

First PC was an Amstrad 386 sx25, 20mb HDD and I seem to remember initially it have 512k of ram, we later upgraded it to 1mb.
It also just came with the PC Speaker so we had install a sound card, SoundBlaster Pro if I remember correctly.
It was the only branded PC I ever had, they were all component builds after that, starting with a 486dx2/66

 

[ODuffer]

Circa 1987 - An Olivetti M24 my Brother in law (RIP) gave it to me, as he'd just bought new. Intel 8060@ 8MHz, 640kb RAM, 5 1⁄4-inch floppy. What more could a teenager want?!

It weighed a ton!

 

[Oz!asM!dwinter]

Summer/Autumn 1998 self built
Intel Celeron 300a Mendocino OC'd to 450 MHz
Abit BH-6
Creative Banshee 3d Blaster PCI

(Still have these parts - got a collection of 20 years worth of graphics cards from an Orchid Righteous 3Dfx PCI complete with VGA pass-through cable to a Radeon 5700 XT.

The BH-6 is still working, runs with a Intel Celeron 600 PGA370 in an Abit Socket 370 to Slot 1 'slotket III' adaptor.)

 

[Tiggymala]

First real PC was a Packard Bell my father bought me when I was at primary school over 20 odd years ago :O

It was a Pentium 1 120mhz
16MB Ram, remember he upgraded it from 8 to 16 and it cost about £80ish I think at the time!
1.2gb HDD
33.6k win modem!

Remember playing Quake when it was released and command and conquer on that bad boy and even dialing into other people to duel in quake!

 

[AyeAyeAhoy!]

Dell P133.

133mhz of pure power. Became really annoying when games started needing 166mhz