How old were you when you got your first PC?

[Vidar]

Had a Comodore 64 when I was 8 or 9 that I loved to death. We got a family pc when I was about 14 and a family member loaned me a copy of Carmaggeddon and that was me converted from consoles.

My first PC of my own was around my 19th birthday, back in the good old Athlon v Pentium days. I loved that thing, had a silver Thermaltake Xaser 3 case and a huge crt monitor that was crippling to move.

 

[Cooler running]

Had a PC I could use from 7, got my own pc at 12.

 

[HoneyBadger]

My first actual x86 PC solely for me was at age 16 (just before going to college) so 1995.

An Escom 486 DX2 66Mmhz.

 

[moon man]

30 something, it was built for the retailer time just for a magazine article, paid £1550 for it p111550 256mb ram and tnt2 ultra card 20gb HD, it lasted me a very long time, went onto laptops then as my world turned outdoorsy

 

[Digital X]

Maybe 5 or 6 for an actual Desktop, I vividly remember playing Network Q RAC Rally Championship with a wheel and pedal set, then my nan having a go.

Some white/biege packard bell not sure on the Pentium model.

 

[MeGaMaN]

Remember my dad having a Commodore 64 from a young age which we shared, my first computer was an Atari ST (which was incredible) then a couple of years later moved on to an Amiga 1200 (again incredible).

Dad had a PC which I was allowed to play on (Wolfenstein then Doom earliest memories), think it was a 386? Remember my main xmas gift one year was a new hard disk for his PC lol, back when storage was very expensive.

My first PC was a Pentium 2 (CPU looked like a games cartridge!) and was where my love affair with Counter-Strike started. Think I was around 16 and saved up and bought it myself.

 

[eddiemcgarrigle]

Does a ZX81 count?

 

[robgmun]

My dad got me and my brother a Commodore 64 on launch day and that lasted until the early 90's, I was about 5 at the time. Then got an IBM PC in 1993 and didn't look back. A 486DX-2 @ 50MHz. Did all my gaming on that so I missed out on nearly all the consoles until I got a PS3 and a 360

 

[beachBOYken]

At first I used my family PC to play the odd game, I still remember the sound of that dial up internet, oh they were the days. I must have been about 16/17 when I got my first PC, I actually built it which I was quite impressed with as I had little knowledge of building one. I don't own a PC now though.
I had some fantastic times playing games after school, Delta Force, Flight Sim, C&C Red Alert, The Sims, Sim Tower, so many great games and fond memories.

 

[Nelly]

ZX Spectrum+ in 1984, I was 9, came with a game called Alchemist.

First PC was in 1994, a Packard Bell 486 SX-25, Cirrus Logic 1MB graphics, 2MB Ram, 52MB HDD. Cost £999 from Dixons, didn't even come with a soundcard, so spent another £200+ on a Bluepoint Corporation Sound FX Classic 3000, remember it well for doing Roland MT-32 emulation as well as basic soundblaster.

 

[MeGaMaN]

Remember buying a Sound Blaster 16 card

 

[Kei]

Parents bought the first PC I had access to while I was about 6 or 7 in 1993. It was an MJM 386SX running windows 3.1. They bought me my own PC when I was about 11 or 12 which was another 386 but a compaq LTE Lite/25C laptop. First home built machine was around 2000 using super socket 7 Cyrix 686 M2 333, Voodoo 3 2000 pci and a sound blaster live!.

 

[MatteRB26]

I was 5 or 6 when I for my first PC, but it was a family Commodore VIC-20 rather than specifically mine.
I was about 11 when I for my first PC, but it was a family IBM x86 rather than specifically mine.
I was 19 when I when I for my first PC which I built myself.

Maybe I did it on purpose to see who's concentrating...

 

[keyser]

20, 1998, Prebuilt by a great Birmingham brand that no longer sell PCs /ducks, P2 333MHz slot socket CPU, 32MB RAM, a beast at the time, 6 months later bought a Voodoo 2 which didn't work very well due to lack of RAM so bought a 64MB RAM stick, for 96MB RAM. Quake 2 ran like a dream and I couldn't miss with the railgun after never managing to hit anything with it before it was upgraded about 2 years later with the Celeron 300A (downgrade) with the infamous 450MHz overclock (upgrade).

I bought it on 6 months 0% finance which I missed paying off so then had mega APR over 2 years woop.

 

[LeeUK]

Some lowly spec Dell Pentium 3 in the year 2000. It was bought second hand too. Had built in dial up modem for the free AOL.

 

[bakes0310]

Pentium 2 with a geforce 2 must have been about 8. Remember my first upgrade I believe it was more ram and a geforce 440 card, boy was it amazing.

 

[i-bert]

Does a ZX81 count?

I was thinking the same. My family got one on release and had its successors ever since. Went for the Atari ST instead of Amiga, but the first real desktop PC was a 386. I think I was about 16.

 

[Angilion]

Pentium 2 with a geforce 2 must have been about 8. Remember my first upgrade I believe it was more ram and a geforce 440 card, boy was it amazing.

I remember buying the first home PC 3D graphics card available - an Orchid Righteous 3D with the original Voodoo GPU and 4MB (yes, MB) dedicated VRAM. This was when the best PC graphics were software rendering on a 486 running at 66MHz (that was also doing everything else) and sharing the system RAM, which was at most 4MB in those days. The only software that used the 3D graphics card was a demo that came on a disc with the card. That was it. 1 game (Quake) was about to use it. Or maybe the 3D version of Quake had just been released then. I didn't have it.

I'd read some extraordinary levels of hype about Voodoo in some articles about it. Absolutely gibbering about it. Barely coherent in places. A hype train the like of which I'd never seen.

So I installed the demo (a wizard's tower), started it...and stared at it for a while before picking up the phone and gibbering about it to a friend of mine who was also into PC gaming. He came round, stared at the demo for a while, then asked where I bought the card, then went straight there and bought the card. He didn't ask how much it cost. I don't think I knew, anyway. Buy card, live on beans and cheap bread and water until next payday? yeah, fine, whatever. Look at the graphics!

It wasn't an upgrade. It was a whole new thing. There's been nothing like that scale of change since.

 

[Tute]

I was 10 when I got my first PC, which was an Acorn A series something that ran RISC architecture.

My first Windows compatible PC was a year later, a 386 SX16 unit with a two tone display. That was in 1996.

The first PC I built was a couple of years later, a unit built around a Pentium P75. Coming from a DX4-100 it was quite a big leap in performance, especially gaming.

 

[SDK^]

I started a HND in computing in Sept ‘95 but didn’t get my first PC until my 18th Birthday in Jan ‘97.

It was a custom built PC using all the best parts from the PC Pro magazine award issue in late ‘96.
Sony 17” Trinitron monitor, P166 CPU, 16MB EDO RAM, 2.1GB Hard Drive, US Robotics 33k modem, Matrox Mystique GPU, Creative Labs AWE32 sound card.

Cost me £3k - I took a loan from my parents to pay for it. I learned not to go high end, as I couldn’t afford to upgrade it for about 4-5 years,by which time it was very slow. My next PC was built from mid-range components allowing me to upgrade every 1-2 years.