How old were you when you got your first PC?

6? parents bought a packard bell. at age 8/9 i had my own business and i payed for my own PC. state of the art AMD Althon 64 3500 & believe 2 Gigabytes of ram ran XP great

i did have an atari at age 2
 
Angilion said:
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.
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my uncle had a voodoo 2 and i was watching a tech demo of a fairy flying around a forest and lake i think, couldnt believe it at the time. I used to watch him play duke nukem 3d, Doom, commander keen and the first wolfenstein.
 
had my first computer when i was about 5.. was an Amiga. Had like 50 games on a stackful of floppies. Parents were not happy with me spending countless hours playing Lemmings, CannonFodder and James Pond among others
 
Had an Acorn Electron from as far back as I remember.

First proper PC came at around age 7 or 8 I think. An Opus 286 SX 8mhz. It had an upgrade to give it 1mb of RAM, a 5.25" floppy and a 20mb HDD - Which again was an upgrade. It was quite a thing at the time - People my Dad knew kept asking "why do you have one of those at home?".

I used to like A-10 Tank Killer and F117-A flight sim, which I recall it only just about ran.

Fun times.
 
My first "PC" was a C64 I think when I was in Junior school, so I must have been about 7 or 8. Then I got my Amiga 500 I think when I was around 11 or 12. Then the PC about 16. I remember thinking the PC was crap for games back in the day. You couldn't just run a game like we can today. Everything was commandlines and typing commands with switches to get everything running, especially with the soundblaster for audio, and the IRQ channel conflicts and all that. The PC was a nightmare compared to the Amiga (or Atari).
 
mid twenties, which was back in the last century. bought a pc with a Cyrax processor.
 
BowdonUK said:
My first "PC" was a C64 I think when I was in Junior school, so I must have been about 7 or 8. Then I got my Amiga 500 I think when I was around 11 or 12. Then the PC about 16. I remember thinking the PC was crap for games back in the day. You couldn't just run a game like we can today. Everything was commandlines and typing commands with switches to get everything running, especially with the soundblaster for audio, and the IRQ channel conflicts and all that. The PC was a nightmare compared to the Amiga (or Atari).
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Oh aye, I remember manually creating different boot files. It wasn't unusual to have to reboot to run a game, either to account for resource conflicts or to allocate the "lower" 640KB of memory in the way required for the game. Autoexec.bat and another file that is lurking on the fringes of my memory...himem.sys?

I just looked it up - it was himem.sys.

PCs were at best mediocre for gaming in those days anyway, even without the faffing about to make games run. An Amiga or Atari 520ST was much better suited to gaming back then.
 
If I exclude c64 and atari 1024ste, it would be around 14/15 years old when I got a 486sx2-50 (released 1994) from my parents.
 
I was probably about 13/14.

My parents bought a Viglen, p2 300. The following Christmas I bought a Voodoo 3. Didn't even check to see if it had an AGP slot (luckily it did).

Quake 2/3. Counterstrike 1.6ish. That was peak PC gaming for me. :)
 
Got my first PC at 18 when going to Uni, was just a crap prebuilt that wouldnt even allow you to make any upgrades. Then built my first one on my 21st birthday, my wallets never been the same since!
 
This was my first PC at 16 years old when I started college... http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3404/Sinclair-PC200/
Used mostly for college work with the worlds worst dot matrix printer that printed each dot individually on tractor feed paper.
I had the white text on black screen, but it also had a TV output that could do CGA via RF though it was always had a bit of shimmer.

Over the couple of years started buying, fixing, selling all manner of 386 / 486 machines for pocket money while in college.
When I left college and worked for a bit, I sold my CBR600 when Norton Insurance stopped covering any bike and cover went from ~£300 to £1500 per year and bought my first 'gaming' PC.

Dan Technology
Pentium 90
8MB memory
S3 or TNT GPU... don't remember
Tiny hard drive
Dual speed CD ROM
Sound blaster
Speakers
15" SVGA monitor

It cost around £2200 and played DOOM without a significant border. Common back then for DOOM to run in a postcard size box in the centre of screen with a fixed border for 'playable' frame rates so was 'cool'.
Near obsolete in a couple of years as tech was moving so fast. Oh to be young and foolish, today it's the equivalent of £4500 with inflation .... Ouch.

My PC spending has been far more sensible since then.
 
Angilion said:
Oh aye, I remember manually creating different boot files. It wasn't unusual to have to reboot to run a game, either to account for resource conflicts or to allocate the "lower" 640KB of memory in the way required for the game. Autoexec.bat and another file that is lurking on the fringes of my memory...himem.sys?

I just looked it up - it was himem.sys.

PCs were at best mediocre for gaming in those days anyway, even without the faffing about to make games run. An Amiga or Atari 520ST was much better suited to gaming back then.
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Oh the joys
 
Sankari said:
* 1997: I was 24, and bought my first PC (Cyrix 166, 256MB RAM, 1.2GB HDD)
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256MB RAM was a helluva lot for 1997. Like crazy numbers and must have cost a fortune, over £500 just for the RAM probably? My first PC was also 1997 and had a faster CPU, bigger HDD but only 16MB RAM. 16-32MB was standard then.
 
Don't remember how old i was, Fairly sure the first PC ran Windows 3.11 , Used to have to boot in DOS to load some games from their CD's. There was a Pentium 2 after that (Unless i'm getting them mixed up). Found a 128mb Flash drive the other day, now i feel really old...
 
I had a
Vic 20
Spectrum 128k
Amiga 500

Then when i left uni, so age 20/21? i saved a few months and bought the bits for a PC from a computer fair. Wad of cash in hand.

I think it was AMD K6-2 350? Something like that, 128mb ram, 8gb HDD, Voodoo Banshee 16mb, Motherboard, hmm, something with a Nvidia chipset :P i think. DFI maybe lol... case and PSU was probably the cheapest i could afford, i dread to think.

My mate played on my mad spec PC and was so blown away he ended up buying a Tiny Computers prebuilt system for about 1500 quid. K6-3 500Mhz with a Voodoo 3... To 1UP me :P Something like that....
It was ridiculous money at the time when we are earning about 100 Quid a week ... lol
 
HangTime said:
256MB RAM was a helluva lot for 1997. Like crazy numbers and must have cost a fortune, over £500 just for the RAM probably? My first PC was also 1997 and had a faster CPU, bigger HDD but only 16MB RAM. 16-32MB was standard then.
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Actually I've made a mistake there, it was 128MB. I went up to 256 in 2001. And yeah, even 128MB was not cheap, but I had a mate in the IT industry at the time, and he got me a pretty sweet deal.
 
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