Roll back the year to 2000

Narj said:
Can't quite remember everything but a friend helped to build my first proper pc which was a P2 233MMX. Pretty sure I was rocking Windows 95 or 98, a Voodoo2 and may have even had 128MB RAM (which I seem to remember being horrendously expensive) and one of those quantum fireball HDDs.

I think the single most impressive thing I remember from then was playing "Lock On".

At some point onwards from there, force feedback became all the rage so I got A Sidewinder stick and a wheel Bloody Great fun playing Rogue Squadron with FF!

Zip disks were great too!

Good times, the MSN gaming zone was buzzing and amazingly wasn't full of toxic morons. Direct multiplay over modem was a thing (Red Alert, Age of Empires). Now I'm getting all nostalgic. :(
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That sounds pretty similar to my first PC, a Pentium 2 233MMX with a Voodoo 2 gfx card (if that was the one that did 3d only, I had to get another card to display the windows desktop when we couldn't work out why the screen was blank just off the voodoo :D)
 
Freakbro said:
That sounds pretty similar to my first PC, a Pentium 2 233MMX with a Voodoo 2 gfx card (if that was the one that did 3d only, I had to get another card to display the windows desktop when we couldn't work out why the screen was blank just off the voodoo :D)
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Yes! That's it I had a Matrox Millenium 2 for 2D!

Thanks for the reminder :D
 
malachi said:
Interesting times. You got so much more for your money back then.

No one thought a graphics card would cost more than that now and people would still buy it.
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Adjusted for inflation it's £1660

Still not bad, since you got a screen included and a TNT2 was a decent GPU, only outperformed by Voodoo 2 GPUs in SLI.
 
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My first PC was a Cyrix 6x86 with 256MB RAM, a 1.2GB hard drive, and a 14 inch monitor. I still remember the day I installed my 3Dfx Banshee.

Good times!

:D
 
I love the old ads. We’ve got a load of old supplier catalogues at work which I won’t let anyone throw out :p
First PC was an Amstrad 386sx 25mhz 4mb ram 40mb HDD
Still got the base unit actually, so perhaps should see if it still powers on.
 
Oh, the days of TNT2 gfx cards which were awesome btw - Matrox Millenium and then the first 3dfx cards that changed the landscape completely
 
I know this isn't the thread for it, but I was trying to remember my upgrade path recently and got stuck at a certain point.

486 DX33
486 DX100
Pentium 233 MMX
Celeron 300a (Running at 464mhz - 55% performance boost, best overclock ever)

And then I can't remember at all for 15 years.

I know I had some form of AMD Athlon, maybe a K7 but can't for the life of me remember what the exact CPU was.

In 2014 I had a i7 Haswell 4770k in a mini ITX system and then ended up with a Haswell-E 5930k which I ran until 2019 when it was replaced with the Ryzen 3900x
 
Lol time computers?? I worked for them as a store manager for a few yrs.

Good times but yeh their pc’s were expensive and crap for what you paid lol.
 
VincentHanna said:
I know this isn't the thread for it, but I was trying to remember my upgrade path recently and got stuck at a certain point.

486 DX33
486 DX100
Pentium 233 MMX
Celeron 300a (Running at 464mhz - 55% performance boost, best overclock ever)

And then I can't remember at all for 15 years.

I know I had some form of AMD Athlon, maybe a K7 but can't for the life of me remember what the exact CPU was.

In 2014 I had a i7 Haswell 4770k in a mini ITX system and then ended up with a Haswell-E 5930k which I ran until 2019 when it was replaced with the Ryzen 3900x
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Was the AMD a TBird? I had one and it ran stupidly hot. That system drove me nuts with high temps, failing RAM and a floppy drive that ended up stopping the system from booting (amongst other things :mad:)

I miss the simplicity of cartridge CPUs tbh. Obviously with today's TDPs it's not practical but who knows in the future...
 
I used to love browsing PC ads back then. I don't know why I just to loved the pictures, the specs, the bundles... Very sad I know, but hey :)

There was something special about the old beige machines, maybe because they were such a novelty unlike today where we carry something so much more powerful in our pockets every day.
 
MissChief said:
First machine was a 486 DX2/66 with 4MB of RAM, a 545MB hard drive, a 14" CRT monitor and (I think) a 256kb Diamond Stealth graphics card. Ordered from ESCOM on Princes Street in Edinburgh when I was 17 with the money I'd saved from my weekend job at Texas Homecare. It was £1,146.52. For some weird reason I remember that. I also picked up a copy of X-Wing when I ordered it and had to look at the box and read the manual for a week.
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This was pretty much my exact same first PC, also from Escom. Although I paid a little extra for the DX4/100.

I remember the shop also had the first pentiums in, but they were megabucks.
 
Narj said:
Was the AMD a TBird? I had one and it ran stupidly hot. That system drove me nuts with high temps, failing RAM and a floppy drive that ended up stopping the system from booting (amongst other things :mad:)

I miss the simplicity of cartridge CPUs tbh. Obviously with today's TDPs it's not practical but who knows in the future...
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I have a vague recollection on hanging on for Socket 939 as it would have PCI Express instead of AGP.

So possibly an Athlon 64 OR Atlhon 64 FX....I seem to remember playing Far Cry (1) on it.

Edit - Around 2005 I had a 6800 GT which was PCI Express, so I must have had a Gigabyte 939 motherboard - I remember it had funky colours on it.
 
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My first PC was an AST from a shop called Byte in 1995....was win 95....cant remember specs but Iremember it wasn’t easy to upgrade unless you bought the parts direct from AST
AST is no more and Byte were bought by PC World
 
Evesham micro's back in the late 90's. Over a grand because I was desperate to get in on the Championship Manager gig, and online multiplayers.

I liken the times and the money spent back then to my obsession with VR, certainly when it came to multiplayer with the £200 a month phone bills and the substandard online experience. The barriers to entry, the fledgling industry, awkwardness and increased costs in chasing the latest and greatest gear like it was with ISP's, modems, and ISDN.

20 years later the hardware might cost as much in comparison, but now you get the fun of DIY and a choice of colours:)
 
lokiss said:
20 years later the hardware might cost as much in comparison, but now you get the fun of DIY and a choice of colours:)
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Not to mention the fact that you can now buy cases that aren't filled with razor blades that tear your hands to shreds :D
 
Which was the big, thick computer magazine that used to be on sale, that had hundreds of pages of ads from computer firms. Was it Computer Shopper?
 
Yas786 said:
Lol time computers?? I worked for them as a store manager for a few yrs.

Good times but yeh their pc’s were expensive and crap for what you paid lol.
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so were all the other prebuilt computers.

I had some p3 633mhz slot A, crap back then from packard bell or whoever it was.

I think it lasted about 2 months before I went to a computer fair and bought new memory, motherboard and graphics card.

the built in motherboard was some really awful generic minimalist piece of crap with like no expansion ports etc just stripped bare.

633mhz was pretty fast at the time, I think there were only 2 faster models. but the rest of the prebuilt pc was just dire crap with a fast cpu as the selling point
 
I think our first family pc was a Compaq Presario (can’t remember the model number) but the monitor had speakers in either side and a large button on the front for power and volume.

edit. Actually just found the monitor and it didn’t have the speakers attached to it. Oh. Hm

Fond memories of getting that with red alert And heroes of might and magic 2 for Xmas a long time ago!
 
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