What was your first (PC) computer, 286,386?

My first PC was a 486SX25 with an 80MB HDD. I remember upgrading it with a Pentium 90 Overdrive Chip and using MS DblSpace to give me 160MB HDD. Yay! I could have X-Wing, Tornado, Stunt Island AND Doom all installed at the same time!

I also remember countless hours editing the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files in order to try and free up as much "Base Memory" as possible.
 
Athlon XP2400, ECS K7VTA3 motherboard, 1gb DDR ram, Radeon 9700 gfx card, 80gb Maxtor HDD. Big 19" Phillips CRT.
 
Freefaller said:
I don't miss having to tweak config.sys and autoexec.bat to tweak low and high memory to get various programmes and games to run!
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Ah yes, and don't forget setting: SET Blaster=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6 :D

I remember when Windows 95 became more mainstream.. and how weird the whole concept of running games IN Windows seemed... :eek:

Also remembered that I spent my entire childhood savings on this 21" CRT beast:

s101gt.jpg


Counter-Strike b5.2 at 1600x1200@75 baby! (totally unplayable!!)
 
The_Dark_Side said:
I remember when running under Windows was a selling point!
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It did make things much simpler in many ways, no setting up autoexc and config for each game, then having to set up each game during start (I seem to remember almost every time) to use your soundcard's setttings.

It's one of the things a lot of people forget, or never realised, that back in the early PC days you had to do all the configuration for devices manually, right down to reading through a list of jumper settings for the drive controllers and getting them right!
I remember it being something like 2-3 jumpers for IRQ and another 2-3 for the IO address,

I do not have fond memories of that, especially the time I tried to add a second drive controller and faster uart to a machine and it had something like 30 jumpers that needed to be set! (it was one of those super IO cards with an IDE controller, floppy drive controller, pair of 16550 FIFO serial controllers and an advanced parallel port).
 
Werewolf said:
It did make things much simpler in many ways, no setting up autoexc and config for each game, then having to set up each game during start (I seem to remember almost every time) to use your soundcard's setttings.

It's one of the things a lot of people forget, or never realised, that back in the early PC days you had to do all the configuration for devices manually, right down to reading through a list of jumper settings for the drive controllers and getting them right!
I remember it being something like 2-3 jumpers for IRQ and another 2-3 for the IO address,

I do not have fond memories of that, especially the time I tried to add a second drive controller and faster uart to a machine and it had something like 30 jumpers that needed to be set! (it was one of those super IO cards with an IDE controller, floppy drive controller, pair of 16550 FIFO serial controllers and an advanced parallel port).
Click to expand...

Yup! I remember having to set the jumpers correctly on my IDE drives (master/slave etc).

The dark ages before PnP :D
 
Intel 486sx25 with 2 meg, then a mad guy at uni swapped his AMD 486/66 for it as the thought Intel was better, ran Doom like a dream and all my mates with Commodore Amiga's sat and drooled. :)

I then showed them the 7th Guest and Mad Dog Mcree on cd-rom, they were gob smacked :D
 
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an AST with a Pentium 90 I think, from Byte, might have been I didn't have a clue then but I remember having to buy overpriced parts to upgrade it
256k cache upgrade maybe?
 
Freefaller said:
I don't miss having to tweak config.sys and autoexec.bat to tweak low and high memory to get various programmes and games to run!
Click to expand...

I do, it made me feel special. Or should that be "special". Anyway, I was never able to free enough conventional memory to get Populous II to run with both sound and high colour (256 colour palette instead of 16!) though :(

To answer the original question, I had a 386 monochrome laptop, not sure on clockspeed (16mhz?) and a 486 sx-33
 
My first PC was.....

A Pentium 166mmx from Tiny computers in 1997.
It had 2mb of ram and a 20mb HD.
Am not too sure on graphics card, I think it was matrox millennium not 100%.
Windows 95.
Used Netscape for browsing and my monthly phone bill was about £200 from BT. :eek: Had many of fights at home over phone line and usage. :mad:

It cost around £1200 quid I think if not more.

After about 6 months I done the jumper pin trick (which was just basically a FSB change/hack) and overclocked it to a 233mmx. :p

I been overclocking since 1998. ;)

Built my own after that.:D
 
A question I have to ask to OP?

PC is classed as a personal computer am I correct?

Personal computers have been around since the 1970s, it was only intel and IBM that homogenized the PC, to what we call a PC today.

What would you define the C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST etc or all the multitude of computers before the so modern day PC called.

My recollection is PC as we know now was for rich people in business or if you wanted to play games in purple with beeping sounds?
 
itchy said:
A question I have to ask to OP?

PC is classed as a personal computer am I correct?

Personal computers have been around since the 1970s, it was only intel and IBM that homogenized the PC, to what we call a PC today.

What would you define the C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST etc or all the multitude of computers before the so modern day PC called.

My recollection is PC as we know now was for rich people in business or if you wanted to play games in purple with beeping sounds?
Click to expand...

I had a Vic 20 with 3.5k ram. Some much simpler back then.
 
itchy said:
A question I have to ask to OP?

PC is classed as a personal computer am I correct?

Personal computers have been around since the 1970s, it was only intel and IBM that homogenized the PC, to what we call a PC today.

What would you define the C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST etc or all the multitude of computers before the so modern day PC called.

My recollection is PC as we know now was for rich people in business or if you wanted to play games in purple with beeping sounds?
Click to expand...

I think PC was probably meant as IBM Compatible PC but since it was just PC my Z80 system qualified as would Apples as well as Vics, BBC Micros etc.
 
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