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

[Destination]

That system lasted about two years until I did a complete overhaul. Funny to think I've had my current core system for 7 years and it's still fine (i7 920).

Indeed, if I was buying to upgrade it would be for USBc/3 and the likes just to speed the external backup processes, rather than for work function.

The first system we had was a P133, fast and nice for its time bought from PC World in 1995 or so I think for an outrageous amount of money.

 

[Haze]

My 1st was a P133 with a matrox Millennium GFX, and think it had 16 mb of ram

 

[Werewolf]

The Acorn was fun, although I never did manage to program any games on ours

 

[SexyGreyFox]

MFM, RLL and SCSI hard drives - who remembers those?
Besides a £5000 1x burner I shared, I remember my first CD-Rom player was a Panasonic and had to be connected to the Panasonic pins on a sound card.
Within what seemed like a few months sound cards now came with 3 sets of pins for Panasonic, Matsu****a and Matsui because of the different CD Players.
And then a new kid on the block appeared on sound cards which was doomed to fail - IDE (how little I knew).

I met one of my best mates at Trentham Computer Fair where he heard me talking and picked my brains. He said that every game he bought he had to have a batch file created to get the sound working at £40 a time
He bought his computer down and all I had to do was change the sound card IRQ from 3 to 5 and everything worked without these batch files. I took the PC back to a place called PC Drive-In and made them give him his money back for the batch files.

 

[Rannoch]

MFM, RLL and SCSI hard drives - who remembers those?
Besides a £5000 1x burner I shared, I remember my first CD-Rom player was a Panasonic and had to be connected to the Panasonic pins on a sound card.
Within what seemed like a few months sound cards now came with 3 sets of pins for Panasonic, Matsu****a and Matsui because of the different CD Players.
And then a new kid on the block appeared on sound cards which was doomed to fail - IDE (how little I knew).

I met one of my best mates at Trentham Computer Fair where he heard me talking and picked my brains. He said that every game he bought he had to have a batch file created to get the sound working at £40 a time
He bought his computer down and all I had to do was change the sound card IRQ from 3 to 5 and everything worked without these batch files. I took the PC back to a place called PC Drive-In and made them give him his money back for the batch files.

I had a SCSI hard disk on an Adpatec controller. That thing was fast, all 4GB of it

 

[jmc007]

Dragon 32.

Operating system‎: ‎Microsoft Extended BASIC‎
Release date‎: ‎August 1982; 34 years ago‎
CPU‎: ‎Motorola 6809E @ 0.89 MHz‎
Memory‎: ‎32 KB/64 KB‎

 

[Pickers]

I believe my first was a p120... I have no idea on hard drives! Ran windows 95. It was an IBM.
Come to think of it, it probably still in the parent's loft! May have to have a look! Upgraded to have a diamond monster 3d card to run OPENGL quake...
Then I built a pentium II 350 a few years later. Wow that flew by comparison and went through various 3d cards (voodoo anyone?)

 

[nutcase]

First PC was a 486 SX 25 that we overclocked (started early) to 33. Then we bought a DX2 for a mahoosive 66Mhz.

First computer was a VIC20 though.

 

[Werewolf]

MFM, RLL and SCSI hard drives - who remembers those?
Besides a £5000 1x burner I shared, I remember my first CD-Rom player was a Panasonic and had to be connected to the Panasonic pins on a sound card.
Within what seemed like a few months sound cards now came with 3 sets of pins for Panasonic, Matsu****a and Matsui because of the different CD Players.
And then a new kid on the block appeared on sound cards which was doomed to fail - IDE (how little I knew).
.

I remember the MFM/RLL drives (from memory one was a more advanced version of the other so one both drives would work on one controller, but not the other controller).
It was weird as it used to get affected by the room temperature.

Wasn't there a forth less common CD interface on some cards? (or was it just a renamed one?)

I bought an IBM PS2/60 (I think it was, or was in an /80?) for my uncle cheap, it was in a huge case (bigger than a modern full tower) with full height drives that you had to manually park using a command!
It also used those weird proprietary interfaces.

 

[jamiehavok]

Xenith 286 SX16, 4mb RAM and a 40mb HDD. Ex-BT cast off. I could have Windows 3.1 or Indiana Jones and Fate of Atlantis installed. Not both.

i remember my mate's dad had like an 8086 amstrad with 20mb hdd with monkey island that took 5mb, if we saved too many games he would run out of drive space. not to mention whenever the screen scroled the fps tanked!

personally my first was a 486sx2/66 compaq basically a gimp 486dx2/66 which was released in 94. but its real bottlneck at the time was it only had 4mb of ram so by 1995 allthough the cpu would have just about managed for another year, everything needed 8mb! tried to get it upgraded at some point but for some reason it didnt happen, by 1997 i had a pentium 200mmx with 16mb of ram, later upgraded with a powervr matrox m3d, asked my mum for a voodoo but thats what i ended up getting lol.

 

[nutcase]

I bought an IBM PS2/60 (I think it was, or was in an /80?) for my uncle cheap, it was in a huge case (bigger than a modern full tower) with full height drives that you had to manually park using a command!
It also used those weird proprietary interfaces.

I have a 20MB hard drive for my Beebs that you have to manually park

 

[SexyGreyFox]

Wasn't there a forth less common CD interface on some cards? (or was it just a renamed one?

My brain is telling me that the Matsu****a interface was also known as something else but I am mad.

Lol, Matsushita

 

[The_Baron]

Pentium 60. Oh the joys of trying to get old DOS games working

 

[Barry Smalley]

For me beyond the usual toys of C64/Amstrad CPC64 etc, my first was the Amstrad PC1512 with a 20MB HD.

 

[Werewolf]

Pentium 60. Oh the joys of trying to get old DOS games working

"moslo.exe" I think it was used to be handy, as some dos games had their speed linked to the cpu clock, I remember Wing Commander (I think it was) used to run at stupid speed if you played it on a 486
Whilst Ultima 9 had an utterly stupid bug where the height of certain things was calculated in a way that was linked to your CPU speed, so key in game quest items would spawn so high up you either had to find and stack masses of stuff underneath, or use a cheat to fly up to them (they were meant to spawn a few inches off altars/ankh's).

 

[mrbios]

My first was a i486DX2 at 66mhz i think. Running windows 95, i never did use 3.1.... Then i got upgraded to a P1 100mhz cpu and windows 98.

 

[elmuzzy66.]

msx with tape deck

 

[Feef]

I always got my dad's castoffs as a kid, so I started with a 286 in my room when I was about 6, followed by a 486dx (?) which I think was 40mhz with a turbo button for 66mhz. This was a good 20 years back, I'm not going for accuracy.

I think the next home one was 200mhz or so, and I think my first build was a....k6-2? I don't really care to remember. I was bothered for a while overclocking stuff between my duron 650 and Athlon xp1800, then went back to not really caring about computers.

I have a laptop now, it sort of works, as long as you keep the screen closed and remember which USB ports work.

 

[TheVoice]

Indeed, if I was buying to upgrade it would be for USBc/3 and the likes just to speed the external backup processes, rather than for work function.

Yeah I've had my current machine for about five years now, there's just no compelling reason to upgrade. An i7 2600 with 12GB of RAM and a modest SSD still flies, only thing it really needs is a GPU upgrade.

 

[OspreyO]

I was a late starter, had none till after college then got a 486dx33 and a Mac LCII.

I started out with DOS, then Windows 3.0, OS/2, at the same time System 6 /7 on the Mac.