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

Caporegime
Joined
1 Nov 2003
Posts
35,691
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
An off the shelf PC from "Comet" - not sure on the CPU it had, quite possible a 286, 386 or 486 variant. It didn't come with Windows though. It had something which I remember being like a file-a-fax type file explorer where the apps were located inside.

Then a guy we found in the paper upgraded it to Win95 for us and we had Encarta 95, which I remember taking up 1/4 of the available space :D - A quick google suggests approximately 3.5-5mb of space required to install. So it sounds like roughly a 20mb hard drive! phwoar! :D

After that parents bought another "off the shelf" from "Tiny" - god that thing was awful. Never met the spec requirements for anything I wanted to install game wise, it also had a 19" CRT monitor which at the time was ENORMOUS. The motherboard died 3 times, twice under warranty, the 3rd time it was binned.

Around that time I started getting into custom hardware and a close family friend introduced me to you 'orrible lot :p - he still browses here!

My first PC which was mine and I built had:

P4 3.0 with hyper threading and 800FSB yo!
Abit IC7 Max-3 Motherboard
512mb OCZ RAM
Radeon 128mb 9800pro :cool:
Audigy 2 Soundcard
Dual 17" monitors
External watercooling - cannot remember the name. EXOS something.

Was a beast of a machine :cool:

Ah I got goosebumps retyping that spec out. Many an hour lost on these forums discussion that build!
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Feb 2010
Posts
13,253
Location
London
P2 233 MMX, 256MB RAM and a Voodoo card if I remember rightly.

Good times! I liked the cartridge CPUs - no faff whatsoever :D
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Feb 2010
Posts
13,253
Location
London
Thinking back about these old machines, I now remember how horrific some of the cases were with all the sharp edges. Also ribbon cables, aaaargh! Ended up buying some of the rounded ones.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2004
Posts
20,603
Location
England
Some nasty Compaq in a beige case that weighed as much as a small car. Pentium II 233Mhz / 64MB ram. But this was in 2003 so it was ancient even though it was new to me. :o
 
Associate
Joined
3 Jun 2007
Posts
2,277
Location
Essex
Mine was a Packard Bell Tower.

I used to work for Dixons and this PC was marked up at 1200 squids... cam in one day and was checking the pricing and noticed it had gone down to 620 quid.. i snapped it up for that price (PC's back then were around 800-1000 for basic models).. the next day came to work and it had gone back upto 1200.. turns out it was a pricing error.

Think it had Pentium 150 that i could overclock using a jump to 166mhz.. Upgraded it with a Voodoo 2 later on and then another for SLI voodoo 2.
 
Associate
Joined
17 Sep 2009
Posts
1,063
A dell putty coloured thing running Dos and a modem the size of a shoebox - 1990 (wife doing an MBA with the OU )

I used to play in a Duo too. The Symbolics. My mate Sim was the singer and I was....
 
Soldato
Joined
1 Nov 2007
Posts
5,758
Location
England
No idea where we got it from but it was a 286 running DOS. I used to love playing games on it but alas it got stolen. After that we switched to Apple Macs. I only really switched back to PCs in 2011 and I wouldn't go back to Apple now. I like Windows too much. Back in my early years I was more of a games console fan than a PC fan. It wasn't until I was about 10 that I started using computers more.

Back in the day with a 14.4k modem and trying to download porn :p. Ah those were the days. I miss my childhood.
 
Caporegime
Joined
29 Jul 2011
Posts
36,456
Location
In acme's chair.
Despite the fact that I'm only 21, it had a 286 and ran DOS... When I was at school my PC had a 166MHz Pentium and ran Windows 95.

We were a little bit behind the times when I was growing up. My Dad still has a Nokia with an external aerial to this day.

I remember that I had to persuade Dad to get Broadband which took a lot of effort. He used to use eBay on dial-up and click "submit bid" 40 seconds before the auction ended to try and "snipe" it. :D

Thankfully these days I am no longer in the dark ages.
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jul 2004
Posts
20,081
Location
Stanley Hotel, Colorado
32mb was always a lot of memory as I remember. The first pc I bought myself had 4mb and just about ran Doom

No graphics, it went via CPU ? the vga was just another port like serial or printer.

Cyrix CPU as I remember required no heatsink. I had one that fell off the cpu, no problem it carried on for a few minutes. Realised it was broken so just pointed a desk fan at it but the cpu would just slow down when it was overheating I think.
Basic pentium back then was awful, ran internally at 50mhz (actually slower then 486) so cyrix cloning and producing cheap chips was a real god send
 
Back
Top Bottom