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

First PC was a ESCOM desktop PC. It had a Cyrix Cx486DX 66Mhz CPU, 8MB RAM (Upgrade from 4MB cost close to £150), 630MB HDD, CD-ROM Drive, 1.44 MB Floppy Drive, SoundBlaser Card and some cheap graphics card. Oh and it had Windows 95!
 
First PC was one my parents bought which was a Gateway (maybe 2000?) that ran Windows 95. a lot newer then some of the dinosaurs on this forum :p
 
486 DX4 120
4MB RAM
1MB SIS VGA
350MB Hard Drive

Managed to overclock it to 133Mhz and put another 32MB RAM. Running Carmageddon with the 3DFX Glide drivers was awrsome, back then hi-res was 1024*768 :cool:
 
Technically, it was a 286 from dixons but my mate told me i should have bought a 386 so I went back and exchanged it for a 386sx20, 1mb ram, 100mb hdd. It was a super machine. :)

It was a Packard Bell.
 
486 SX 25Mhz
4MB RAM
100MB HD
What's a Graphics Card?

It was by a built by a company called VTech, who may or may not be the same people who make kids toys today. Had to get my Computer Science lecturer at college to say it was OK before my Mum would let my Dad pay for it. So embarrassing...

Got me into the PC building scene back in those days, first added an extra 4MB RAM, then put in a Sound Card and 1x CD-ROM, then a larger HD, then built a new PC from scratch. Happy days.
 
The_Dark_Side said:
Anyone remember Gateway? They were huge too. I seem to remember their packaging had a black and white "cow pattern" on it.
Click to expand...

Yup..

I had the Gateway 2000 tower system.

Got the top of the range version with Boston Accustics speakers and subwoofer big 21 inch old style monitor it was massive amount of gear.

Girlfriend at the time went mad as setting it up it took a whole corner of a not very large living room.

Funny thing is looking at my desk now i am still using them speakers for my sound :D
 
First PC which was actually mine was:
486DX33
4MB
250MB HD
3,5" 1.44MB Floppy
Cirrus Logic 5426
Sound Galaxy NX Pro
2x CDROM
Goldstar 1024x768 monitor (CRT)
Cherry Keyboard
MS Mouse of some kind

This was in late '93. Did me through university with a few upgrades (DX2-66, 8MB of memory and a second 250MB HD)

First PC I used at home though was a home machine my Dad had from work which really was a bit of a ******** ginger step-child ...
IBM XT-286 (when IBM introduced the 286 AT they under estimated demand so shoved some 286 boards into XT cases and called then the XT-286)
286 6MHz + 287 maths co-pro
prototype motherboard (with soldered on jump cables in places fixing issues (this was an ex-lab box)
EGA graphics (full length card with full length daughter board giving 256kb) + EGA monitor
Memory expansion card (16MB) normally mostly used as a ramdrive as no emm386 as it was a 286
20MB HD
1.2MB 5.25" floppy
1.44MB 3.5" floppy (required a bios patch to get working)
IBM Keyboard
MS Mouse

+ IBM 9-pin dot matix printer (rebadged Epson FX80)
 
My first PC was a custom built rig delivered to me in Jan 1997. Everything was top spec for the time.

P166 Mhz
32MB RAM
2.1 GB Hard Drive
Matrox Mystique graphics 2d/3d card (2mb)
Creative Labs AWE32 sound card
US Robotics 33.6k modem
Quad speed CD
17" Sony Trinitron Monitor
 
Our first PC in the house was a 486DX25, 5MB ram, 80MB HD. No CD drive, graphics card sound card or anything. I was super proud of being able to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to get 614k of conventional memory :D

My own first PC was a P133 (overclocked to 166 via motherboard dip switches).
 
A Pentium 166MMX with 16MB of ram, no graphics card and a 2GB hard drive. Running on good old Windows 95 :D

Lucky thing that back then some games like Resident Evil 2 had a software mode, so could run it without a card.
 
My first proper PC was an ICL XT with game card, 10mb HDD and I think VGA card.

Then an Apricot 386sx with 1mb of ram (we added a 2mb expansion which required dismantling half the case and removing the drives and a support bar).
It used an MFM or RLL drive (it used to be flaky if the room got too cold) and we bodged a CD rom drive into use towards the end of it's life.


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 hated that.
I used to have specific boot discs for loads of games because they all wanted different amounts of memory free in different spaces, and it got to the point where I could recite the parameters off the top of my head as I'd done it so many times.

I think Ultima 8 took me a day of messing with the boot disc to get working.
 
Having to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys to extract just the little bit extra base/extended memory to play a particular game. It was an achievement to do so. :)
 
I had a 286 with 4mg ram, I think it was 266mhz and had a 20mb drive.

Though our first computer was this thing you plugged into the TV and you could play Pong on it.

After that we had a BBC model B.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom