What was your first PC spec?

Mine was from a company called Tiny Computers, I remember it having a 500mb Hard Drive, 4GB of Ram and costing £1600 I’m pretty sure it had a model number along the lines of 486i or 486x could have been 586 definitely ended in 86

I did get a monitor with it for that price too ;)
 
Built my first one myself with some supervision from a mate. Coincided with a memory price surge (huh, like that could happen again right?) so cost substantially more than I'd planned. Went something like this:

AMD 386dx-40
4mb ram
105mb hard drive
Trident something or other video card.
3.5" AND 5.25" disk drives just to be on the safe side (used the 5.25" a grand total of twice).
 
Mine was bought back in 1993 from some beige box shifters called Footprint Computers.

AMD 386SX-33
2MB RAM
40MB HDD
Graphics card was either Cirrus Logic or Trident.
14" SVGA Samsung monitor.
PC Speaker Sound

I had to get all heavy with them after I inevitably trashed my Windows 3.11 install and discovered I didn't have any of the original disks supplied. Amazingly, they sent them the next day, which might even have been Christmas Eve. I can still remember opening those brand new and sealed copies of MS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
 
I had a Risk PC with a 486dx33 emulator card :P
It sucked pretty bad but I could play Doom.

Asked my dad to buy me Arm Ltd shares when they first went public in 1998 but he never did it :(
They sold the hardware bit off and RiskPC was dead (pretty much)

First proper PC was a P3 450@600 in a slot mount with modded cooler that I took to uni in 1999.
 
I saved my pocket money to buy a book on building your own PC from Maplin around '91-92, a short while later my dad took me to a computer fair looking for a 386, he'd almost settled on one when the guy at the stall told us there's a guy a few stalls down selling 486s for some crazy cheap price, IIRC it had 8mb ram and around 500mb hdd. It wasn't until around 10 years ago my dad told me he spent almost all his savings buying that PC, all because he thought I was wanting to build a PC from scratch, like buying PCBs and soldering components etc. He obviously never read the book, it basically told you to buy parts and put them together like really expensive lego, like anyone would expect you to mean by "build a PC" now, but not so much back then! He said he felt he had to buy me one so I wasn't disheartened by the whole thing. It was just after I'd built a megasquirt (a DIY engine management kit) that my dad told me "that's what I thought you meant when you wanted to build a PC". He kept me as up to date as he could, even had a 3dfx Voodoo 2 in '98/99, my friends at school didn't believe me at the time! I think I still have that somewhere.

To repay the massive debt that I owe my dad as far as PCs go, I've kept him as up to date as I can since I started earning enough to more than just pay bills.
 
We had various computers when I was growing up, my dad would borrow pc's from work for a few weeks at a time, but the first pc that was very much ours was a PIII 450mhz with 64mb ram and a 13gb hdd (12.1 usable) the graphics card was integrated so I'm not sure what exactly it was but it was pretty competent for the time (half life, CS, TFC, red alert 2, diablo 2 and the quake trilogy all ran fine, which was all I really did with it)
That PC ran for years and years, the only upgrade it had was another stick of ram which really made a difference! The only time it ever came unstuck was when I wanted to play medal of honour allied assault, the integrated gfx card couldn't run the game so a geforce 4 420mx was purchased. No agp slot though so had to make do with a pci card.
 
Rob Turbo said:
I saved my pocket money to buy a book on building your own PC from Maplin around '91-92, a short while later my dad took me to a computer fair looking for a 386, he'd almost settled on one when the guy at the stall told us there's a guy a few stalls down selling 486s for some crazy cheap price, IIRC it had 8mb ram and around 500mb hdd. It wasn't until around 10 years ago my dad told me he spent almost all his savings buying that PC, all because he thought I was wanting to build a PC from scratch, like buying PCBs and soldering components etc. He obviously never read the book, it basically told you to buy parts and put them together like really expensive lego, like anyone would expect you to mean by "build a PC" now, but not so much back then! He said he felt he had to buy me one so I wasn't disheartened by the whole thing. It was just after I'd built a megasquirt (a DIY engine management kit) that my dad told me "that's what I thought you meant when you wanted to build a PC". He kept me as up to date as he could, even had a 3dfx Voodoo 2 in '98/99, my friends at school didn't believe me at the time! I think I still have that somewhere.

To repay the massive debt that I owe my dad as far as PCs go, I've kept him as up to date as I can since I started earning enough to more than just pay bills.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing that :)
 
Osborne
386Sx 20MHz
3MB RAM
40MB HDD
No graphics or sound card
Windows 3.1 came preinstalled

It was a proper computer for serious work and I was told definitely no games on it. That lasted 4-5 weeks and then I was trying to show my Dad how to play PGA Tour Golf and scratching my head on Lucasarts point and clickers. Also remember playing X-wing (without any sound) on it. My friend had a PC with a SoundBlaster and I was very envious that he could hear all the amazing Star Wars sound effects.
 
16k ZX Spectrum :)

1st actual PC was a Dell 386SX 25 which I fitted at some point an Orchid Righteous 3d card
(and my 1st "mistake", technically motherboard was capable of fitting a 486DX50 but that lasted all of a second once I powered it up......fortunately it didn't take the board with it so I slotted the SX back in and was a few hundred quid poorer.....but I haven't fried a CPU since so ....), remember having a voodoo 3dfx board at some point too but cant remember when
 
The first 2 I used were my dad's.

A 8086 Olivette. IIRC it had a 20mb HDD. Obviously running DOS. First PC games on that thing - Railroad Tycoon and Civ
then he got a 386 laptop running windows IIRC. That was great - I remember playing the original Champ Manager on that

Then I got my own - a 486 sx33 from Macro. Had to buy a soundblaster audio card and CD ROM bundle to go with it, and later I believe I upgraded from 1mb to 4mb RAM. About £200 of upgrades just for those 2 lol
 
Commodore +4 (Personal Calculator :)) Saboteur rulez

First real (kind of) PC was:

Intel Celeron@566MHz
64MB RAM
NVidia Vanta 16MB
10GB Seagate HDD
Matsonic mobo IIRC.


The first PC I built myself:

Intel Core2Duo E4400
2GB RAM
500GB Seagate HDD
Asus P5LD2-X mobo (yep, I still remember that)
Had my old Ati Radeon 9600XT, upgraded to HD2600 Pro when that died. Then I sold that and got a HD3870 that lasted for 5 good years.
 
My first PC desktop was courtesy of Escom (remember them?)

-P133
-16MB ram
-1 GB Hard drive
-Matrox Millenium Graphics card (1 or 2mb?)
-Onboard Soundblaster Pro
-6x CD ROM
-14 inch CRT
-Windows 95

The trigger for me buying this beauty in 1995/1996?

Three titles I have seen on my friends 486 DX 4

Doom 2
Mechwarrior 2
Rebel Assault

I barely booted into Windows back then, I always used to go straight into DOS to play games. DOS also enabled me to mess around with EMS memory via a bootdisk so I could play Xwing etc
 
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