What was your first PC spec?

Our family's first pc was one of the 1st or 2nd gen apple all-in-one minitor-cum-computer things. Our amazing and highly eccentric neighbour just gave it to us (me) when I was 11. He worked at CERN in Harwell Oxfordshire and also lent me all the Terry Pratchett books, which he had in hardback, mostly signed.

He was a proper geek. Before being a geek was cool. And he just wanted knowledge and intelligence diseminated. Him and his family live in Luxembourg now, and can't believe Brexit.

Just some super intelligent UK people utterly incredulous at has what happened and now changing nationality to avoid the repurcussions of the recent UK idiocy...
 
My first PC was a P3 750mhz with 128mb of ram and onboard graphics. Later upgraded to 256mb and Radeon 7500. My first purchase from OCUK back in 1999.

I later bought a Voodoo 5500 PCI mac version that i got for N64 emulation which I still have and believe are worth a pretty penny now!
 
Assuming you're limiting the scope to IBM PCs and compatibles:

CPU: 8Mhz Intel 8086
Video: Paradise extended VGA adaptor (supported MDA, CGA, Hercules, EGA, MCGA, VGA, and enhanced VGA).
RAM: 640KB
Sound: PC Speaker
FDD: 3.5" 720K A: and 3.5" 1.44MB B:
HDD: 27MB RLL hard disk.
Operating System : MS-DOS 3.3 and Microsoft Windows 2.8
Monitor: 14" VGA
Modem: 9600 Baud.
 
Eh, when I were a lad :)

The first PC I bought was in a full size tower case, which in those days was about 3 times the volume of a modern full size tower case. It was about the size and shape of a thick suitcase and the thick steel chassis made it very heavy. I think it had been a network server. It had a power lever switch rather than a power button. Big red lever switch that clicked and clunked loudly when used. It was pleasingly industrial.

386 25MHz. I think it was the SX model.
1MB RAM
2x 5.25" FDD
2x 40MB MFM HDD
Magnetic tape drive
VGA graphics card
Small VGA monitor. I don't recall the exact size, but it was tiny compared to modern kit. 12 inches? 14? Something like that.

Cost me £500, which was a lot of money in those days. I hid it in my socks because I was nervous about carrying so much cash :)

I added a 9600 bps modem, which was top kit at the time and seemed extremely fast, and a Soundblaster card. The motherboard was about the size of a tabletop and had about a bazillion expansion slots. I called it Goliath :) I also changed the jumpers controlling the small front 2 digit LED segment display to make it read "99" and told people I had an advanced prototype CPU running at the implausibly high speed of 99 MHz. Quite ridiculous - there weren't any CPUs running faster than 40MHz at the time - but it was a bit of a laugh.

Had that for a while. Upgraded a few times, of course. The sheer size of the case made working in it very easy.
 
Assuming you are not including spectrum or Amiga computers then
IBM "blue lightning" 486 class dx3 75mhz
420mb HDD
I think it was.... 8mb of ram

Then at the same time I bought a 2x CDROM drive and soudblaster 16 pack (bundled with sim city 2000, theme park, strike commander and an ultima game.

All in cost around £1300 in 1994.

I had to sell my Amiga 1200 and CD32 to fund it which broke my heart but the Amiga did not cut it for uni course work :(

It was such a POS PC that I swore never to buy again and have built my own ever since
 
486 dx2. Single floppy with 20mb hd. Think that's when hard drives 1st became mainstream, 386 was dual floppy. All back in the good old days of gunship, tie fighter, wing commander etc. Good times.
 
I found some of my old hard drives the other day. Quantum Bigfoot 5 1/4" drives. Various capacities, between 2.5gb and 19.2gb. Purchases while at uni mainly. Spun a couple of them up. Still working. Noisy old things, but pretty cool things they were. Huge capacities for lower prices than 3 1/2" drives. I mainly used them for storage. Still have some old junk on too.

Not sure what to do with them at the moment. Maybe build a 486DX4-100 machine?
 
It was 1997, and I bought an AMD K6 233MX, I think I had 64MB of ram but I might have had 32MB and confused it with a later build, 3.2GB HDD, a Matrox Mystique graphics card and Soundblaster AWE64 sound card. My motherboard had USB, which was new at the time.

I can't remember if I ran Windows 95 or 98, or if 98 was even out.
 
When I was a kid back in the 90's my first computer was an Apple II with the double 5.25 disk drives and Apple green screen monitor that I had bought for a fiver from a car boot sale. I was then later given an Acorn Archimedes A3000 along with the Acorn monitor and 3 button mouse by my school who no longer required it with a load of floppy disks. I wish I still had those now they would have been worth something today.

My parents had a Pentium PRO PC running Windows 95 I can't remember the specs I'd imagine it had a 133MHz or a 166 MHz Intel Pentium processor I can't remember what RAM it had then a couple years later that computer was moved into the dining room as it got replaced by a new computer which was an Intel Pentium II small form factor PC I think it had a 450MHz processor and 64MB RAM I remember it being quite nippy on the internet back then and it had a mountain lion wallpaper on it and ran Windows 98.
 
Evesham Vale Platinum, bought in December 1994:

Pentium 90
8MB RAM (SIMMS)
540MB IDE HD
2x (Double-Speed) Panasonic IDE CD-ROM
Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM 4MB PCI Graphics Card
SoundBlaster 16
Windows for Workgroups 3.11/MS-DOS 6.22
MS Office 4.3 Pro

Was pretty high-spec in late 1994, but soon superseded by the pace of change back then...

My next upgrades were an additional 8MB RAM, to run Windows 95, a Quad-Speed CD-ROM and a Orchid Righteous 3D 3Dfx card (GLIDE/OpenGL was such a quantum leap it's unreal)
 
First pc was bought from Time Computers back in 2000. Had an AMD processor (think it was the one that was better than a P4 but the spec escapes me), 32gb hard drive. Cannot remember the graphic spec. It had a cd r/w which amazed me at the time!
 
Compaq Deskpro 386 SX2-16 running a hefty 6mb RAM, with a 10MB HDD, 5.25" actual floppy drive, 3.5" floppy, and a massive 14" VGA monitor. I forget the graphics capability of it, but it got me through my school work back in the day. I ran Aldus Pagemaker, Lotus Office and a fair bit of Minesweeper on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on top of MS-DOS 6.22 :D
 
My first PC was a Dell System 310. A 386DX at 20MHz with 1MB of RAM, 40MB hard drive, Hercules graphics and mono monitor. OS supplied was Dell's DOS 3.31. It was a step up from a Commodore 64 and I thought it was the business. Didn't think I'd ever fill the 40MB of hard disk space as used tapes with the Commodore.

Still have the monitor, Hercules graphics card, manuals and DOS but the PC is in the shed and probably turned to rust by now if the battery hasn't destroyed the motherboard.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom