What was your first PC spec?

Circa 1993

Intel 486 DX-2 66Mhz eventually upgraded to a AMD DX-4 120Mhz , which didnt actually run at 120Mhz though due to the limitations of the motherboard.
8Mb RAM upgraded to 16Mb RAM
340Mb Western Digital Hard Drive
SoundBlaster AWE-32 (That was a big card)
1Mb S3 Graphics
Dual Speed CD-ROM which was upgraded to a Quad Speed.

Ran DOOM , Heretic , IndyCar Racing and other games of that era quite well.
 
Interesting thread. Absolutely loved my Amiga, but when I got my first PC and tried some demo games my mind was absolutely blown. One of the first being Jedi Knight Dark Forces II, it was like a whole new world for me. Then came games like Half Life that just blew my mind. With lots of problems at home it was an escape into another world.

I think my first PC (for school work of course!) was a Pentium 200 MMX, 4gb HDD, 16Mb ram (upgraded to 64Mb shortly after I think), some kind of 3D Rage Pro card I think (soon upgraded to Voodoo 2), 15" CRT. Shop bought. Frequently broken and on the phone to tech support due to my tinkering.

It really was a golden age of gaming. Lots of innovation, lots of expensive upgrades needed. I remember my first custom PC build and the first 1Ghz AMD chip that we had been desperately waiting for.
 
Can’t remember exact spec but my first pc only had 512k memory and I was always jealous of anyone who had 640k! Similarly it was only CGA and I had VGA envy!
 
My very first PC was a 286 back in 1994, then a year later I bought a dell Pentium 66. This was one of the first pentium machines made (luckily mine was free from the intel pentium bug)

Not 100% sure on the spec. Something like Pentium 66Mhz, 4mb RAM, 500mb IDE HDD, which was connected to an ISA HDD controller, think it had either a 512k or 1mb diamond graphics card. The motherboards with onboard IDE ports were not out till a year later. This caused me some grief with Windows 95 as their were no 32bit drivers for it, so had to run in 16bit compatibility mode. It also had a double speed cdrom drive and a 16bit soundblaster which I was really happy about.

The things I remember playing were Encarta '95 and the star trek TNG encyclopedia....oh and magic carpet!

The only upgrades I did on that machine was the purchase of a sigma designs realmagic ISA hardware MPEG2 decoder card and a quad speed cdrom drive. That allowed me to play VideoCDs........I may have also added a WinTV card but can't remember....oh, and perhaps I bumped it up to 8mb ram??? oh, and maybe a 6gb hdd lol (yeah, I remember a friend saying I would never EVER fill 6gb).

after that I started building my own pcs........I remember one christmas I got a soundblaster AWE64 gold and an orchid 3dfx card. That was an awesome time!!
 
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286 12Mhz with 1MB RAM, 60MB HDD. I then was hooked and got a 386 which I kept for a while and then when the 486 dx2/66 came out I was in heaven, and absolutely skint! That CPU was the dogs gonads. Simpler times :)
 
Olivetti 8086, then an IBM 286, next up a cyrix 233 which was god awful, replaced with a pentium 166mmx, next amd k6, amd duron and then we start getting into the more modern stuff, god I feel old typing that!
 
I think my first pc was a 486. I can't remember much about it. I remember the sound blaster for audio.

I used to play Doom and Doom 2 online.

I hated PC's back then because we had to setup the config file for most games we played.
 
Thread revival alert. Before PCs I had an Acorn A3000, before then an Amstrad CPC464 and a Speccy 48K rubber devil.

The first PC I built (for myself) was

AMD K6-2 350MHz
AOpen AX59 Pro super socket 7 motherboard
128MB of PC100 RAM
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP
8GB Seagate hard drive
Creative Soundblaster 16 PCI

It got improved over the years as follows:

AMD K6-III 450MHz (overclocked to 500MHz)
256MB of RAM
added a Diamond Voodoo 2 card
added a 6GB Maxtor hard drive
swapped the Soundblaster 16 for an AWE32 (yes, the massive ISA one!)
 
My first PC. Trying to remember, think it was 1997/98. I had a Pentium 200 MMX, 32Mb ram, an ATI rage 3DII graphics card (think it had 4MB ram or something silly like that), cannot remember how small the hard drive was, just remember it was small, noisy and slow (IDE ribbon connectors!) The monitor weighed a ton too.
 
I forgot about monitors, I was using an Iiyama Vision Master Pro 410 - 17" Diamondtron aperture grille flat CRT type affair. VGA and composite inputs. I remember also doing things like replacing the flat ribbon cables (IDE/floppy) with bunched and sleeved ones because "airflow" but also they were sleeved in bright yellow so were quite cool looking back in the late 90s :)
 
286 12Mhz. My dad purchased it for his work, along with a massive dot matrix printer. Remember it cost a couple of thousand pounds back in early 90s.
Games I remember playing were secret of monkey island and wing commander 2. WC2 ran okay but the cutscenes would play at maybe 1 frame per second if lucky. We used to start the cutscene before school and hope it had finished by the time we came home at 430pm!

Great memories. After that went to 386, 486, dx2-66 and then pentium, which was a huge leap.

I had spectrum 48k, commodore 65, and amstrad 6128 too.

We also had an imported super famicom and a new geo home video system, with 3 games as they cost about £150 each.

I was very lucky that my parents were fairly well off.

I’d give anything to go back to those days, for so many reasons.
 
1998, Elonex PC, Pentium 2 333MHz, 32MB RAM, some 2D graphics card, 28k modem I used with my Amiga. I played GTA1 dialup with a random guy I met online via a wanted ad who was looking for someone to play with (we would dial each other up direct :)). Played that a lot but it was costing me as it wasn't a local call rate :) until Quake 2 won me over, then that was all I played. I played Quake 2 in software mode until later upgrading with +64MB RAM for total 96MB, Voodoo 2 graphics card and a 56k modem! It was flying! and I couldn't miss with the railgun.

me said:
random guy I met online via a wanted ad who was looking for someone to play with
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Mine in '93 or early 94 was:

Intel 486 dx2-66
VLB motherboard
210MB HDD
Cirrus Logic 5428 1MB vram
Sound Blaster clone Sound Card
4MB RAM
14 inch no-name monitor
3 1/2 inch 'floppy' disk

It cost well over £1k at the time, I remember buying a 1GB Western Digital HDD for over £200 in mid-late '94 also - PC's back then, and before, were expensive! I got a good deal for an extra 4MB of RAM from a friend for £75, bargain.
 
According to wiki ... ISA is a retronym which would explain your recollection:

Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.

Originally referred to as the PC/AT-bus, it was also termed I/O Channel by IBM. The ISA term was coined as a retronym by competing PC-clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT-bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture.

The 16-bit ISA bus was also used with 32-bit processors for several years. An attempt to extend it to 32 bits, called Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), was not very successful, however. Later buses such as VESA Local Bus and PCI were used instead, often along with ISA slots on the same mainboard. Derivatives of the AT bus structure were and still are used in ATA/IDE, the PCMCIA standard, Compact Flash, the PC/104 bus, and internally within Super I/O chips.
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