Late 1996 or early 1997 - Bought it so I could type my papers at home instead of having to stay in the school's computer lab all hours of the evening, and really I just had wanted my own computer for quite some time. Little did I know, many of my Computer Sci. major friends would get me immediately hooked on multiplayer LAN games. Warcraft II, Shadow Warrior, and Descent were some of my fondest memories of LAN games over at different buddies houses.
Anyway, here are the specs of that first machine...
AMD K5 233Mhz
32MB EDO SIMMs
2MB Matrox Millennium PCI video card
4.3GB Maxtor HDD
24x CD-ROM
Floppy Drive
33.6k Modem
17in CRT Monitor
Windows 95 SR2
Added 64MB to get to 96MB the day I purchased the computer, and I distinctly remember the tech asking me what I could possibly run that would use all that RAM. Also added a Zip 100 drive and 10/100 3Com NIC, not too long after I purchased the computer, to get it ready for college and the beginning a long-term addiction to LAN parties (I was one of the few guys that had a 10/100 NIC back then and I remember paying ~$100 for it). I bought the NIC specifically to participate in LAN parties.