What was your first Computer?

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Gigantopithecus

Diamond Member
Dec 14, 2004
7,664
0
71
First computer was an Apple IIGs (with a color monitor, 3.5" floppy & 5.25" floppy drives, no hdd), first pc was a Dell 486 @ 66mhz w/ 8mb ram (later upgraded to 16mb!!!), and a 380mb hdd. The Dell still works fine and I still play Betrayal at Krondor and the 7th Guest on it when I'm feeling nostalgic.
 

RaiderJ

Diamond Member
Apr 29, 2001
7,582
1
76
Pentium 75 w/ 4MB RAM... later upgraded to 12MB! Added a SB Awe32 ISA for like.... $130?

Just picked up a SN25P this weekend! Man, where things have come in 10 years!
 

Reapsy00

Member
Apr 12, 2005
116
0
0
Commadore 64 had cool games but the only one i can remember now was defender lol. I had a 5.25" disk drive with it too

My dad got an amstrad 8086 sometime later can't remember the specs at all lol but it was slow.

I sold the commadore 64 at some point later for £100 muhahahahahahahahahhahahahahah
 

racolvin

Golden Member
Jul 26, 2004
1,254
0
0
oh man, I'm having an old folks moment ....

Tandy TRS-80 Model 4P .... the "portable", which meant it was luggable, like a sewing machine. 26lbs worth of Z80 muscle, 128k RAM (Dual bank 64k), two (count'em!) SSDD 5.25" floppy drives and an internal 300 BAUD modem. Had to love those Verbatim floppies - you could punch out the side with a single hole punch and use the back side for more storage

Man I loved that computer. $1800 bucks worth that I paid $75/month on a bank note for .. mowed yards, worked at Wal-Mart, etc to pay for that .. had it before I ever had a car
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
80,287
17,079
136
First system we ever had was an EMpac word processor. I have no clue what the specs were, but it had to boot the OS from a floppy.

First x86 compatible was a 386-25, either 2 or 4 MB of RAM, 40 MB hard drive and a lone 5.25" floppy. Also a Half-meg trident video card.
We found a guy who knew how to upgrade and slowly moved to a 386-40 then a 486-100. We added CD drives, RAM, a couple different soundblaster cards and peripherals. (Printer, mouse, modem). All lots of fun and very expensive.
Then one day my dad came home with a Packard Bell. Pentium 100 and Windows 95. My mom sh!t when she found out it cost 2 grand.

The first I built for myself was a generic case, Thunderbird 1Ghz. I think I started with 128MB of RAM. Radeon 64MB VIVO. Sound Blaster PCI 512.
Never built a whole new system since. Have upgraded everything (one component at a time) at least 3 generations.

 

t3h l337 n3wb

Platinum Member
Apr 22, 2005
2,698
0
76
Some POS Compaq, my dad bought it when I was like 6-7. I played Chessmaster and browsed the internet on it, until I somehow fried the hard drive -_-;
 

dunkster

Golden Member
Nov 13, 1999
1,473
0
0
I bought an Apple - but it was dead-in-the-box. Many Apples were at that time.

Took it back and bought an Osborne Portable PC. Zylog Z80 cpu with dual floppies in a one-piece molded housing. No modem. Those were the DOS days, and I used that 'system' to write a BASIC customer database program for my regional sales office.

Those were the days - HDs were rare, small, slow, unreliable and extremely expensive by todays standards. A 'large' hard drive was several hundred kilobytes. Gigabyte-sized hard drives were not commercially available until about a year later.

We've come a long way, baby!
 

tiap

Senior member
Mar 22, 2001
572
0
0
First computer was a Radio Shack in 1980? with cassette drive for data
First PC was an ibm pc 8068 mid eighties
 

heartsurgeon

Diamond Member
Aug 18, 2001
4,260
0
0
actually, before i purchased the ibm pc, i had been using minicomputers for years, including the
PDP-5

i really cut my teeth on the old Data General Supernova....(my dad bought machine serial number 2)

them was the good old days...
 

tiap

Senior member
Mar 22, 2001
572
0
0
Originally posted by: corkyg
IBM PC - first model - 5.25.DD drives, 2 MB RAM, and a green mono monitor. I didn't buy it - it was issued to me in the spring of 1981.

The first machine we bought for home use as an Atari 800. Long ago and far away!

2meg of ram in 1981 then was like 20gig would be today. Back then I bought a full length add in memory card from Quadram to boost the ram to 640k and it cost $500.00

 

Painman

Diamond Member
Feb 27, 2000
3,728
29
86
I guess I'm the only one who got started on a Coleco ADAM... ours caught on fire like most of 'em did. Took it back and got a C64.

First PC of my own was a Gateway 486-33 with 4 MB and a 250 MB drive, 1993.

Hard to say when I built my first, I recycle a lot of stuff. First CPU/mobo swap was early 1998, ABIT AX5 and a P233 I oc'ed to 262.

First time I oc'ed anything was a year earlier, my Diamond Monster 3D to a blazing 66 MHz
 

Jeff7181

Lifer
Aug 21, 2002
18,368
11
81
It was made by BSR... it was a 386SX at 16 MHz with an 80 MB hard drive and 2 MB of RAM.

First computer I built myself was a 166 MHz K6 with a Biostar motherboard and 96 MB of RAM I believe. Had a 1.8 GB hard drive IIRC.
 

Arcanedeath

Platinum Member
Jan 29, 2000
2,822
1
76
The first computer I used was an Atari 800 w/ 5.25" floppy and the cartridges for the games, we had it hooked up to our 6 1/2' sony bigscreen in the basment, its still in service to this day plays donky kong and some space invaders like game my little cousins still love.

The first PC I used was an IBM XT clone w/ a 40meg MFM or ESDI (I can't remember) HDD a monochrome screen, some trident video card and about 1meg of ram (it was upgraded to that later I don't remember what it started with) and a 5.25" + 3.5" floppy combo drive (also a later upgrade) it ran dos 2.8 something and was later upgraded to dos 6.0, thing still works to this day (last tested about a year ago to pull some old finical data), but it's currently in storage.

The first PC I personaly owned was a no name Pentium 90 overclocked to 120 w/ a 2 meg S3 graphics card and a 2 meg Orchid 3d card based on the voodoo 1 chipsest for 3d along w/ 64meg of 60ns EDO memory, and a 1.2gig WD HDD (the HDD still works ) based on Win95A

The first PC I personaly built was a Celeron 333A @ 550 on a Gainward BX motherboard w/ a slocket and a golden orb HSF, (yes Gainward used to make motherboards ) I also had an AWE64 gold and a Diamond Viper 550 TNT 1 card w/ 16megs (only cost $80 for a top of the line TNT graphics card back then Man do I miss those days! ) + a 17" Mag CRT that would go up to 1024x768 @ 85hz, That display lasted around 12 years.
 

wisdomtooth

Golden Member
Dec 21, 2004
1,155
0
0
Originally posted by: tiap
Originally posted by: corkyg
IBM PC - first model - 5.25.DD drives, 2 MB RAM, and a green mono monitor. I didn't buy it - it was issued to me in the spring of 1981.

The first machine we bought for home use as an Atari 800. Long ago and far away!

2meg of ram in 1981 then was like 20gig would be today. Back then I bought a full length add in memory card from Quadram to boost the ram to 640k and it cost $500.00

Back then, the IBM version of MS-DOS ("PC-DOS") could only address up to 640K. Unless Corkyg was running some other OS (like various versions of UNIX), 2MB was not feasible on the IBM-PC.

It wasn't until much later versions of DOS when memory beyond 640K was supported..
 

Basie

Senior member
Feb 11, 2001
634
0
71
My son who became a Computer Tech in the mid 90's got me a Compaq 233 Desktop with LPX form factor and a HP-695 Deskjet Printer at the end of 98. In about a year I built my own using
a Fong Kai Mini Tower with Asus P3v4x and a Pentium III 600EB. Within a month I got a
Abit BE6-II and Pentium III 700E which I promptly and easily overclocked to 980. Had that until the Abit crapped out and got a MSI BX Master which I still have as a backup Computer.
I was about 60 yrs old at the time and needed a Hobby. Been hooked ever since.
 

cjbee

Member
Mar 11, 2005
125
0
0
Intel Pentium 2 with MMX @ 233Mhz
ASUS P2L97 AGP Motherboard
64MB Generic RAM
4.7GB Generic Hard Drive
Creative CD-ROM Drive
TNT2 M64 32MB Video Card

Paid about $3000 for this beast 6 or 7 years ago.
 

HamburgerBoy

Lifer
Apr 12, 2004
27,111
318
126
The oldest I've ever used, and I unfortunately don't know much about it.

Pentium MMX 90Mhz
8MB SDRAM
2GB Hard Drive

The oldest I've ever owned 100%.

Pentium III 750Mhz
128MB SDRAM
Western Digital 4GB Hard Drive
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 8MB
KME 230 Watt Power Supply
 

CraigRT

Lifer
Jun 16, 2000
31,440
5
0
IBM PS/1

286/8MHz
3.5" only, no 5.25! (way high tech)
40meg hard drive
512k video
2400 baud modem
256 color display

ah yes, those were the days.
 

jimmyj68

Senior member
Mar 18, 2004
573
0
0
The Timex Sinclair sounds like what I had in the early 80's, Bought it at the Navy Exchange. Some how I thought (or think) it was foreign made - at any rate you had to program it with basic on audio cassettes and "view" it on your TV (black and white). After playing with it for a while and doing everything you could do, I laid it aside for a while and then "disassembled" it to see what the innards looked like. My first computer computer was a Gateway bought in 1987.
 

mauiblue

Senior member
Aug 8, 2004
652
1
81
My first PC was a Commodore 64 that I played a few games with. In the early 90's I bought a Radio Shack laptop that had 40 megabyte hard drive and ran on DOS. Then in 1999 I got a Dell Dimension XPR 400 which is still running. I upgraded the Dell with a Powerleap CPU (1.5 GHz) and two WD hard drives.
 
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