Your first ever computer + an embarrassing story

[acid16]

So I thought I'd make a thread here for people to talk about their first computer system they ever owned, but with a caveat to make it interesting. When you talk about your first computer system, you also need to say one embarrassing or stupid thing you did involving either building the computer, or just computers in general. It could be anything. The more humilating the better. See if anyone has a more humilating story than me...

My First Computer

I'm 28 years old and so I feel fortunate to remember a time before computers mainstream internet. I got my first computer in 1998 when I was 13 years old. I was a bit late to the party, most of my friends had computers already. This was around the time when Warcraft 2 was like the biggest game on the planet, and everyone was playing it.

I spent weeks looking in the local Buy & Sell papers. I had a $1,500 budget (or rather, my mom did), and I remember drooling over the fancy computers. Back then, Pentium 2 processors were the big thing. If you had a P2 processor you were the sh*t. And if you had a 17" monitor, or 64mb of ram, you were the king sh*t.

Ultimately I settled on a Celeron 300, 32mb ram, 4gb hard drive and a 15" CRT. It came with the standard beige crappy keyboard and trackball mouse (you all remember those mice, right?). I remember the "big upgrade" I paid for was to go from a 28.8k modem to a 56k modem... I was a big shot now. Loaded freshly with Windows 98, I remember thinking how awesome my computer was. Of course, I shared an internet line and phone line in the house with my sister, and so I'd often get knocked off the internet. Remember those good old times?

My embarrassing story

So now, before I ramble on too much... my embarrassing story. Keep in mind, I was like 15 at the time and back then there was very little information on the internet. No google or anything. Well... my computer was super slow after a couple of years of using it, loaded down with misc programs and files. It took about 5 minutes to boot up. So I decided I wanted to reinstall windows 98. Now I can't quite remember what the hell went through my mind, but I decided the best way to do this would be to "format" the hard drive by going into the system folders and putting all of the files into the recycling bin and deleting them. Somehow I guess I just figured I'd slowly delete my way out of Windows 98, like a car backing out of a garage. Of course the rest is history... the computer eventually crashed and I went to my mom with a look on my face as if to say "Shrug... it just all of a sudden stopped working... no idea what happened" as I whistled and looked up at the sky. $150 later in repair costs (yeah, just to format a drive and reinstall windows 98... good times) the computer was back up and running.

Anything top that level of stupidity?

 

[Albatross]

In the days of DOS lots of kids wanted to know commands for installing this and that from the floppy disk,so I always recommended FORMAT c:/q.

 

[DaTT]

I did basically the same thing on my first computer. My parents bought a Cannon 486 with a 33MHz in it. paid into the 3K's for it I think. I also deleted windows 3.11 for some reason, very shortly after we got it.

 

[Spoooon]

My first computer was a C64/128. No embarrassing stories or anything really related to that computer (aside from calling my mom at work one day to tell her I got the high score on some computer game).

I remember a friend of mine in high school had just gotten a P90 and was complaining of running out of room on the hard drive. It turned out that he had filled it with porn and didn't notice.

 

[dabuddha]

PC-wise, my first machine was an 8086XT. I remember it had 640k of ram (I think) and a 40 meg hard drive. EGA monitor and of course a 5.25" low density floppy drive. No modem back then. I did eventually get a 1200 baud modem.

My first ever computer was my commodore 128.

 

[Number1]

Vic 20 in the 80s. I wrote a random number generator program and used the results to buy a lottery ticket and won $400. LOL

My first 86 PC was a Packard Bell 486sx25, that's embarrassing enough.

I bought a MS Dos 6.1 brick at the time and read every pages and actually enjoyed it......

 

[Tweak155]

My first PC was one that ran DOS, but I was too little to really remember it that well.

My first Windows PC was a $3000 beast at 100mhz Pentium 1, 8mb ram and an over-sized 1gb hard drive. This was the computer that brought me the delight of Diablo 1 that I will never forget.

We upgraded that PC eventually to a 333mhz Compaq. That thing was a dream machine at the time.

My first home built was a 1.4ghz Thunderbird (the chip of the future at the time!). I remember just WAITING at one point for my Voodoo 5 5500 to come in the mail. Man did that play Quake 2 like a dream.

My embarrassing PC story? Well some time in college they had changed over the way they power the CPU's. Now they had that little extra 4 pin connector that may or may not be attached to the connector for the mainboard power.

I bought this combo off Newegg that came with a HSF already attached with some processor under it (like a 2800+ or something). I sent the thing back twice telling Newegg it didn't work. 3rd time was a charm when I noticed the separated 4 pin connector . Dang technology.

 

[DrPizza]

I'm 28 years old and so I feel fortunate to remember a time before computers. I got my first computer in 1998 when I was 13 years old.

Not to call you wrong, but there wasn't a "time before computers" during your lifetime.

When I was a little kid, I got a TRS80. That thing was awesome! You had to hook the tape recorder up to it, and loading a good program could take quite a while to play the cassette. It was an awesome platform for learning how to program.

Then, after playing with Apple II computers at school, I was able to get a Commodore 64. That would have been around 1982-1983. Then, in 1984, I went to college for engineering & worked with a DEC VAX 11/780 for a couple of years.

Then, you were born.

edit: I've thought for a while, and can't top spending $150 to reformat a hard drive.

 

[sandorski]

Commodore Vic 20

 

[Ichinisan]

Acer Aspire with IBM P150 (basically Cyrix, not Intel and not 150mhz). Horrible.

Maybe I can return later to add an embarrassing story.

 

[acid16]

Not to call you wrong, but there wasn't a "time before computers" during your lifetime.

No, you're right... I guess what I meant to say was, a time before internet was really popular and common, or the modern version of the "PC". I am talking mostly about the time I grew up, early 90's etc. My first computer actually was a mac... in like 1989. No internet or anything, but I played games on it, oregon trail and stuff. I'm aware computers (and even internet) has been around for a long, long time.

 

[Kaido]

My first home built was a 1.4ghz Thunderbird (the chip of the future at the time!). I remember just WAITING at one point for my Voodoo 5 5500 to come in the mail. Man did that play Quake 2 like a dream.

Hah, the first computer I ever built was a 1.4ghz Thunderbird. Overclocked nicely at 1.6ghz. Saved up for 6 months at my pizza job and sprung for 1.5 gigs of RAM (this was back in 2001 or so...that much RAM was insane!!). I mainly did 3D graphics & some Half-life at the time.

Embarrassing story? I built a Thunderbird for myself and a Duron for my dad. I had no idea what I was doing and shorted the motherboard on the Thunderbird and cracked the core on the Duron. Took both to a local computer shop, $300 each to fix for a grand total of $600. I swore I'd never let that happen again (that was like my month's paycheck back then!) and dove into learning about computers. And now I've been doing IT professional for 10 years. It's a gift...and a curse

 

[Wyndru]

Timex sinclair, then I upgraded to C64.

Not really an embarrassing story, but I remember going to the library and taking out game programming books, which basically gave you all of the code and you just typed it in and played the games.

 

[gorcorps]

When my family got our first computer (Pentium III era) we had a hell of a time installing the free games it included. There wasn't any helpful installer windows that auto populate, so the installation directory had to be typed in manually. After trying to make sense of the installation directions that seemed like a foreign language we finally called our tech savy neighbors over for help. That's when we learned two things:

1.) Just because the manual says your CD-rom drive should be letter "D", doesn't mean it is

2.) There are TWO kinds of slashes on the keyboard, and we were not using the right ones.

 

[Kaido]

Timex sinclair, then I upgraded to C64.

Not really an embarrassing story, but I remember going to the library and taking out game programming books, which basically gave you all of the code and you just typed it in and played the games.

I remember thinking I was a super awesome elite programmer when I copied the game code into Qbasic and actually got it working :awe:

 

[Thebobo]

Timex sinclair
Commodor 64
Commodore 128
Amiga 128
Amiga 2000
Amiga Toaster.
~

Most embarssing moment was using the Video toaster for an awards ceremony persentation when it crashed and took 3 minutes to boot bqack up to continue the awards. I was not asked to come back the next year. C=

 

[rayfieldclement]

My first computer was a PCJr. in 1984. It was great I played games and ran programs like Wordstar, dBase 2, Lotus 122, PC-Write and others. It had 128KB of RAM, no harddrive and one floppy diskdrive. Most of my programs came from the computer at the U. of Penn campus. Just great times esp. Wizardry.


My most embaressing moment is posting the Are Playboy and Maxim magazines edorsing pedophilia on P&N here.

 

[Linflas]

First computer I ever touched was an Olivetti Programma 101 in a 1 semester class my senior year in high school. First computer I purchased on my own was an Atari ST.

Dumbest thing I have done was putting a NIC into a workstation while it was still plugged in and toasting the MB. It was a tough transition from ISA to PCI and having to remember to completely remove power and discharge the MB before pulling cards.

 

[JoeyP]

Does dial-up through an acoustic coupler to a Dec-10 on a paper print terminal count?

If not, then VIC-20, followed by a Tandy 1000SX (8088), followed by a 486/66!

 

[iamwiz82]

Mine was an IBM PS/1 486sx 433mhz. I so badly wanted the DX but I was denied by the parents. I am forever cursed because of that

 

[Wyndru]

I remember thinking I was a super awesome elite programmer when I copied the game code into Qbasic and actually got it working :awe:

Yeah, when I learned sprites I thought I was going to be a million dollar / yr game developer.

 

[ultimatebob]

My first PC was a Commodore 64 that I found at a yard sale for $10. I had to disassemble it and fix it to get it working.

The embarrassing thing was accidently shorting it out and blowing the fuse on the system board while testing it. I somehow had a cable from the cassette drive touch the system board... oops. A replacement fuse fixed it, though.

 

[sdifox]

humm. Clone Apple ][ that wasn't even available in my city, my dad's friend in the capital city shipped it to us.

We had programs on cassettes. So I figure I just grab a tape recorder off the shelf. My dad had a mid level electronics distributor/retail store. So tape decks were abundant. None would work. We had to go to the lowest cheap ass car deck for it to work. Turns out some tones were being filtered out by the decks :biggrin:

This was like 30 years ago.

 

[lxskllr]

My first computer was an Atari800 in the early 80s. My embarrassing story happened this year. I had XP and Ubuntu setup as a dual boot, but didn't use XP, and wanted to reclaim the space for Ubuntu. I wiped the partition, formatted it as EXT4, then rebooted... and got the blinking cursor of despair. Oh, that's where the MBR was :^S Since it was late, and I was tired, I determined that was the best time to screw with it, and decided a fsck was the best course of action. That made an easily fixable situation hopelessly fuxxored, and I spent the next week giving the testdisk suite a good workout while I forensically extracted the unlabeled data from the partition.

Live and learn...

 

[mvbighead]

My first computer was a K6-2 500 in a little Micro ATX bundle from a local computer shop. Biggest mistake was not ensuring that it had AGP, but my Voodoo 3 3000 PCI did pretty well with most games at the time.

Shortly after, I upgraded to an Thunderbird 1200 and eventually upgraded the video to a Radeon 32MB DDR. If I remember, the Voodoo seemed to be a better experience, though the Radeon was faster.

Not sure about a most embarrassing story. Most of the expensive mistakes were made by my parents with our first computer. Had a High School class that went through all the ins and outs of computer repair, so by the time I started getting my own stuff, I was fairly well educated on what to do and what not to do.