Your first computer?

[sedrosken]

Do you guys remember specific specs on your old computers? I remember some on mine, but they're kind of vague.

Unknown NEC model
Pentium MMX 200 MHz
8 MB EDO RAM
Windows 95

That's all I remember/have been told about it. Considering I was 3 when Dad gave it to me... remembering even that much is pretty impressive.

Up until my PDC that I have now, most of the specs are just as vague.

Sony VAIO (specific model unknown)
Pentium MMX 166 MHz
16 MB RAM (no EDO)
Windows 95

Dell Optiplex 1
Pentium II 350 MHz
128 MB RAM
Windows XP

Dell Dimension E510
Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHz
1 GB RAM
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

You guys know what machines I'm rocking now.

And now, for some computers I had at school. These specs will be more detailed as they were far more recent.

Dell Dimension 4100
Pentium III EB Coppermine 866 MHz
512 MB RAM
160 GB HDD
nVidia GeForce 2 MX 440 (64 MB VRAM)
Windows 2000

Systemax Tiger
Pentium 4 Williamette 2.4 GHz
1.5 GB DDR-266 RAM
160 GB HDD (recycled from 4100)
nVidia GeForce 2 MX 440 (64MB VRAM, recycled from 4100)
Windows XP Pro SP3

HP Pavilion XT-978
Pentium 4 Williamette 2.0GHz
512 MB SDR RAM
160 GB HDD (recycled from Tiger)
nVidia GeForce 2 MX 440 (64 MB VRAM, recycled from Tiger)
Windows XP Pro SP3

 

[sedrosken]

Oh balls, I forgot to change the title from what I originally wanted to post before I posted.

 

[timwhit]

Oh balls, I forgot to change the title from what I originally wanted to post before I posted.

What did you want it to be?

 

[sedrosken]

Originally it was supposed to be your first computer, but now its basically all of them that you remember.

 

[Handruin]

The first one my family owned as I was a kid was a Commador 64 with the cassette tape drive. It was later upgraded to the 5.25" floppy drive for improved performance. We also had the matching Commador 14" monitor. It was likely my first gaming machine. There were so many games I would try on this through the years.

Many years passed as the Commador faded slowly as my interests shifter into the NES classic, and then Sega genesis. I eventually turned on to PC gaming and got to enjoy many of the classic games the continue to have remakes made of them even to this day. The first game to hook me when it came out was Wolfenstien 3D.

The first x86 computer brought into the house was a 486 DX 2-66Mhz from AMD. It was a machine built by a person selling them through paper advertisements. I believe it had a 2x CD-ROM drive and 100MB HD. We paid the premium for 8MB RAM at the time which allowed me to journey through the game Starwars Dark Forces.

This machine lasted us for several years. I broke it constantly as I tried to learn how to use it. We upgraded it several times by going to computer shows and bargaining for parts on the cheap. I believe we upgraded it to an AMD 486 DX4-100 and 16MB RAM.

 

[Chewy509]

Like Doug, my first "family" computer was a Commodore 64 with tape drive, later getting the floppy drive. What fun times those were, especially all the hours lost to F-15 Strike Eagle.
Second "family" computer was an Amstrad PC-3286 (i286@16MHz, 1MB RAM, 40MB Type 17 HDD, 14" monitor) later upgraded to 4MB RAM, added a i287 @ 12MHz, and Brother dot-matrix printer.
The actual first computer I purchased with my own money was a Cyrix P120+ based system, with 16MB RAM, 120MB HDD, Trident SVGA gfx adapter...
Next was a Intel P233MMX system (overclocked to 300MHz), and at end of it's life had 256MB RAM, SB Live! 5.1, 4MB Matrox Mystique 220, 2x 3Dfx Voodoo II (12MB) SLI, 3.2GB HDD, running WinNT 4 and RedHat Linux (dual boot). (Note: The motherboard, ran a i430TX chipset, and had both EDO and SDRAM slots for Memory, using EDO maxed at 64MB, but using 2x 128MB SDRAM DIMMs, could get up to 256MB RAM).
Next was a P4@1.8GHz, with 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD (later adding a 10K 36GB SCSI as boot), ATi R9000 Pro (later upgraded to ATi R9600XT)... CPU later upgraded to a P4@2.8GHz (the fastest the board could take), running XP/Crux Linux
Next was a Dual Opteron 242, Tyan K8W mobo, 2GB RAM, ATi R9600XT (later nVidia GF5500), 4x 36GB 10K U320 SCSI (RAID 10), 500GB ATA 7200rpm, VXA Tape drive. Ran XP64/Crux Linux early, and at end was exclusively Solaris 10. (Note: this machine never ran a 32bit OS, it ran a 64bit OS since the day I bought it in late '03).
...

 

[Chewy509]

The first game to hook me when it came out was Wolfenstien 3D.

Same, that and Civilization and Dune 2... sooo many lost hours...

 

[LiamC]

It was Sid Meier's Railroads on a friends Amiga that hooked me on buying my first computer:
AMD 386DX-40
2 MB 30 pin SIMMs
85 MB Maxtor HDD
512KB ISA video
Sound Blaster Pro

 

[P5-133XL]

The first computer I worked with was a PDP-8/L with 4K RAM, paper tape, and a teletype-33 in high school. The only game to play was Star Trek

The first computer I bought was an 8MHz Compaq 8086 512KB RAM, 5 1/4 180KB floppy and a Rodine 45MB HD That was capped at 33MB because that was all that MS-Dos 2.11 could address. I didn't find out that it was actually a 45MB drive till a couple of years later when I tried to switch from a mfm controller to a RLL Controller and found I could actually go to from 33MB to 66MB instead of 33MB to 45MB which is what I expected (I had also upgraded MS-DOS by then too so I wasn't limited to 33MB any longer).

 

[CougTek]

The first computer I bought was an 8MHz Compaq 8086 512M RAM, 5 1/4 180MB floppy and a 45MB HD That was capped at 33MB because that was all that MS-Dos 2.11 could address.

I can assure you that your 8086 Compaq didn't have 512MB of RAM and that 5¼ floppies never reached 180MB of space. KB was the unit back then. The 45MB hard drive is plausible though.

 

[P5-133XL]

Ahh you are entirely correct it was KB not MB.

 

[ddrueding]

My dad gave me an Epson HX-20 when I was 10 with no support or documentation. I didn't get very far with it.

The first computer at home was a 386-33 that I wasn't allowed to play with. When we got the 486-66 my father installed a CD-ROM that required a cartridge system so we could look at a multimedia magazine (Nautilus?). Other than watching the awesome (probably 640x480) videos on the disk I was not allowed on. My Dad is a computer programmer, and this was his work machine.

First machine I had full access to was an Athlon I dumpster-dove after I'd moved out.

 

[Mercutio]

My family always had computers around the house. I remember an Apollo workstation from back when I was a kid. The first computer that was absolutely meant to be a "family" computer rather than part of my father's studies or work was a 4.77MHz XT clone. It had a 10MB hard drive and dual 5.25" 180kB floppies and it originally ran Xenix - Microsoft UNIX (yes, that was really a thing). The system came with these absolutely massive printed manuals and I was more or less told that I had to be able to work it. I was overjoyed when dad brought home an MS DOS boot disk, because I knew that meant I'd actually be able to play games on it. I still have that computer.

The first computer that was actually mine, bought with my own money, was a dual 486DX/50 with a hyper-exotic 1768MB SCSI-2 hard drive that I originally intended to use with OS/2. After I got to college it was switched to FreeBSD (which didn't have an SMP kernel and didn't have binary compatibility to allow it to play Doom, which was kind of a big deal 20 years ago) and then on to Linux (which had those things but not much else).

 

[fb]

1. Was a Commodore 64 with tape drive, first game was Tomahawk (helicopter simulator). I also bought Gunship and California games disks because I was going to buy an Excelerator Plus disk drive - but they never arrived before I got computer #2.
2. Amiga 500, eventually upgraded to 2.3MB RAM, a Philips CM8833 monitor and a Commodore MPS 1500C printer.
3. First PC, I don't remember the motherboard but it was a P120 with 8MB EDO RAM, Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM, Sound blaster 16, and a 840MB Quantum Trailblazer. The memory was later upgraded to 24MB and 80MB.
4. Second PC, Abit motherboard, Pentium 233 MXX, started out with 64MB EDO RAM, later got 256MB SDRAM (it could handle both) and a US Robotics 56K modem. It also had a Nvidia Riva 128 GPU. I think I also got a SCSI-card + Plextor UltraPleX PX-40TS + Plextor PlexWriter 8/20 8X.
5. P3 1GHz with 512MB RAM, I had one of these very nice ultra quiet drives with fluid bearings from Fujitsu that unfortunately had a 100% early death rate.
6. Asus P4B motherboard, P4 1,8GHz with 1GB RAM, it was ultra stable and ran 24/7 the last time I saw it. I also had a Adaptec 29160 and a Seagate Cheetah 15.3 18GB as OS drive.
7 [current]. Asus MB, AMD Athlon 64 3800+, 2GB RAM, GeForce 6600.

 

[Bozo]

Our first computer was a Ti 99a. Really advanced for it's time. I believe it was a 16 bit machine.
Then we purchased a Commodore 64 with a tape drive and a 5.25" floppy drive. My son still has it.
Our third computer was an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium CPU and Win 95. I seem to remember upgrading the Very Expensive memory. Or maybe it was video memory. I also seem to remember adding a math co-processor, but I might be wrong. The combination sound and modem card (MWave) was replaced at least twice.

 

[CougTek]

I don't remember what was the computer model, but it was something I played the original King's Quest 1 on it, as well as a Sinbad game and a maze game with some kind of alien in it. I haven't had a computer until late in my life. The first model I can accurately describe is a 486 SX25 with something like 2MB of RAM. The processor, hard drive and memory have been upgraded at great cost. It was then replaced by a Pentium 133MHz. I don't remember the one following that, but I know I've had a Pentium III ~700MHz later on. In year 2000, I had an Athlon 800MHz IIRC. I've had so many since that I don't remember most of them. Right now, I have five systems and the number of computers I've simultaneously had in the past 13 years varied from 1 to 6.

 

[Chewy509]

Digging through some notes, the Amstrad PC3286 also had a SoundBlaster 2.0, and the HDD was a Miniscribe 8051A (40MB)...

Thinking about HDDs in the old systems, I basically had:
1. 286 - Miniscribe 8051A 40MB,
2. Cyrix P120 - Maxtor 120MB (can't remember the exact model, but 100% sure it was a Maxtor).
3. P233MMX - Seagate Medalist 3221 3.2G (These are the ones that couldn't do UDMA with i430TX chipsets, but worked fine in the UDMA on i440xX chipsets).
4. P4 - Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB. Then a Seagate 10K.6 36GB for OS/boot (Adaptec 39160 controller).
5. Opteron 242 - 4x Seagate 10K.6 36GB Cheetah's on a Adaptec 2120S RAID controller, and a Seagate 500GB Barracuda PATA (which I still have in an external enclosure).
6. Current - WDC 250GB Blue + Hitachi 2TB.

 

[snowhiker]

Timex Sinclair 1000. One Kilobyte RAM and one Kilobyte of ROM. I was pimp when I got the 16k RAM upgrade module. Took 6 minutes to load a 16k program up from an audio cassette player. You had to mess with the volume on the tape player just so or it wouldn't work. Great fun.

 

[LunarMist]

My first personal computer was a Dell XPS 400MHz PII with 256MB RAM in May 1998. I paid about $6000 for the computer, monitor, scanners and 4x external SCSI CD burner. Frankly I wish I'd waited another couple of years as both the computer and scanner were not really up to par. Within a year I had replaced just about everything, and all of that again by 2002 when fine medium format scanners and good archival printers were available on the desktop.

Of course at work we had various computers from the 1980s, but I had no use for them at home. It wasn't until the early 2000s that e-mail and web access became practically mandatory. Life was better before that era.

 

[Mercutio]

I think there's a lot to be said from being able to send a video in real time to a person on another continent while you're standing in a national park, or being able to browse imgur while enjoying quiet 9AM porcelain vacation.

 

[LunarMist]

I think there's a lot to be said from being able to send a video in real time to a person on another continent while you're standing in a national park, or being able to browse imgur while enjoying quiet 9AM porcelain vacation.

In large areas of most national parks one is lucky to get a phone signal, much less 4G to send any kind of quality image.

 

[jtr1962]

I think there's a lot to be said from being able to send a video in real time to a person on another continent while you're standing in a national park, or being able to browse imgur while enjoying quiet 9AM porcelain vacation.

That's the kind of stuff I saw on Star Trek but never dreamed I would live long enough to see it actually happen.

On the main topic, my first computer was an Amstrad something or other with a Z80 microprocessor and monochrome monitor running CP/M. It was basically a word processor which could do a few other things, including simple programs. I bought it second hand in the early 1990s. No hard drive and it didn't even use standard floppies. It was some proprietary format.

My first "real" computer was a second hand 386-40 which I got from a coworker who was seriously into computer games in late 1998. I used it for a while solely with MS-DOS, and then starting playing with Windows 3.1. I found 4 MB of RAM limiting so I spent about $100 to max out the RAM at 32 MB (8 4 MB 30-pin SIMMs). The machine came with a 1.2 GB WD hard disk. I later bought an 8.4 GB Maxtor hard drive, and a Promise IDE card so I could run both drives without drive overlays. If anyone recalls machines of that era couldn't deal with hard drives over 528MB. That machine served me for a few years until my mom picked up a floor special Pentium 100. I bought an 18.4 GB Maxtor and 128 MB of RAM for that machine. A few years later I ended up with my coworker's Pentium II-450 machine. I bought a 40 GB and later 80 and 100 GB drives. The machine came with 128 MB. Later on I upgraded in stages-first to 384 MB, and eventually I maxed out the RAM at 1 GB. That was about all Windows 98 could successfully cope with. The final upgrade on that machine was a "slotkit" which upgraded the CPU to a 1.4 GHz PIII. It was a serious speed upgrade over the stock processor.

Continuing along to about 2006 or thereabouts I eventually realized I needed a better PC. That's when Merc sent me an A7N8X-E motherboard with an Athlon XP-2500 (later upgraded to an XP-3200). I eventually maxed out the RAM at 3 GB and bought a 200 GB Maxtor. I also replaced the motherboard caps when the board starting getting twitchy a few years back. This system served me until late in 2012 when the forum members were kind enough to buy me my present system-AMD A10 Trinity APU, Asus F2-A85V-Pro motherboard, Intel 330 series 240 GB SSD. I put in the 16 GB RAM I had purchased about a year earlier in anticipation of eventually getting a new system. I also put in the 200 GB Maxtor.

As for monitors, I went from monochrome CRT to color CRT and now to dual LCDs (1600x1200 and 1280x1024). As I said in my first sentence, I can do stuff on a PC I could only dream of back when I was a child. We've come a really long way in 40 years.

 

[jtr1962]

I should also add that I have about a dozen other boxes ranging from 286s all the way up to circa 2006 stuff which I found dumpster diving. I don't use any of these boxes regularly, but I made some of them into working systems. I also have a complete "museum piece" 8086 PC with 640 KB of RAM and color (!) VGA monitor which I got when my neighbor cleaned out his garage in the mid 1990s. He had no use for it. Frankly, neither did I, but it's a real piece of computing history. It has dual 20 MB 5.25" hard disks (one of which I found in another non-working machine and put in this one). I also somehow got it to use a 1.44 MB floppy. If I recall, that was using a floppy adapter card which was another of my "finds". Nowadays I mostly pass up old PCs I see by the curb, although I'll take the RAM if there is any, and the CPU if it's less than about a decade old. Nowadays it's not uncommon to find DDR and DDR2 RAM in old PCs. This is surprising given that both can still fetch decent prices on Ebay.

 

[Tannin]

I had two or three Z-80s, then an XT clone

 

[CougTek]

My first "real" computer was a second hand 386-40 which I got from a coworker who was seriously into computer games in late 1998. I used it for a while solely with MS-DOS, and then starting playing with Windows 3.1. I found 4 MB of RAM limiting so I spent about $100 to max out the RAM at 32 MB (8 4 MB 30-pin SIMMs). The machine came with a 1.2 GB WD hard disk. I later bought an 8.4 GB Maxtor hard drive, and a Promise IDE card so I could run both drives without drive overlays. If anyone recalls machines of that era couldn't deal with hard drives over 528MB. That machine served me for a few years until my mom picked up a floor special Pentium 100. I bought an 18.4 GB Maxtor and 128 MB of RAM for that machine. A few years later I ended up with my coworker's Pentium II-450 machine. I bought a 40 GB and later 80 and 100 GB drives. The machine came with 128 MB. Later on I upgraded in stages-first to 384 MB, and eventually I maxed out the RAM at 1 GB. That was about all Windows 98 could successfully cope with. The final upgrade on that machine was a "slotkit" which upgraded the CPU to a 1.4 GHz PIII. It was a serious speed upgrade over the stock processor.

Are you sure you're not a decade too late? Getting a 386-40 in 1988 is plausible, but by 1998, both the 386 and Windows 3.1. were seriously obsolete. Then you wrote that you got a Pentium 100MHz a few years later. Makes no sense. A Pentium 100MHz would have a been a great coffee table by 2001-2002, but not much of a computer.

 

[time]

These are the early computers I had at home, as opposed to used or built at work:

My first computer was the HP-25. It was surprisingly powerful for something that could only handle 49 instructions, but severely limited by the 7-segment numeric display and non-persistent memory. My favorite programs that I wrote utilized the numeric display - upside-down - to flash deep and meaningful messages such as "shell oil is bliss" and "she is boobless" - one word at a time. The latter severely discombobulated a young teacher who was attracted by the moving display, then hastily retreated with a crimson face when the punchword was delivered. (Yes, I was a student from Hell).

I built the next computer from a kit. It was based on the National Semiconductor SC/MP ("Scamp") CPU and provided a rich user-interface experience of 8 toggle switches and 8 LEDs. This is how I learned the ASCII table in both binary and hexadecimal form by rote (long since forgotten!).

I built a keyboard kit to streamline the input, and designed and built (with wire-wrap) a VDU (Video Display Unit) as a text terminal, utilizing an old B&W portable TV. I have since forgotten all the electronics knowledge that enabled me to work out where to inject a video signal into a TV. It's all a bit academic anyway, because it wasn't long before I managed to reverse the power supply polarity when firing it up (it was homebrew and used my general purpose regulated power supply). TTL semiconductors didn't like that, so afterwards I was back to interpreting binary LEDs in real time.

Fast forward a few years, and I snaffled a 'standalone workstation' for home use. It integrated an Intel 80186 CPU with a combo text-graphics interface displayed on an integrated CRT. This was developed independently from the original IBM PC - most installations involved dumb terminals and a minicomputer.

Had to give that one back, but a year or so later, I ended up with an Amstrad (can't remember the specs: 80286 with 30MB hard drive?).

Had to give that one back as well, but then purchased my very own 386SX with a 40MB HDD.

 

[Bozo]

He did mention that it was second hand (used).

 

[jtr1962]

Are you sure you're not a decade too late? Getting a 386-40 in 1988 is plausible, but by 1998, both the 386 and Windows 3.1. were seriously obsolete. Then you wrote that you got a Pentium 100MHz a few years later. Makes no sense. A Pentium 100MHz would have a been a great coffee table by 2001-2002, but not much of a computer.

The dates are accurate because the computers were all obtained second hand. I recall not having a whole lot of interest getting a PC back in the late 1980s when they were going for well over $3000 (that's probably well over $6000 in today's dollars). Just the RAM I put in the 386 would have cost well north of $1000 in the late 1980s. The late 1990s is when PCs finally started getting affordable for the average person. Nowadays there's probably not much reason not to have a fairly up to date system given that PCs are commodity items.

 

[jtr1962]

Buying a PC back in 1995. Yes, a 386 was considered obsolete back then as far as getting a new system, the 486 was the most popular CPU, and the Pentium was latest and greatest. I would imagine in 1998 a 386 might start to be consider somewhat dated, but it was still viable for lots of people. And remember lots of people were still using Windows 3.1 as this was only 3 years after Windows '95 came out ( many people didn't make the switch to a 32-bit O/S until Windows '98 ).

I knew someone who as of a few years ago was still using an 8086 in their office. They may have stopped because as I recall it was getting nearly impossible for them to find 5.25" floppies. A PC is only obsolete when it can no longer do what you want it to.

 

[jtr1962]

I also have a complete "museum piece" 8086 PC with 640 KB of RAM and color (!) VGA monitor which I got when my neighbor cleaned out his garage in the mid 1990s.

Actually, remembering things more clearly this was the early or mid 2000s right before he moved to Florida, not the mid 1990s. I already had several much better PCs when I got this museum piece, so it had to have been early to mid 2000s, not mid 1990s.

 

[sedrosken]

You've all had some interesting machines.

I have a C64 in the garage, mostly because it doesn't work (RAM or PIC went bad). I have the 1541 drive too and plenty of software, a few pieces of hardware (even a C64 Modem!), but I'd have had to have bought an A/V cable for it (yes, they exist, I've checked).

Slightly off topic: I might be getting a hand me down laptop that isn't that old from my uncle for Christmas. It's a Dell Inspiron 1500 series that's new enough to have a Windows 7 COA on it. It'd be a decent upgrade from my Inspiron 530, but the non-upgradable gfx is a downer. But it's a laptop and it's free so I can't complain, doubly so considering I only heavily use my gfx card for Skyrim. Minecraft will probably run just fine on it, along with anything elsee I might want to use. Probably going to use any money I get for Christmas to upgrade the RAM and drop an SSD in.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm only oversimplifying a little to say that laptop graphics are never upgradeable. A few boutique notebooks support doing so, but the upgrades themselves are very expensive and in my experience also have dubious compatibility and even worse reliability. I know it might be nice to game on a laptop but trust me it's not as fantastic as it sounds unless you like having a broken laptop and a choice between only two or three extremely expensive replacement GPUs that were also born to die.

 

[Clocker]

First one: Commador 128 (piss on you C64 peons) with tape drive and 5.25" floppy.

Second one (I consider this my first real computer):

Built by a local shop (PC Supply in Rochester, MI):
468DX-2 66 with 8 MB RAM
QDI Motherboard Trident video card
Western Digital 340MB Hard drive
Windows 3.1

I later upgraded the RAM to 16MB and then the processor to an AMD K5-90. That's when I got the PC bug.

I still remember spending hours reading about PCI Bus-Master IDE drivers on Tom's Hardware and trying to get them to work!

Clocker

 

[Clocker]

Oh and downloading them on my 14.4 modem!

 

[sedrosken]

I'm only oversimplifying a little to say that laptop graphics are never upgradeable. A few boutique notebooks support doing so, but the upgrades themselves are very expensive and in my experience also have dubious compatibility and even worse reliability. I know it might be nice to game on a laptop but trust me it's not as fantastic as it sounds unless you like having a broken laptop and a choice between only two or three extremely expensive replacement GPUs that were also born to die.

I'm not saying I want to upgrade the GPU, I'm just weighing the benefits. Whatever it's running is a formidable upgrade over my aging PDC E2.2K, and to be honest it might just have a decent enough onboard GPU to run Skyrim. That's it. That's the full extent of the torture I put on a GPU. Skyrim.

Even if it doesn't, I'll be fine. I just won't play Skyrim. I kinda suck at it anyway, and I don't play it much anymore.

 

[sedrosken]

...
6. Asus P4B motherboard, P4 1,8GHz with 1GB RAM, it was ultra stable and ran 24/7 the last time I saw it. I also had a Adaptec 29160 and a Seagate Cheetah 15.3 18GB as OS drive.
...

Funny. I have the same mobo with a P4 1.9 GHz, 1 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32 MB, WD800 Caviar and Lubuntu 13.10.

 

[Chewy509]

First one: Commador 128 (piss on you C64 peons) with tape drive and 5.25" floppy.

And how much time did it actually run CP/M or even in it's native mode? (most C128 owners I know spent about 95% of their time in C64 mode).

 

[Clocker]

Agreed. The C128 sucked. Guess you missed my sarcasm.

 

[Chewy509]

I'm a little surprised, no Trash-80's, Amstrad CPC's, Acorn's, BBC Micro's, Amiga's? Or even shock, horror, a Macintosh. (later called the Macintosh 128K or Mac Classic).

 

[Chewy509]

Agreed. The C128 sucked. Guess you missed my sarcasm.

Sorry did miss the sarcasm

I remember when the Amiga came out, that was drool worthy. (and some of my friends had Amiga 500s, and one even had an original model 2000, and later getting the 4000T).