Your First Ever PC.

Encolpius

Silver Level Poster
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... BIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBI.

Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii TWIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII, KÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓÓRCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH JZH BungABung! thrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpTHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP SPHEIIINNNGG, SPHEIIINNNGG, WHRTHRRRRRRRRRR.

*Connected at 28800 bps*

Good times, good times.
 

mishra

Rising Star
My very first PC ever, was 286 XT I think or something like that. It came with Turbo button, no mouse, hercules graphic card - which was not black and white - it was black background and orange text (interlaced ofocurse). There was no sound card yet I can still remember AxelF tune through pc buzzer :D these were the good times. I think it had also 10MB or 20MB drive and the 5inch floppy drive. I remember having DOS on it, Norton Commander and Prince of Persia and I think game called Formula 1 or sth like that :) It was so long ago...

Don't really remember that PC... it was more of a type writter than a PC. My mum got it for me from her old work. However it taught me Qbasic language.. and I made my first ever program = calculator. Was well impressed by that. But I got that PC, when there was already 486 on the market... so not many games worked under it. So I begged and begged and my mum bought me Intel Pentium 133Mhz, with colour monitor, Windows 95 and sound card :D It cost fortune!!! Before we paid it all it was worth next to nothing like 12 months later. At that time, you could buy top end PC - pay fortune for it - and few months later it was worthless.
 

omens

Gold Level Poster
Other than the ZX Spectrum 48K and 128K, our first Windows based PC was:

Pentium 100MHz (the fastest at the time and didn't suffer the floating point integer the earlier models did)
16MB EDO RAM (8MB was standard, 32MB luxury)
1GB 7200rpm HDD (at a time when 500MB was on most computers)
1MB Avance Logic graphics card (we debated getting a 4MB Diamond one)
SoundBlaster 16 (my dad didn't want to get the AWE 32)
CD-ROM drive, floppy disc drive
14" CRT, speakers, keyboard, mouse
LOADS of bundled software - Win95, Encarta, MS Works, Best of Windows Entertainment Pack, and a whole host of other programes I can't remember. Back then, bundled software was an important dealbreaker.

My fave game was EF2000 - a Eurofighter simulator and I played it with this joystick:

skycommander.jpg


I remember having fun with memmaker to get the max base RAM in DOS because it didn't matter how much upper memory you had, it was important to free as much of the 640K as possible.
 

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DanteWilhelm

Bright Spark
Amstrad CPC6128

CPU: Zilog Z80A @ 4 MHz
Memory: 128 kB


mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm


Of course after that comes the inevitable purchase of a ''modern'' machine which yes, like all the others here, cost over £1000

HP M something
1.2ghz CPU
128mb RAM
40gb hard drive


Now I have 13ghz of processing power and 8gb of ram what's going on? I've gone from a 16mb graphics card to a 2gb graphics card!
 

Elpme

Member
Spectrum 48k, oops showing my age think i was around 11 at the time. I didnt actually get another PC until XP was out and no people i didnt use the spectrum until then lol. A few games consoles inbetween tho.
 

Rapcar

Member
yep, my 1st was a spectrum 48k. The best game for the speccy was Elite. At the time it was the nuts!!!
 

Ash

Well-known member
The first PC we had as a family was in the early 90s. I was only born in 91 so I can't remember it but my dad is always telling me about it's "40mb HDD that would last you years!" lol
 

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Nice thread :D

Think our first PC was an IBM thinkpad, can't remember the model. We still have it in a box somewhere, turned it on a couple of years ago and it still works :) Weighs like a bag of bricks on your lap though. It was around 1998, I was 8. Hard to believe it was 14 years ago..

1277126107_ibm-thinkpad-700c.jpg

Specs:

The 700 was based on a 25MHz Intel 486SLC processor backed by 4MB of memory and a choice of 80MB or 120MB hard drive. Its screen was a 9.5in, 640 x 480 monochrome job, physically smaller than the 10.4in, 640 x 480 active-matrix colour screen fitted to the premium-priced 700C. The higher-end model had the same processor as the 700, but a removable 120MB hard drive came as standard though buyers could choose either 4MB, 8MB or 16MB of memory.

Both machines contained nickel metal hydride batteries good for almost four hours' use, IBM claimed at launch. The 700C weighed in at 3.5kg (7.6lb), while the 700 was 3kg (6.5lb). The price was hefty too: a cool $4,350, worth rather more in 1992 than it is today. The 80MB 700 cost $2750, the 120MB version $2950

Yikes at the price! I'll treat it with more respect next time I see it.
 

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Ash

Well-known member
My mum had an IBM ThinkPad. She had it like 10 years ago. I remember finding it a couples years back and checking the specs. 256mb RAM and a 12gb HDD. How did anything run on that?
 

Wozza63

Biblical Poster
My mum had an IBM ThinkPad. She had it like 10 years ago. I remember finding it a couples years back and checking the specs. 256mb RAM and a 12gb HDD. How did anything run on that?

Thats not all that bad really I have just purchased a brand new PC with that much RAM
 

El Wayneo

Silver Level Poster
Lol, i imagine theres some guys on here who some really old stuff.

I had an Amstrad CPC464 in the end of the 1980's, it had the RAM upgrade to 128kb.
 

Smurfette

Active member
Mine was a ZX81 and a Commodore 64 when I was a kid.

My first Windows PC was a Pentium Pro 200MHz
16Mb EDO RAM
1Gb hard drive
2Mb video memory (later upgraded to a Voodoo Rush which never worked on anything)
and a 17 inch monitor which I thought was the bees knees :D

I still miss my Commodore... sigh...
 

Wolvo7

Bright Spark
Yeah PC technology evolves so fast that I'm not giving up the hope of seeing quantum computers being commercialized in my lifetime. Of course this depends on our understanding of quantum physics being improved too..
 

Encolpius

Silver Level Poster
I never played Elite but one of the first games we got for PC was Frontier: Elite 2. I was so stoked when I finally got it to work properly. It only took me about five hours of farting around with stacking my drivers and DOS boot disks just so that I had enough conventional memory to play it. And then I thrust it aside in frustration when I kept being shot down because the game starts you off with an impressively named "Eagle Long Range Fighter" which is actually pants.

I did eventually get to grips with it years later though.
 

Enflame

Member
oh i remember it well i was 5 and my mother brought home the most bandjaxed computer from work. As in the weird one that no liked that was prone to crashing and blue screening for no concievable reason or so we thought. Anyway i got it to run loads of games like i think diablo 1 and a mech warrior game i was very young at the time. All I know about the computer now is that it was an ibm but it was mine. <3
 
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