Your first real PC?

Brk · Post by **Brk** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:11 pm

By "real" I mean a PC in the conventional sense/architecture, not like the old Tandy all-in-one keyboard computers (which I had).

I got my first "real" PC in August of 1995, as a reward for getting a 4.0 GPA my first year in college. It was a Compaq Presario (can't recall the series number) beigebox with the following specs:

- 75 MHz Pentium
- 8 MB RAM (eventually upgraded to 48 MB)
- 1 MB VRAM (upgradeable to 2 MB, which I did)
- 700 MB hard drive
- Integrated video/audio
- 4x CD-ROM
- 33.6 kbps modem
- 14" VGA monitor with side-mounted speakers

It came with Windows 3.1 pre-installed, but had a upgrade coupon for Windows 95. Man, I was kickin' it, running 1024x768 on a 14" monitor (LOL) and wowed all my dormmates with Myst and some detective game I got off someone. I was the shizzle until another guy I knew got a 100 MHz Acer machine a few weeks later...

Zilog B · Post by **Zilog B** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:14 pm

My first was an AST 386, 25 mhz, with 4mb ram and like a 300mb hard drive I think. Win 3.0 on it. I used it to play X-com like a mofo!

Ghosthunter · Post by **Ghosthunter** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:14 pm

first computer was an 80286...and I cannot even remember the stats....think I was 11 years old

Annalysa · Post by **Annalysa** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:24 pm

I had a 486 something back in 94ish, The first computer i bought was a packard bell that still works in 95 p75 or something

thepieman · Post by **thepieman** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:26 pm

My First Computer was in 1987 8086 XT /64k Ram/ 2 Floppies/No Hard Disk drive/Green Mono Monitor

I later upgraded to 256K of ram and a 20MB MFM drive and added a 2400 baud modem/and EGA video. I was 3l33t.
I ran my first pirate BBS on that system "The P.I.T.S."

tao_jones · Post by **tao_jones** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:31 pm

I had an Mac Performa 636 in 94
66 Mhz Proc
500 MB HD
not sure about the Ram and Vid Ram
External Modem 36.6 (Super Pimp)
4x CD-Rom
15" monitor

mccoffee · Post by **mccoffee** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:32 pm

first computer was a mac notebook it's about a 386 equalvant fist pc was compaq 200mhz with one pci slot rofl

Cypher · Post by **Cypher** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:37 pm

I had an old IBM back in the early 80's.
Than I had an Acer 486 a few years back.

The Dude · Post by **The Dude** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:38 pm

I had a loner from work an AST bravo something like what schlurpee posted.
When they upgraded all the PC's they auctioned off all the old systems. For 25 bucks I got a Dell Onmiplex DX2 66 with 4 megs of ram and an onboard mach 32 ATI video that had 2 megs of ram. A 200 meg hard drive, keyboard, mouse and a Dell 15 inch monitor. I think that was in 1996, 97, can't remember. I put a Pentium over drive in it to bump it to a DX4-120, and eventually maxed out the ram to 128 megs, lol 72 pin simms. It's still in use, I gave it to my step daughter to use when I got what I have now. My step daughter got a new system last christmas so I gave it to my sisters to play with. They use it for web browsing and Hot-mail. It's the first PC for them so they really don't know how slow it really is. It's running windows 95, lol. I'll probably get it back when they buy a new PC some time next year.

Brent · Post by **Brent** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:38 pm

Our first real computer we got in the house was when I was in 6th grade, so um like 1992?

It was a Packard Bell 386sx at 16MHz with 1MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive with a 14" VGA monitor, had a five and a quarter inch floppy drive and a three point five inch floppy drive, i believe it also had a sound blaster sound card. It had DOS (forgot the version) and Windows 3.0. Also had a 2400 baud modem and a dot matrix printer. With only 1MB of RAM windows would only work in black and white, no color, later we upgraded it to 4MB of RAM. So most of the stuff I did was in DOS, that is the computer I frst played Civilization on, and Oregon Trail. That is the computer that got me into computers, when I saw the guy upgrade the RAM from 1MB to 4MB and saw the benefits I knew right then and there that is what I wanted to do. So I started studying everything I could about computers, read magazines, books etc. That was also the computer I first dabbled in online stuff, starting with BBS's and the first service I used was Compuserve, later we switched to AOL, which back then was actually good. I didn't end up using a real ISP until about 1996 when I moved to NC and then really got into the Internet.

JawZ · Post by **JawZ** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:04 pm

1986...it was a Compaq Deskpro 386. Don't remeber specs but they were like this: Floppy and 5 1/4 drives....a 40MB HDD, I think, and some other cool stuff.

I've pretty much had every computer type since the TRS-80 including ones from Apple.

Unholy · Post by **Unholy** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:17 pm

1992, IBM 486/DX came with a bad @ss ribbon printer took shook the desk when it was printing.

koldchillah · Post by **koldchillah** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:19 pm

well since the Radio Shack TRS-80 doesn't count, I'd have to say freshman year of high school my parents bought me a 486DX2 (early '94).

full specs:

486DX2 66MHz
8MB RAM
720MB Western Digital Hard drive (most people only had 420MB at the time)
original Sound Blaster 16 ISA card
double speed CD-ROM (ooooohhh... aaaaahhhh)
2MB old school graphics card, ( I wanna say it was a Trident card for a VESA slot)
14" monitor
Canon Bubblejet 4000 printer.. (what a hunk of junk that turned out to be)

OS: DOS, XTreeGold, & Win3.11

after primarily serving as a $3000 video game system to play DOOM with, I finally got a little more serious by the end of high school. Senior year (96/97) my parents let me build my own computer out of parts purchased at a computer trade show, so my first "self-built" PC was a Pentium 200mmx w/ 64MB EDO RAM, 2.1GB hard drive, Diamond 4MB stealth graphics & 10 speed CD-ROM. Building that thing took me like a month b/c I only "thought" I knew what I was doing and had to learn several things the hard way..

Once I got up to college, that little 200mx ran like a champ and by early '98 I had already slapped a 5.1GB hard drive in it, and filled the sucker with these new type of audio files known as .MP3's which were purely ripped from CD's myself.. no downloading yet.. and in mid '98 I bought a $500 DVD-ROM drive from Creative Labs just so a bunch of us young/dumb college kids could sit in a dark fogged out room and watch 1 of about 60 or so DVD titles that had been released. Suddenly about 6 months later they upped the quality of DVD production and my primitive DVD encoder couldn't keep up.

man, has technology come along way or what!? Gotta love Moore's law..

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:23 pm

1988 IBM model 70

25mhz 386
8 megs of RAM
30 MB hard drive
3.5 floppy
DOS 5.0 and Win 3.1

Joint Chiefs of Staff · Fri May 21, 2004 1:49 pm

A Dell

P3 700mhz

I did have company laptops before that since 94'.

p2ii · Post by **p2ii** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:21 pm

'92 I think. It was a Zenith clone of an IBM 8088. M/S Dos 2.0 I believe and a 13in. monochrome. I used to rip it up playing Zaxxon on that joint. Anyway, I got it second hand from my uncle.

MadDoctor · Post by **MadDoctor** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:22 pm

Sperry PC Micro IT
Year of production: 1981
Processore (CPU): 8086
Speed CPU: 6, 7,16, 8 Mhz
Bit registry: 16 bit
Expandible to: 3,500.00 Kb.
Hard Disk: 0 or 20 MB
FDD: 1 or 2 x 5.25"FDD

twwabw · Post by **twwabw** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:27 pm

8086, and an Apple IIC ( 2 disk drives

). Then a Compaq 286. Then in '91 or so a 386 SX-20, and I spring the big $$ for 3 MB total Ram !! wow!

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:55 pm

Atari 1040 ST(few Apples before that, the mono green screen kind). The 1040 had a whole meg of ram! Whooo! Amazing MIDI capabilities too. Pseudo-networking ability, could play against other comps using the MIDI ports(Falcon was a blast). Then I got a Mac....then I found the 'net and it was over from that point on. BBSs and e-world, AOHELL.....guess I've been mucking thru the e-universe for about 15-16 years. 300 baud analog modem < 3.0mbit DSL connect ya know?

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Fri May 21, 2004 4:58 pm

An Epson 8086. Monochrome monitor. Can't remember anything else other than it would run a spreadsheet program.

Croc · Post by **Croc** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:32 pm

An Ipex 386 running W3.11.
Still have all the floppy disks and if I searched, all the manuals.
The computer is landfill.

Croc.

fastchevy · Post by **fastchevy** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:36 pm

Very first computer was an Apple IIe

I still have the first PC I bought for myself.
IBM Aptiva 350mhz, runs like a champ use it quite abit to update my website and have never replaced a single thing in it.

ghost · Post by **ghost** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:44 pm

Some IBM clone with an 8088 processor, can't remember any other specs other than the 5-1/4" floppy.

Blisster · Post by **Blisster** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:26 pm

some crappy 386 with no sound and windows 3.1

RoscoPColtrane · Post by **RoscoPColtrane** » Fri May 21, 2004 6:40 pm

OH man our first one was a BAD AZZ set up for the time! My dad went all out on this thing. I think it was like in 94 or something...anyway it was a 25mhz 486 with 8meg of ram, a 512 hdd, and the CDROMS had just come out...i think it was 4x or something...

running win 3.1

apd153 · Post by **apd153** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:00 pm

First home system was an IBM clone 286. I used to love playing Star Flight 2. First one I ever built for myself was in 1996. Put together a Pentium 133MHz for college.

Spammy · Post by **Spammy** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:01 pm

Commodore 64

Izzo · Post by **Izzo** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:04 pm

4-5 years ago ...gateway 500 PIII .....all i did was play games and look at my fantasy football scores ... didn't really get into things until just over a year ago

ScottE · Post by **ScottE** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:07 pm

Apple IIgs

Blisster · Post by **Blisster** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:19 pm

Spammy wrote:Commodore 64

well if you're gonna pull that out, mine was a Texas Insturments TI 35 i think. Then I got a TRS-80 Color Computer. It had 64k of RAM and ran Extended Color Basic!!!

thepieman · Post by **thepieman** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 9:02 pm

Hyundai 8086
Dual 1.2MB Flopppies
64Kb memory
Built in Mono Monitor and mono Video Card
Dos (I forgot what version!)

Back in 1987

Rivas · Post by **Rivas** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 10:27 pm

my first one was 386SX 40mhz 4mb ram voodoo2 video with 2or 4mb of memory ..thats all what i remember

fastspaz · Post by **fastspaz** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:06 pm

1992...

486sx w/ 25mhz processor
300mb hard drive
14 inch monitor
windows 3.11
no soundcard, no cd rom drive, not much of anything but a box and a monitor to play solitaire and write letters to friends when i was 11 or 12... hahaha

Shinobi · Post by **Shinobi** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:47 pm

Well... lets see...

I was going to say my happy ol' Commodore 64.. but you said no "micro computers".. so I acually started with a 386SX Dell (325SL) at 25 Mhz with 4 megs of 30 pin simms and a 80 "meg" hard drive.

Had MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it. I also owned at the same time, a AT&T 8086 and a Olivetti 8088 XT... I can't remember the exact models.. but both had very nice Seagate 251-1 MFM drives in them

I remember.. you had to do the "park" command to set the heads on the drive so they wouldn't "crash" when the power was turned off..

Shinobi

thechemgeek · Post by **thechemgeek** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:52 pm

other than the Commodore my first "pc" was:

1997

MicronPC
233 MHz PII with MMX Technology (Yea!)
128 MB RAM
2D Viper II Card
3D 3Dfx Stealth Pro Card (i think)
20 MB HD
SoundBlaster
17" monitor

and it was like $3500

BrandonB · Post by **BrandonB** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:53 pm

1999, Generic Computer. 10gb HD, 997mhz, 21inch monitor, with windows 2000, later put windows XP on it.

SLK · Post by **SLK** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 1:06 am

An AST 386 with Dos 3.0 I believe... Too long ago to remember!

Bastid · Post by **Bastid** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 1:46 am

Pentium 200 MMX
64 megs of ram
8 meg vid card
1.18 gig HD

that was about 7-8 years ago...

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 3:53 am

A AST 486 I think.. It was first decent comp anyway.. But first computer I have no idea but I had a 5.5 "floppy" game of thermo nuke war or DEFCON I tried to play on it a few times but something kept messing it up so I ended up tossin it in the trash. I believe I had it back around 92-93 maybe earlier.