Did you build it yourself? What OS did you use? Did you have internet access?
Feel free to outline the component brand names and model (if you remember them) and let us know if you still have access to the computer.
This was in Jan 1997. It was running Windows 95 (Windows 98 wasn’t released yet). No internet (we got dialup later in the year; maybe in the late summer). It was built by my parent’s colleague (company system admin), I was too young to build my own PC.
*Pentium I 133 MHz *1.5 GB HDD *CD-ROM Drive *FDD *Sound Blaster 32 (remember getting Sound Blaster Live! In the next build). *32 MB RAM *S3 ViRGE 325 (4 MB RAM if I remember correctly).
I think the colleague who built it sold it off when we got a new build.
First one i remember building myself had a Q6600 4gb ram and a GT 730. It was mainly based on an old HP workstation that got thrown away by my dads work, and I picked up the 730 on sale. Somewhere around 2008-9 I was 7yo I think.
Played Minecraft, BFH and BFP4F fine (thanks grandpa for teaching me to play fps games at 5yo)
TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1. 4k RAM, 1.77mhz Z80 CPU Cassette tape for offline storage, but I mostly just typed the program back in.
20mhz, 4mb ram, 80gb drive. Mac IIsi.
Around 2008-2010, I previously had an HP Compaq Presario that was no longer cutting it, so it was time to upgrade! I ended up using the case itself for quite a while, but gutted the motherboard for some Gigabyte board of the time, a Pentium 4 (1.X Ghz), a whooping 4 GB of RAM (32-bit systems woohoo), ~100Gb HDD, and an nVidia 9600GT. Give it a few years, and I’d upgraded it to a GTX 560 and i5-2500k which ended up blowing in a power surge in college dorms around 2015.
It’s been long enough that timelines are fuzzy, but the turn of specs have been wild. I was pretty shocked to learn that a lot of CPUs have turned from over-clocking to under-volting due to how generally powerful (and power consuming) they are nowadays!
My first computer was a Dell 486DX @ 66mHz with 8MB RAM, a 514MB hard drive. It ran Windows 3.1 initially, and I think we upgraded to 95 eventually. Many a day playing DOS games, especially those 1000 in 1 discs with tons of shareware.
I remember those 1,000 in 1 discs, they were somewhat common in the mid 90s when CD-ROMs started taking off.
They’d be plastered all over tech stores end caps and cashier lanes, and sometimes places you’d never expect. But boy did they open my eyes to PC gaming.
First few proper ones I knew what what going on with where this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC472
And a bunch of Atari st machines!! God the Atari stuff was glorious for the time!!!
But before that had the older amstrad and a Hitachi peach iirc, but I was too young to really know what was what with those.
640×200 pixels with 2 colours
Did you ever use this mode?
By the time I got into computing (96), I think 800x600 with at least 16K colours was relatively common.
I am not even sure what you would use 640x200 with two colours.
Hmmmm, good question, this was a long while back and I was young, I suspect we used the two colours higher res mode there when using word processing and other text based stuff. I remember playing answer back junior quiz and it was awesome it had multiple colours!, but no idea what resolution that ran in tbh. You have got me wondering about that machine now, might have to do some reading on it later today.
Fully mine? 286SX16 IIRC, followed by an Amiga 500. Shared would be a Vic 20 followed by a C64.
Commodore VIC20 first, with the cassette deck and memory expansion card. I can’t remember now what size the expansion was, but we couldn’t play some games without it.
My first proper PC was an Advent 486 SX25, with either one or two megabytes of memory on board. My brother convinced our parents that it would be good for school work, but I added a single speed CD reader and a generic sound card to it and got Doom for my birthday.
That became my PC, so I upgraded the RAM to 4MB and the CD drive to a blisteringly fast quad speed! Crazy, I know :o
I’ve actually got it at home at the moment, but don’t know if it works. It was in my parent’s attic when there was a leak near it, so I’ve brought it here to let it dry for a while before I risk doing anything with it :)
Good question, I don’t know! This was around 1985-ish
It was a 30 kg (60 odd pounds) beast, white, with built in 4-6 inch black /green monitor and keyboard and it used round small (about 2 inch diameter) cassettes to load data from, hidden under a black panel. It had 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, and I played games with it…there was chess, racing, and some more.
I remember having to put in the cassettes in a certain way, then press a thumb switch to make it load the boot program which would give me a menu from which I could select games to play.
My dad brought it home one day, some insurance company dumped them en-masse.
Anybody who might know from that description what machine it was?
Only thing I can come up with is a Commodore Pet but the cassettes were just normal cassettes. The memory was about right and the weight is sorta close. Anything else you remember? You’ve piqued my curiosity. As far as round storage like you described the only thing I’ve found was something called DecTape. But those were used on things beasts like a pdp-8 or pdp-12s. Not something you’d have in your house.
Let’s see if you can guess what this was….
Operating system EOS, OS-7, CP/M, TDOS
CPU Zilog Z80A @ 3.58 MHz
Memory 64 KB RAM 16 KB VRAM
This was in early 1984
A Tandy device (guessing without doing a web search)?
I started using computers around 95/96. Our consulting professor did show us an example of Tandy laptop back when I was doing a masters degree in the 2010s.
A Coleco Adam. I spent hours writing games for that thing. And it broke all the time. I must have returned that thing like three times. Then we had a house fire (unrelated to the computer) and I got a a Commodore 128 (which I just now realized also had a z80). I spent hours writing games and software for that too. Guess it was destiny I work in IT.
Worked for a year doing odd jobs to afford it (was a teenager). Bought it at a computer show. Never booted, so I had to learn how to fix it.
This was a theme. First car was a POS, so I had to learn how to fix it, too.
That’s so sad that the first computer you scrap enough money to buy as a teen just doesn’t boot. 😠
So long ago. I think the first was an Apple 11e with an external 256K floppy drive that loaded Basic OS every time computer was turned on? 1984 or 1985?
The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe.
The first computer I owned, was the very first eMachine.
I do not remember the specs on either.
Atari 800 so 6502 1.8 mhz 8k ram cartridge and 5 1/4 floppy. That was my first family computer, the first computer I bought with my own money was a dell T450 Pentium 3 450mhz and an ATI dedicated 3d accelerator card and a 19" Trinitron monitor that I loved to degauss for that satisfying bong noise
What year was this for the Atari 800?
The Pentium 1 build I described was on the parents money of course since I was a pre-teen. 🤣
The Atari 800 I had around 1985 or so, I was like 4 at the time, playing donkey Kong and an amber screen
8088, 10Mhz. But if I pushed the button it would slow down to 8Mhz. That made Red Baron easier to control.
640kb RAM. Because nobody should ever need more than that.
2x 360kb floppy drives (5 1/4"). Eventually upgraded with a 40 Mb hard drive. The salesman said that was so big we’d never fill it up.
CGA graphics. I eventually upgraded this to a used ATI Wonder EGA card. That let me use my RGB monitor in interlaced 640x350 graphics mode. The flickering just proved I wasn’t epileptic.
MS-DOS 3.3. It also had a board called Trackstar, that was an Apple IIe. I was taking classes at school at the time, and the school used Apple.
2x 360kb floppy drives (5 1/4"). Eventually upgraded with a 40 Mb hard drive. The salesman said that was so big we’d never fill it up.
This was before my time (FDDs were on their last legs by 1997), but I am guessing at one point dual FDDs was a good thing to have.
The salesman’s pitch sounds so quaint in retrospective.
