Nostalgia: Your First Computer

[Pernig]

What was your first computer, what were the specs, and what made it so awesome at the time? I'm especially interested in hearing from people who got into computing in the '80s etc, before PCs were big over here, and before I was born!

In 1995 my Mum bought a Compaq Presario something. For many hours I enjoyed playing Command and Conquer on it. I always told her I wanted my own computer, and about three years later, when I thought the old thing had been retired to the loft, she gave it to me for Christmas! With the advent of Pentiums it was a little outdated, but for me it was still an awesome machine.

It sported a 486DX4/100, which Tandy told my Mum was the fastest processor you could get when she bought it. They didn't tell her that you couldn't upgrade the CPU though, unless you wanted an Overdrive which was a bit shit. Originally it had a 500MB hard drive, but Mother quickly filled this up and had 1.5GB put in. I can't remember what graphics it had, but it had 8MB RAM, a really fast (£50!) quad-speed Creative CD-ROM drive which I remember used to make the videos bugger up in Red Alert. By far the best upgrade in the machine was a Sound Blaster 16. It actually had an AWE32 at one point which was awesome as it was really loud, but my Mum stole it to put in her new computer before she gave the PC to me.

My favourite games to play on it were Quake, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, Dark Forces, Grand Prix 2 and Nascar Racing. Benchmark-wise, I could run Quake pretty smoothly at 640x480 with the sound off. It stuttered a bit with sound on.
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H100 Breaking for spares

[.....]

Commodore 64

Loved that machine. Could waste hours playing those games when I was younger. I can't imagine kids these days waiting for the tapes to load. Some of the longer loading games even had mini games as the full game loaded to keep you entertained.

I downloaded a C64 emulator and realised you should just let the games be remembered as amazing, when in reality, they were crap.

Moved onto an Amiga, then the usual consoles, Megadrive, Snes, Gameboy, Playstation etc. I had an Atari Lynx which I loved as well.

My first PC was a 486sx 25mhz with a whopping 120mb, not gb, hardrive with a huge 8mb of ram. Loved a bit of Doom on that.

[thx1138]

1980 Sinclair ZX80. With 16k expansion pack.
Didn't get online until 1983 by that time I was on my 3rd micro.

Sadly, i couldn't afford a Commodore Pet or an Apple in the 70s. 8 year olds work on a limited budget.

[thx1138]

https://homepage.ntlworld.com/thx1138/zxthx1138.JPG

Me circa 1983

with ol' faitful ZX80 on the side, next to a 48k Zx spectrum in a dk'tronics keyboard, alphacom thermal printer, interface 1, multiface 3pirating device, micro drives, and a stack of mostly original games on the right.

I remeber the first time I got Way of the Exploding fist to load in under 10 seconds via microdrive instead of tape.

[Digitalize]

Mine was a Beigebox Pentium 4 machine, Ran at like 1.4Ghz, and so hot it was unbelievage. Had an ATI Rage Pro GPU and 256Mb of DDR Ram.

Then i got an Acer AMD Dual Core 1.8Ghz box, up'd to 2Gb DDR2 and had built in nVidia Ram.

Then got a MacBook Pro, 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, now has 4Gb Ram, nVidia 8600M GT

Also got a gaming machine, E7400 Core 2 Duo OC'd to 4Ghz, 4Gb DDR2 Ram, nVidia GTX275.
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1998 CB600F Hornet

[Grimnir]

ZX81 with a whole rip-roaring 1K of memory. I built my own 16K expansion pack - 16 x the 'performance'!
Acorn Electron with the add-on box thingy that plugged in the back providing a printer port / cartridge slots.
486DX4 100 850MB HD, can't remember much else about it. Did a main board swap a bit later to a P1
P2 something
P4 hybrid / heinz 57 mish-mash thingy
Acer laptop

[thx1138]

I remember the first time I used a mouse, and thinking "this will never catch on".

I remember that as well as a mouse, I had a RAT, Remote Action Transfer. It was an early wireless control pad.

The my commodore 128d had a cooling fan, and again I thought, I won't buy another computer with a fan it's too annoying.

[Irn-Bru]

Didn't get one until I was 14 (6 years ago) with the money I got from my paper round. I always thought computers were massively expensive but I was mistaken! Ended up paying something like £300 for my first one.

2.4 AMD Athlon
256mb RAM
40GB HDD
350W PSU
17" monitor

Onboard sound, graphics etc. Could handle Tomb Raider and Red Alert which was all I cared about

Compare that with my Q6600, 4GB RAM, ATI 4870, over 1.5TB of storage and it's obvious things have moved on up a bit. Of course since my setup is coming up 2 years old it's considered slow as fuck by todays standards
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KTM 990 SMT & Suzuki DR-Z 400 SM

[carvell]

A 2.4GHz first computer?!

I'm olllllllllllld.
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Yamaha TDM 850

[wizzzard]

The awsome Atari 800XL

https://i656.photobucket.com/albums/uu281/wizzzard2009/atari-800xl.jpg

64k of mind bending power. Those blocks looked soooo good.

Graduated onto an Amstrad CPC464 with colour monitor, the best of the bunch.


https://i656.photobucket.com/albums/uu281/wizzzard2009/amstrad_cpc464.jpg
Commodore 64 pah I spit on it.

The CPC and this made many a night fly by:

https://i656.photobucket.com/albums/uu281/wizzzard2009/quickshot_ii.jpg
The Quickshot II Turbo, King of joysticks
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And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
Zeitgeist / Addendum / Moving forward

[tatters]

My first PC was a IBM X286 back in 1992 which l found in a skip at the back of a industral estate. cant rember the CPU speed but it had a 8.5 floppy drive and a 60Mb hard drive, used to right BASIC programs and play flight sim games like F11A nighthawk runing on DOS.
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Past:NRG50,AF1125(x2),NSR125RR,ZZR250,CX500,VFR400,KR1S,ZZR600(x2),CB400N,YZF1000(x2),KH125,Z200,FX400R,CBR954RR(x2)GPZ500S,GT550,VFR750F(x2),RD350N,XR650R,CBR600F,CB250,KDX250,YZF750R,CRM250,400EXC,KLR650,TTR600RE,DR350S,R100GSPD,RGV250,VMAX1200,DL650,KZ750 Present:G650XC,C12,CRF450X,1190ADV

[Frost]

https://api.ning.com/files/3vKQkh-FlomOYW9skChF93Xu7pXGFmSvuuplDQxYdHQWd9uTnZeGvdBlZnLv*eWaSdZBofbrNXShknxsCEiANx3sde3h361Z/commodore64setup.jpeg

Had it when i was young. Didn't have a fucking clue how to do anything but put games into the tape drive.

First real PC i had that i could use (mostly still for games though!) was:

98 second edition (pirated)
700mhz (400 was still considered a fast PC back then)
128mb ram (costing about £1 per mb)
20gb
Geforce 2 GTS (£450, what was i thinking?!)
And a collosal 17" CRT monitor.

That was a very hard earned £1200 that became obsolete so quickly it's put me off buying anything posh ever again. Untill i bought my new 6 core system and am left wondering what the point was

[The Artist]

https://www.spaennare.se/PWMDIG/image7.jpg

My first. Windows 95.

Not that old compared to you old fogies.

[T1z3R]

my first 'home' computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer. also know as the CoCo. dont recall the spec but it was barely more powerful than a calculator. software came on cassette tape or catridge. never got much use from the colour part though as i only had a B&W portable

my first 'personal' computer was a Mitac P75 with 8MB ram and a 1MB video card. cost me my entire christmas wage of £800 when i was about 18. bought it from Tandy where i worked at the time. my dad still has it in his loft
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duck my sick!

[chrisw]

First non-x86 was an Acorn Electron. Started out with just a tape drive but over the years it got a cartridge reader and a floppy drive. We also ended up with a 4-colour printer as well (well, more like a mini plotter).

First x86 was an Escom; I think it was a 486DX 33Mhz in a MASSIVE full tower case, no idea why as it was almost completely empty. The damn thing was never stable, in the end we dumped the internals, upgrading to a Cyrix 586 chip and board. This was even more unstable so eventually gave up on it and bought a 386SX 16Mhz from a friend for £20 which worked flawlessly.

Not long after (one year in fact), I was employed full time in IT; Since then I've never had much to do with building machines (other than a couple of PII based machines with 3dFX cards) as I've either had company laptops or machines which have been retired.

[SlimRick]

https://www.kropotkin.co.uk/images/cgeuk05/functioning_zx81.jpg

A Sinclair ZX81, with 16k expansion pack...Awesomeness

[Clanger]

Me and my brother got a ZX Spectrum + for our joint Xmas gift one year (can't remember which year) but definitely before 1985. I know that much.
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Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter won't mind - Dr. Seuss

[The Shaggy D.A.]

The first I had full use of was a Tandy TRS-80 model 1; I used to babysit for some friends, and they had a home office. This was 1979, and I was 13.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/objects/trs80l.jpg

Although I had borrowed a mate's ZX80 when he upgraded to a ZX81, the first I owned was a Jupiter ACE, which I bought after I left school in 1982. It's now in the loft, somewhere.

https://www.heydon.org/kevan/collection/pictures/jupiter-ace-large.jpg

Following that, I had an Amstrad CPC464, then a CPC6128, after which I got my first DOS box, a dual floppy Olivetti PC-1 which is also still in my loft.

https://www.system-cfg.com/photos/olivetti_pc1_1.jpg

I later bought a luggable Amstrad PPC640, maybe around 1989. Still double floppy, but had a modem, where I started using BBS. This too is still in my loft.

https://www.computercloset.org/Amstrad_PPC-640.jpg

Then I got my first PC with a hard drive, an Olivetti PCS86. I think this was about 1991.

https://www.pastorarts.monsieurlecug.com/pcs86.jpg

I bought another PC-XT clone with a 5.25" floppy and a 10Mb Hard drive so that I could code using the Pick O/S from home. This was eventually replaced by an IBM PS/1, which in 1995 was what I first got on to t'interwebz at home with, via Compu$erve. this one's in the loft too, although without the hard drive which died.

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/ibm_ps1_1s.jpg

I skipped the 486 processor, and went for a homebuilt Pentium system sometime in 1997. Since then it's been a slow and steady upgrade - never been bleeding edge, always on a tight budget.
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Chances are quite high you are not in my Monkeysphere, and I don't care about you. Don't take it personally.
Currently : Royal Enfield 350 Meteor
Previously : CB100N > CB250RS > XJ900F > GT550 > GPZ750R/1000RX > AJS M16 > R100RT > Bullet 500 > CB500 > LS650P > Bullet Electra X & YBR125 > Bullet 350 "Superstar" & YBR125 Custom > Royal Enfield Classic 500 Despatch Limited Edition (28 of 200) & CB Two-Fifty Nighthawk > ER5

[Phoenix]

My first computer at home was i'm pretty sure a 386 SX 25Mhz with about 2mb of RAM, was awesome back at the time, the first games I played were Wing Commander and Test Drive 3 when they came out (they were my dad's) so that makes it 1990.

Not long after that I got a second hand Amiga 1200 with hundreds of games but was only allowed to use it for about 30minutes a day as it was apparently not good to play games, didn't last long and was sold about 6months later.

I still had to put up with a 486 DX-33 with 4mb of RAM until 1997 when I finally got a Pentium 233, hadn't been able to play anything remotely recent for years until then.

Oh I had an old Olivetti laptop to mess about with for a while too, had one of those green screens and was immenseley useless, think my dad must have picked it up from a scrapyard or something.

[neil.]

Amiga 500 with A1020S monitor! I also had the 512k expansion, giving me a meaty 1MB RAM. I also had an extra floppy drive and a parallel port MIDI interface with which I experimented with my first venture into computer based music with MED and later OctaMED. I also got quite into the WorkBench OS and scripting etc. Amazing that a whole GUI OS could fit on a 720K floppy whereas now you need gigs of hard disk space.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Amiga500_system.jpg
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CBT February 2008 | A2 June 2008 | Yamaha YBR125 (written off) | Honda CBF125 (current)

[defblade]

Dad was a technophile, so we had a ZX80 and so on. Main computer for a few years was a Dragon 32, then an Amstrad PCW 256 (IIRC?) then a 386.

My first PC was a 486SX-25, 4Mb RAM, 200Mb HD (or was it 100Mb?), can't remember the graphics card (3DFX in my head??), Soundblaster 16(?), 13 or 14" CRT monitor .... it was '93 and cost just over £1000.

Bought entirely to play Doom on.

Until fairly recently, it was the same computer* and I actually had the original 3.5" floppy drive from that system in my then current set-up. Until I tried to use it for the first time in years and discovered it didn't work any more

My upgrade budget was about £3k/year for years but happily things have slowed down a bit now



*as in, this is the same broom - it's had 6 new heads and 3 new handles, but it's the same broom.
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Honda Varadero 125cc => Suzuki Bandit 650 33bhp => 77bhp =>
BMW K1200R Sport 163bhp => Aprilia Shiver GT 750 95bhp

[Frost]

Fellow g33ks may be interested to see that the PC in a keyboard form factor once so popular might be making a comeback:

https://i.gizmodo.com/5124985/eee-keyboard-an-entire-touchscreen-home-theater-pc

[cagiva gezzer]

A spectrum of sorts with the rubber keyboard and tape drive.

Waiting 5 minutes for the games to load from the tape . .

Then a NEC P1 (75mhz / 64mb RAM / 2gb ) Laptop which got me through the first and second years of uni (2002-2003).
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"because one stroke isnt enough and four strokes waste two"

[G]

First one I owned as a kid was a Spectrum +2, after seeing driller (it's 3d, like real life!!!) on a friends Spectrum 48.

However for some time before that my dad had a Wang laptop. He got it in Singapore as they were rather sparse in Papua New Guinea, where we lived at the time.

https://electricgypsybbs.com/computers/web_images/wang_wltc.jpg
https://electricgypsybbs.com/computers/wang_wltc.php

My dad went for the top of the range recently introduced 40mb drive (4 x the standard 10mb.) It also had an external SCSI floppy drive - and best of all for a time way before digital communications being known about - a printer to print out your recently typed document!
I think he got windows 1.00 at the time, but later upgraded to 1.01 which allowed use to use the mouse!

My computing journey went to an Amiga 500 then 1200 after the spectrum; then on to a 486 50SX including a modem in 1994 (I then overclocked to 66 ). Mostly used compuserve then; web sites very short on the ground with ftp/gopher more popular I'd say.

[Pernig]

It seems a lot of people used Compuserve to connect in the '90s, including me. Remember that awful voice? I vaguely remember them changing the American voice for an English one in a later version. It was not long after this that we got a four-port hub and 512k cable, which at the time was £50 a month. Somehow me, my Mum and my Step-Dad all managed to connect to this at once.
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H100 Breaking for spares