What Was Your First PC?

[64K]

I had a C-64 before I got my first PC in the mid 90s. It was an XT with a 8086 processor and CGA graphics, 640KB of RAM, Dual 5 1/4 floppies and came with a monochrome monitor. I don't remember it having a hard drive but I might be misremembering. I had a lot of fun with that computer.

 

[P4-630]

My first own was a Cassiopeia E100 Palmtop PC with Windows CE, 1999.

 

[Zyll Goliat]

My very first computer was ZX Spectrum 48Kb then later I had Amiga 500 and only after that I jumped on "PC" it was 486 DX as I remember....

 

[Bomby569]

this awesome beast. What a machine. Put the game to load, go outside to buy the bread, and come back to play the game

 

[Zyll Goliat]

this awesome beast. What a machine. Put the game to load, go outside to buy the bread, and come back to play the game

View attachment 293745

Hey you know what that is still waaay faster then "building the shaders" in today's The Last Of Us on high-end PC ......

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Self-built with the assistance of a friend-of-a-classmate during sophomore (pretty sure) year of college. K6-2/400 and a Voodoo Banshee. Was very fortunate; every component turned out to be a pretty solid purchase save the monitor. Case in particular has been a champ; in continual use to this day.

Spoiler: Full spec

MB: Gigabyte GA-5AX (ALi Aladdin V)
RAM: 64 or 128MB PC-100
Maxtor 13GB HDD
SMC 10base-T ISA
SBLive! Value PCI
Creative Dxr3 DVD-ROM and decoder card
LS-120 floptical drive
Superpower Zephyr case (link seems to be the sole remaining web resource about this case as of this post that has working images )
some off-brand 15" monitor that spontaneously lost the red emitter

 

[Veseleil]

My first PC should've been the 486, but I bought the Playstation on persuasion of a devil himself. So my first PC was a Celeron 900MHz gifted from a friend.

 

[johnspack]

Yeah, like 64K, my first one was an XT with the 8086. Upgraded heavy with a massive 1.2Mbs ram, a vga card with a mono vga display that did 64 shades of grey....
Good times!

 

[dirtyferret]

gaze upon the Mattel Aquarius and its rubber chiclet keyboard in all it's glory!

 

[Sithaer]

As much as I remember it was a 486 in my early elementary school years as a shared family PC.
I did not have my actual own PC till 2008 which was a Athlon 64 x2 6400+ based system with a 8800 GT.

 

[64K]

gaze upon the Mattel Aquarius and its rubber chiclet keyboard in all it's glory!

View attachment 293766

Living the good life back in the day I see.

 

[Calenhad]

My first pc was a C64

 

[meatwar]

After "playing" with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k, ATARI 2600 Console, the Commodore Amiga 500A came the first "acquaintance" with the Personal Computer back in high school
with those Ambar and Green monochrome crt displays...hehe, the homework stored on those paper 5,25 floppy's... 286 @8 and 16Mhz...DOS and GW-BASIC...damm
And then in late 89, if not mistaken, came the first "out of the pocket, ouch$$$" a Philips P33 series, model P3348 Intel 386SX @ 20Mhz... but the "cherry" on top was the the new Philips 14"SVGA 800x Color CRT, along with branded PC/AT Philips keyboard and Philips 2 button mouse...rubber sphere, MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.11...hehehe

The old dinosaur... cheers!

 

[Deleted member 229121]

The first real PC we had in our house was a Gateway tower, but my older brother had his tech savy friend go with my dad to buy it.
It had a Pentium II and I didn't know or care about anything else apart from the 3DFX badge and Voodoo II card inside of it.

 

[freeagent]

My first pc was an HP Pavilion 8570C with a P3 450 and VoodooII I think.. pretty sure it had a Bigfoot in it too..

Edit:

Bought it from a friend and he put the GPU in

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I can't remember which I got first a ibm business machine 286 totally useless or the amstrad CPC 464, but one of them.
First bought for. Me by ME x86 pc at 16 was a p75 Olivetti Envision.

 

[Courier 6]

it was an 386sx something, built literaly from junk, some parts I got here and there, a mobo that had a leaked battery, I had to remove the corrosion and fix it, but it still worked for a good while, that´s it for short

 

[AhmadMZ99]

my first PC was given by my father, i wasn't know about pc's spec except it's have a pentium ii cpu, running windows 98, the pc looks similar like this but bigger with 4 5.25 slots

 

[68Olds]

Purchased our (wife & I) first PC in 1988 & it was a Packard Bell 286 with a 5.25 floppy, 10MB HDD, 640k RAM, Trident EGA card & EGA monitor.

 

[mb194dc]

Spectrum Plus 3. Had a weird 3 inch disk drive, no idea why they didn't use 3.5.

x86, was a Carerra 486 sx33, 4mb ram, 170md HD, 1MB Cirrus Logic VESA graphics, Windows 3.11. Ran doom, sim city 2000, Pacific strike, Tie fighter and others pretty ok.

 

[Tomgang]

My first pc, if you can call it that. Was a Commadore 64, i was only kid back then. Else for pc, it was a shared macintosh performa between me, my parrent and sister.

My own personal pc buy with my own money. Was the X58 system i had before my current system. I7 980X, asus p6x58d premium, 12 GB ddr3 ram and a gtx 1080 Ti was the latest configuration, before i sold it.

 

[Bill_Bright]

MITS Altair 8800

I just happened to have been stationed in Albuquerque at Kirtland AFB at the time this came out and was lucky to learn about them and get my hands on one. It was a kit. It was not my first advanced kit (I built a Dynaco PAT-4a preamp before that), and I was already trained and certified on advanced "micro-miniature soldering techniques", but this MITS still really tested (and honed ) my soldering skills.

You programmed it by flipping a toggle switch (up for 0, down for 1) for each bit until you set 8 for the byte. It was really cool (at the time) but took ages to program anything. It taught me that I do NOT like programming and preferred to stick to hardware maintenance. So some years later, I got rid of it. Big mistake. Sadly, I did not have the foresight to realize the historic significance (or value) of it at the time, or what it would become later.

My next computer was a C-64. My first "IBM PC clone" was a Gateway 486 I picked up at the Gateway factory way back in 1993 (wow! 30 years ago - I am old ) - before they were bought out by Acer and went way downhill.

That Gateway was the first and last factory built PC I've owned (besides laptops). I have built all my own since then.

 

[Lew Zealand]

C64 was our first computer but first PC was a Dell P4 Northwood something that I never used, so the first real PC I actually used was an Intel NUC5i7RYH.

Core i7-5557U with Win 10, Mac OS, and Ubuntu installed at various times. Squeezed it dry of performance including Win 10 gaming using the iGPU before building a real gaming PC. Still sits here on the desk though it's on its last legs as it just fails if you push to more than 20W or 80C, both of which are well below spec and it could handle easily in the past.

 

[xmanrigger]

486DX with a Cyrix CPU. Paid $4000+ for the system. Running Win3.1. Werent IRQs and DMAs fun? NOT!

This machine was such a POS, it crashed on a weekly bases. After the 3rd time sending it back to the shop to fix at $300-$400 a shot, I made it a mission to figure out myself before I was in the poorhouse. I credit it for my PC knowledge. There was a lot more to building and configuring a PC back then. A person actually had to know shit. LOL

My next PC was a SuperMicro server with dual Pentium 2 CPUs.

EDIT: I still have that original Cyrix CPU.

 

[Shrek]

The first I used: a BBC Micro (by Acorn Computers)

The first I owned: a Mac Plus