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What got you started with PC's? Tell your story.

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I received first (used) Atari 2600 in the early 90's. After that new Sega Mega Drive II in 1994 and my first PC in 2002, which my mom bought me.
I was a teenager and my knowledge about PC's was limited but still well above the average PC user, so I literally ordered a PC by components via phone call. PC was assembled for free at the shop. It was consisted of Pentium 4 1,6A Northwood, MSI 645 Ultra, one stick 256MB Samsung DDR333, Inno Tornado GeForce2 Ti 64MB, WD Caviar 40Gb 7200 RPM, NEC DVD drive, Floppy drive, some case with 400W PSU, Samsung SM551S etc. It was quite powerful machine and the most powerful PC in my class. :D
 

CAPSLOCKSTUCK

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Me and my two brothers first played games at home on this, i still have it




Sports Vision 1000 (1977)

upload_2016-9-7_11-11-31.jpeg



here comes a very good link to early consoles......http://pongmuseum.com/collection/intel-tvsport1004.php
 
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To start......i am 50

My first experience of computing was 1977/78 when my school got its' first BBC computer. We used to play Space Invaders during morning break. At least sometimes we did because invariably it would take so long to load the game off tape ( if at all) that the bell would ring before we got to play.

Fast forward 10 years and pcs were becoming common in the workplace so me and my brother got ourselves on a free course where we learned the basics.......word processing, data base and excel.

This opened up new work opportunities but didnt inspire me at all. Home pcs werent a "thing" back then as it was pre WWW.

Then the use of email really took off and i wanted access to it. Amstrad brought out an cheap flimsy email machine and though i didnt buy one it made me start rethinking the whole pc thing...............me and my wife had moved to London for work and i wanted to keep in touch with my friends and family as they moved to far flung corners.

The Amstrad thing was shit and shoddily made and as soon as i saw one for real i decided i needed something better. My son was just born, i was earning good money so i bought a second hand IBM 486x and my world completely changed. I suddenly had access to all sorts of amazing information.....no more trips to the library .

I now had easy access to all the topics that interested me, yes, dialup was shit but it was available. Back in those days i had to really prioritise my searches because loading took ages and cost money by the minute.


The 486 served us well.....I'm typing with the k/b now and the balled mouse is in a drawer for posterity. When the kids were little i bought reading and educational games for them, i was working shifts including nights and my kids slipped into a similar sleep pattern when they were pre-school so at the times when there were no TV shows on for them the PC was a great distraction.


that was it for a while till i found TPU through GPUZ. The 486 was showing its age and prebuilt PCs were still outrageausly expensive......i wanted to build one so i did !!

I had the 486 hooked to the WWW and a big box of brand new parts and being honest i said to myself " what have i done?" Hundreds of pounds spent and i really didnt have a clue what i was doing.


With the help of various videos and many Google searches i built it, and it worked at the first press of the button.
Athlon ii x 4 630
HD 5750
4 gb ram

unlocking and overclocking was the next priority......getting more power for less and i havent looked back .


Since then i have built many, many computers, several for me but many more for other people. Using recycled parts i get people on the web for cheap and get my friends gaming for as little money as possible.


TL/DR

TPU led me down the road of pc addiction..........thankyou TPU, i love you ( see sig for further info)


I had no idea you were so young you make me look old at 26 :p
 

CAPSLOCKSTUCK

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Around 97-98 I got a pc made for me and my bro from a guy at my moms job.

It was a cyrix 233mhz I believe. It was nice I had free internet from netspy for years I think that was the name. I broke windows cause I deleted system32 files.The guy fixed it, but found pron star pics and told my mom.
From then on I learned computers top to bottom. I built a an AMD k6-2 500 on some soyo board.Had an awe sound card as well. My 1st bought gpu was a nvidia geforce 2 mx it had a purple pcb. I had a an s3 gpu from previous pc before i got the geforce2mx.
I used to mess with tech demos and be amazed.
The exact gpu is on this page.
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component/k2/item/244-nvidia-geforce2-mx-400

Lots of hard to remember memories lol
 

Ahhzz

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Gods, we're so old... I'll join the 'Rocker here.

Some of my fondest memories of my dad come from the 80's. He bought us (me) a Commodore 64 and tape drive not long after release. There used to be a magazine called "Compute!", and in this magazine came programs in Basic, Machine language, and Assembly. My father would sit on the couch for hours at a time, not 4 or 5, but I remember 1 to 3 easily, hours at a time, reading off the Assembly and Machine Language code to me, as I typed it in to create these silly little games and programs....
 
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As a kid i had an Oric 1 which was exchanged shortly after for a (rubber key) Spectrum 48k, when that died i had an Amstrad CPC 464 for a while, then got an Amiga 500+ a few years later. My Brother had an Atari ST and while we liked playing each others computers, used to always argue which was better (pretty much like an Nvidia/AMD thread here nowadays :)) My parents got a PC around this time which i used to play games on a bit, though most games of the era were much better on amiga/st, other than some early vector graphics flight sims and the monkey island games (actually better sound and graphics on the amiga, but i didnt have a hard drive and 2 used 11 floppies!)

I got a playstation soon before i moved out of my parents at 18 and really couldnt afford my own (decent) PC for 3-4 years or so, or an internet connection for that matter, i picked up a few mediocre 2nd hand pc's during this time, but as with the 16bit era it was not as good as the consoles i could actually afford.
I suppose the first time i actually got into PC's properly was when i got a still reasonably new k6-2 450 rig free off a friend and picked up a voodoo banshee cheap 2nd hand.
Once i had a decent base PC to upgrade from, the floodgates opened:D
 
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Ok if we are talking about when I was really young, our very first computer was a philips msx home computer :D



You could stick cardridge games in it, we only had 1 cardridge game.:p

The rest of our games were on cassette tapes, so we had a tape recorder connected to it with a small black/white tv.:D:p

:peace:
 

INSTG8R

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Commodore 64 was my first "PC" I kinda tricked my parents into buying it for me. But games like Test Drive and Ace of Aces solidified my love for gaming, driving and flying. First "real" PC in our house was a Pentium 3 666hz(SATAN!!) Think it had a Riva TNT in it.
 

eidairaman1

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13 when My Grandpa B got us a IBM baby AT in 98 with W98, I got intrigued when he was fixing them. God Bless his Spirit. He passed away March 28 2016 at 84. I am 31 myself.


Before that I had used the Apple II E and Macintosh in Elementary and Windows 3.1/95 on IBM/Dell in High School. Really wasn't Interested in Apple
 
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Going to also show my age a bit, but I started in computers as a kid back in the late 70's with the TI-99/4A, and my best friend who had a Radio Shack TRS-80. In both cases you could write programs and then attach the PCs through an audio cable to a cassette recorder (same cassettes you'd play or record music on) and save programs to them. What really gave it a kick were the TRS-80 monthly magazines that would come out and each had programs in text in them that you could then manually type in and they'd play a very simple game or do something on the screen. So we'd do those together but were a blast to put in and then see the result, kind of like building blocks. Often they had bugs and you'd have to get the next months issue for the corrections or figure out how to correct them on your own.

All of that evolved for me as PCs improved in the 80s with the early Commodores, and eventually the early XTs and 286 PCs, along with the glorious Amiga 500 a bit later. Those opened the door to all kinds of things that you could do with more powerful PCs, and particularly the modems and bulletin boards which were the predecessor to the Internet we know today. The 286s especially changed things because that started the modular hardware approach, where instead of having proprietary equipment you could actually begin customizing the internals exactly how you wanted. Prior to that you could add for example a 5 1/4 floppy drive to a Commodore 64, but you had to buy theirs and you generally never opened a C64, or the prior PCs, and upgraded them internally. So that started the hours spent thumbing through the thick Computer Shopper mags pricing things like internal hard drives.
 

Ahhzz

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Going to also show my age a bit, but I started in computers as a kid back in the late 70's with the TI-99/4A, and my best friend who had a Radio Shack TRS-80. In both cases you could write programs and then attach the PCs through an audio cable to a cassette recorder (same cassettes you'd play or record music on) and save programs to them. What really gave it a kick were the TRS-80 monthly magazines that would come out and each had programs in text in them that you could then manually type in and they'd play a very simple game or do something on the screen. So we'd do those together but were a blast to put in and then see the result, kind of like building blocks. Often they had bugs and you'd have to get the next months issue for the corrections or figure out how to correct them on your own.

All of that evolved for me as PCs improved in the 80s with the early Commodores, and eventually the early XTs and 286 PCs, along with the glorious Amiga 500 a bit later. Those opened the door to all kinds of things that you could do with more powerful PCs, and particularly the modems and bulletin boards which were the predecessor to the Internet we know today. The 286s especially changed things because that started the modular hardware approach, where instead of having proprietary equipment you could actually begin customizing the internals exactly how you wanted. Prior to that you could add for example a 5 1/4 floppy drive to a Commodore 64, but you had to buy theirs and you generally never opened a C64, or the prior PCs, and upgraded them internally. So that started the hours spent thumbing through the thick Computer Shopper mags pricing things like internal hard drives.
I wondered who'd be the first Trash-80 representative.... o_O

JK :) Thanks for posting!:toast:
 

64K

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I wondered who'd be the first Trash-80 representative.... o_O

JK :) Thanks for posting!:toast:

Ah yes, The Tandy TRS-80. Available at your neighborhood Radio Shack back when Radio Shack was relevant. It went away before I bought my first computer in early 80's the C64. I had a lot of fun on that computer. It was definitely a step up in gaming from my Atari 2600 console plus you could program it.

First PC was a XT 8088 CPU with dual 5 1/4 floppies but no hard drive and 640KB RAM and CGA graphics. That was a nice PC in it's day. :)

What got me into computers was a high school science teacher (late 1970s) that went out and bought an Apple computer with his own money because the school thought of computers as being for businesses only and wouldn't buy one for the school. He kept it in his class and let anyone that wanted to mess around on it if they were careful with it.
 
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What got me into computers was a high school science teacher (late 1970s) that went out and bought an Apple computer with his own money because the school thought of computers as being for businesses only and wouldn't buy one for the school. He kept it in his class and let anyone that wanted to mess around on it if they were careful with it.

My high school shop teacher (who influenced me more than any other teacher) wrote a program on an Apple II that he'd purchased himself and brought to school. His program stopped functioning after he added more code to it. After some digging, he realized he'd maxed out the 64kb of RAM ;)
 
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Back in the day PC's did all sorts of stuff (games included) so it would be natural to think they(le: they them it pcandor's) could do my homework also.[circa mid90's]
 
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What got me into pc's? The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion. But there's a long story before that!

____________________________________________________________

The first pc my family bought was way back in 1992. All I remember was that it was a 286 and had a ''turbo'' button which didn't make any difference.

Having a pc in the house triggered my interest. The only pc I ever touched before was in 1998 when my best friend's dad bought her an Amiga and we used to take turns playing on it. The games were on cassette tapes, and we used to wait 30 minutes for a game to load before playing.

____________________________________________________________

Anyway I was very interested in our first 286. It didn't even have a mouse, and we never got the joystick to work, but it had enormous 5ÂĽ-inch disks and we didn't need to wait 30 minutes before playing a game.

My mom had a ''back to the future'' relationship with this pc - she used to type in questions like we normally type on Google today, expecting the machine to answer and then get disappointed when she got a ''<Dir> not found'' error. It never told her the weather or gave her any solution to whatever she typed, and at the end she gave up.

Whenever my dad had a problem it was always me who solved it. They were mostly command prompt errors - DOS is like that - he'd forget where something was and I'd go searching the directories for him and show him what to type to get to it
.
However that computer used to give a lot of trouble and dad was constantly taking it to the seller. One day when the warranty was up and the computer wouldn't start he decided to open the case, and he found pencil batteries (those disposable ones!) connected very amateurishly to something. Now my dad might not have known anything about computers but he's a qualified radio technician and could easily recognize whether something was factory-made or an attempted botched fix.

From then onwards my dad always bought computers with the family money (obviously not from the same shop!), and they were for all the family and for my studies. Certainly not gaming pc's. The last one we had (some Pentium 4 with an MX440 graphics card) used to stagger a lot while playing The Sims 2. Basically I only played Sims games. At that time still I knew zilch about hardware. If it beeped or anything, I'd just put it in the car and take it to the shop! I never even opened up a case to clean inside!

____________________________________________________________

One fine day I was playing Sims 2 on this Pentium 4, which had been going strongly for quite some years, and this time it was blissfully silent.
Remember I had never opened the case - way back then they used to be sealed and if you broke the seal you void the warranty. I never imagined that dirt might accumulate inside... since the seller was fine with me not opening it for 2 whole years for warranty why should I have bothered for the years to come? I only imagined it's safer to keep it sealed!

Anyway this time I noticed that the pc had suddenly become incredibly silent. Which was weird considering that it had become so noisy that I suspected that some thousand bees had set up home inside.
Realizing that the sudden disappearance of those thousand bees was too good to be true, I cautiously started examining the case. Externally. With a flash light.

That was when I saw this fan at the back, which was stationary (It was the PSU fan but I had no clue). My only thought was that since this thing is powered up then that thing (a.k.a. fan) should be powered up as well. So I took out my tool-kit... erm.... my thin ball-point pen and kicked one of the blades. Sure enough the fan started turning and my 1000 bees were back humming in full vengeance.

I spent months doing this 'trick' to get the PSU fan running. Then one day it refused to run any more and the smell wasn't very nice especially after Sims 2. So I switched everything off, placed the tower on its side, and for my first time in history I got a screw-driver and opened the tower.

Believe me I wish I took a photo. There was fluff and cobwebs everywhere. There were even live spiders and dead moths inside. Everything looked very sticky (I used to smoke indoors while playing). It was disgusting. I didn't touch any of ''it'' but realized that the fan was in another compartment I needed to dismantle! I still had no idea what it was or its function. Anyway I unscrewed it and gently eased it out of the tower, taking a lot of care that the rest of the wiring was still attached since there was no way I could wire that thing up again. I opened the PSU and dismantled the fan. The following day I went to the pc store, gunky sticky yellow fan in hand, asking them to ''give me a fan like this''. With the new fan I went happily home, replaced it and put everything back in place, blew with my mouth on everything inside the tower to try to get as much gunk out of the case (had no clue I could use compressed air!) and my pc was back working as good as new. Ran fine for a couple more years, and to my relief, without the 1000 bees inside.

It was only much later that I learnt that I had been working on the PSU, and that it could have been quite dangerous...

_____________________________________________________________

Fast-forward to 2006 and I saw a youtube video showing Oblivion. There was no way my ancient still-cobwebby Pentium with MX440 and heaven knows which other sticky components could run those awesome graphics, bee-hive or not.

I also quit smoking indoors, not for my sake, not for my husband's sake and neither for my kids' sake because none had been born yet. I quit smoking indoors for my beloved computer's sake.

So I decided to get my own gaming pc, with my own money. This was some months before I registered on TPU. I went to one of the best local shops who suggested that they build a custom one for me.
Anyway, this seller suggested an E4300, Asus P5B, 2GB of generic RAM, some PSU, and an 8600GT inside the cheapest case possible. He quoted the total at €1,400 which was a phenomenal sum for me at the time so I didn't commit myself. I researched, found benchmarks, and thought wow this is a monster (compared to the gunky pentium!)

Since he had given me a breakdown for each part, and was charging only like €25 for assembly and installation, I decided to check how much it would cost for me to buy the same parts online. Imagine my surprise when I ended with slightly more than €600, Windows included and with a nice case with large fans and blue lights everywhere :D rather than the cheap office-type one I was offered!

That was when I started searching the net, spending hours reading on how to build pc's and found TPU. I didn't register because I felt embarrassed posting anything. Everybody here were building their own pc's, overclocking them etc and I felt a total idiot...
But this forum gave me the courage - so many people were doing it, why couldn't I?

Hence I bit the bullet and bought the parts. Spent a week or so staring at them, strewn on a table. Finally bit by bit I assembled the computer. And by golly it worked at the first try. I gamed on it for some weeks, while still reading TPU. I remember reading a good thread on overclocking the E4300, and I got it to 3Ghz without any glitches. That was the moment when I felt comfortable enough to register.

Oblivion ran fine but frequently it went below 30fps so I was disappointed a bit hence 2 or 3 months later I did away with the 8600GT and got an 8800GT and added 2GB more RAM which made the game run perfectly just the way it should.

______________________________________________________________

My main job isn't related to computers at all, I never even studied IT, but pc's are my best hobby. I've assembled over 10 pc's for free for family and friends, and also a couple for work. Software and virus removals? I've lost the count.
I was always cautious on overclocking though, and never attempted it unless the person really needed it to get the most out of old hardware or specifically asked for it.

______________________________________________________________

My next challenge is laptops. My first experience was not great. I had bought a Clevo laptop with a Q9400 and two 8800GTX in 2009 and after the warranty expired one card started frying up after the other. I bought some 3 cards in total, barely getting the chance to run them in SLi as intended, replacing one after the other myself and when finally the last card quit working I just gave up on it.
My only success on laptops so far was dismantling my mom's to replace a dead HDD. She's become quite proficient now in computer use, Microsoft Office, our accounting software at work. Oh and now there's google so she can ask anything without getting a ''<Dir> not found'' error. ;)
 
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Tatty_Two

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Got handed this flat square thing at work in 1993, someone said it was called a laptop but I remember it to be as big as some modern day midi towers lol, no instruction some very early version of Windows..... can't remember, Windows 3 I think and lots of DOS, I just remember lots of DOS and some basic word processor software, that sparked my interest and then eventually, in 1996 I bought my first pre built desktop PC.
 

CAPSLOCKSTUCK

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I happen to be 69 yrs young! When I got out of USAF in 1970, went to a bar that had 'Pong". Wow! what a bitchin game!! That started it all.
Early '80's I first got a Timex-Sinclair, plugged it into my (b&w) tv, took over my kids 'Fisher-Price' cassette player, (after they went to bed!)
& tried my hand at programming. (use that term lightly). Sears Robuck sold a apple II clone which was a little better than the T-S. Went and bought an Epson HX-20, another early laptop, still have it around, the T-S too. The Epson has built-in small printer & micro-cassette play/record unit. Also got all the way from Japan their 'screen controller' to plug it into an RGB green screen monitor.

Got divorced.

First real comp was a 386 based unit with a 'Cyrix math co-processer', 4 MEGS ram, a 5 1/4 floppy, a 120 MEG hdd, and Dos 5.0. $1,600.00!!
Had the power switch on the power supply, no keystroke combo to shut down, use your finger.

First build was a (early) Pentium which was in a huge plastic case on the mobo. It had a controller card to plug hdd & floppys into.
It scared me what my son (about 9 or 10 then) could do with dos. Second build was a Celeron base unit. Put an 'Awe 64 Gold' sound card, it was awesome sounding!

The boy told me to go with AMD & its been AMD ever since. Prolly built 20 computers since, except for the 386, I have never bought a brand new case, allus used. A few were identical mobo etc. so I could 'clone' a drive instead of installing complete os. All were/are now XP Pro 32 & 64, & various flavors of linux, early were Win 3.0, 3.1, Chicago! (14 1.7 meg disks!, it was the 'beta' of 95 I think). 98 + SP's, then xp.

One brand new laptop, a toshiba with xp home. About 6-7 months ago I got about a dozen used laptops, installed various ubuntus on them & gave them away. Still have 6 laptops & 8+ working desktops.

In case anybody wondered, I operated (retired in 2010) heavy equipment, bulldozers, backhoes, etc. and never had need of computers. They have always been toys for me, I enjoy them more 'cause of this reason.

Thats my story & I'm sticking to it, , , , ,

-corne-

(cornemuse = from 'Penguin Island' by Anatole France, a good book to read)
 
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Back in the days at fridays the news journal would come with separate special section (like a magazine) of tech news and computer stuff. I saw a picture of the Abit IC7-MAX3 in there and fell in love with it, that's it. After that it all startedfor me! Check my system specs! :D
 
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