What was your first PC?

[Greenslade]

My first PC was. A Dell Dimension i have no idea of what specs it had on there, only that it had XP on it.I did not know anything about PC,s at the time this was in 2005.It could have been different ,i had to sell my massive collection of vinyl and hundreds of Cd.s.I had to sell them because my landlord was selling up.I did not fancy spending money on storage.So i sold the lot for a giveaway price.£2,000 there were lots of collectables.Why i am mentioning all this was that he would give me a Mac and take 50 from the price thinking back in it he should have given me that anyway.I dare say it was the Original 'Cheese Grater' Power Mac G5 pile of junk that is.
But he said Mac, s were mainly for productivity not for the average user.I know now that is B.S.
I do have a IMAC 27 2017. 3.5 256ssd which i have had for two years now i love it. So what was your first PC?

 

[Audioave10]

2001...A Sony Vaio Pentium MMX 233 Mhz. I don't know the other specs but it had a TV out so it could have been an ATI all-in-wonder card.
Windows 98. The first game that got me excited? Max Payne! & Quake II...I was hooked.

 

[freeagent]

Mine was an HP Pavilion 8570C. I bought it from a friend. It had PIII 450, Voodoo II 16MB card, and an Asus mobo with 64mb ram. I doubled the ram and shortly after that I put a nice ATi card in that let me watch tv and play games That was back in 2002

 

[Bill_Bright]

MITS Altair 8800 from a kit. Sure wish I kept that. I was in the right place and the right time for that (Albuquerque from 1975 to 1982).

Then a C64, modified to support 2 floppy drives (8 and 9).

Then, to celebrate my divorce in 1993, I drove up to the Gateway factory and picked up a Gateway 2000 486DX, my first IBM "clone" and only factory built "PC". Built my own since then.

 

[Audioave10]

Bill...you started from day one of the PC industry and that is impressive.

 

[Tatty_Two]

Commodore Vic 20 circa 1982, 8 bit with a tape cassette data drive and 20 Kb ROM + 5 Kb RAM

 

[Tomgang]

Dont know is this counts, but Commadore 64?

Else it was a prebuild Amitech pc in 2001 with windows XP. Litterly a crappy pc i regret buying. All those thing that died or broke in it. This was also from there i began my custom build pc´s in stead and never looked back on a prebuild pc ever again. All throw things has gotten better today it seems.

 

[delshay]

Amiga 500 when it was very popular

 

[Deleted member 202104]

Commodore Vic 20 circa 1982, 8 bit with a tape cassette data drive and 20 Kb ROM + 5 Kb RAM

Same here. And out of that 5 Kb of RAM, 3583 bytes were available for some good old Commodore Basic.

A whopping 22 characters could be displayed per line. Hours and hours spent in front of a 9" Sony Black & White TV used as a monitor.

 

[68Olds]

In 1988 the wife & I order a Packard-Bell IBM Clone 286 (10 or 12MHz) PC from a DAK catalog. It had an HDD and EGA monitor vs our work computers that were dual floppy & monochrome.

 

[EntropyZ]

I suppose that would have to be the "scrap" computer I found around 2006 which I owned, it had a Pentium 200 MMX on it with a motherboard that had a decent chipset and had around 48MB of RAM equipped, though can't remember any other details about it other than the case still having a turbo button. I had swapped the S3 Trio 2D graphics card with a Matrox Millennium 4MB. I didn't have any 3D accelerator at the time available to me (I barely knew what one was and the difference from the time period a lot of action games were transitioning to 3D rendering). But I could play stuff like The Sims or any other 2D titles, but I could forget about running Unreal or Quake II at a decent framerate.

Technically we had better computers at home, such as a custom built ASUS P4P800-E/Pentium 4 3.0GHz HT Northwood which my dad had from the year before. But it wasn't mine.

My upgrade the same year was a DFI Socket 478 motherboard w/ an Intel Celeron @ 600Mhz, nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32MB and some Hynix 768MB RAM. Which was worlds different!

 

[Bill_Bright]

Bill...you started from day one of the PC industry and that is impressive.

So, you are saying I'm old as dirt? LOL

Again, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. If the Air Force didn't send me to Albuquerque way back then where I just happened to meet the right people, I still would have been interested in computers, but never would have come across the Altair. I would have started out with the C64, maybe the VIC-20.

 

[Audioave10]

So, you are saying I'm old as dirt? LOL

Again, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. If the Air Force didn't send me to Albuquerque way back then where I just happened to meet the right people, I still would have been interested in computers, but never would have come across the Altair. I would have started out with the C64, maybe the VIC-20.

With all do respect, I'm 66 so I can't laugh at you.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Technically a IBM business machine 286 but effectively useful would be a P75 Olivetti envision.
I recall having a 486 and getting a cyrix drop in for it but I can't recall much if anything about it or when.

 

[GerKNG]

my first own! PC was the Medion Titanium MD 8386 XL from 2005.

Pentium 4 640
1GB of RAM
a "Medion Radeon X740 XL" (a X700 Pro with overclocked VRAM)

 

[Deleted member 24505]

First proper PC was a AST advantage 828. P166(no MMX) 8mb ram, 2GB HDD, some video card, tower case.

 

[Greenslade]

Bill...you started from day one of the PC industry and that is impressive.

He sure was i have never seen one of those before

it does not look like any PC i have seen before.

 

[Audioave10]

He sure was i have never seen one of those before

it does not look like any PC i have seen before.

He might have meant this one...

 

[Sithaer]

Well not technically mine but the first 'PC' in our house was a commodore 64 but I don't remember much of it cause I was just a child, I do remember our 486 tho which we had after.
It was my father who bought the first PCs for us and got us into this whole thing, I think he still kinda regrets that idea.

I did not own a PC till I graduated in high school, before that I had a shared PC with my brother which kinda sucked.
My first own PC in 2008 had a Athlon 64 X2 6400+ and a 8800 GT.

 

[Bill_Bright]

He might have meant this one...

Yep! That was it. You had to flip toggles, up for 1 and down for 0.

To code, there were 8 toggle switches, one for each bit. You entered one byte at a time. It took forever. That is probably when I discovered I hated programming. As an electronics tech, I thoroughly enjoyed the hardware aspect. But from then on, I made a career out of avoiding programming. Ironically, my last job working for someone else was in a major software development company. I was one of 10 hardware techs supporting 400 developers.

I think he still kinda regrets that idea.

I bet not. Kids who didn't (and still don't) have that kind of early exposure tend to start out behind and frequently never catch up.

 

[Greenslade]

MITS Altair 8800 from a kit. Sure wish I kept that. I was in the right place and the right time for that (Albuquerque from 1975 to 1982).

Then a C64, modified to support 2 floppy drives (8 and 9).

Then, to celebrate my divorce in 1993, I drove up to the Gateway factory and picked up a Gateway 2000 486DX, my first IBM "clone" and only factory built "PC". Built my own since then.

I bet you never looked back after your divorce Bill. Free to do what you want after that

MITS Altair 8800 from a kit. Sure wish I kept that. I was in the right place and the right time for that (Albuquerque from 1975 to 1982).

Then a C64, modified to support 2 floppy drives (8 and 9).

Then, to celebrate my divorce in 1993, I drove up to the Gateway factory and picked up a Gateway 2000 486DX, my first IBM "clone" and only factory built "PC". Built my own since then.

 

[Sithaer]

I bet not. Kids who didn't (and still don't) have that kind of early exposure tend to start out behind and frequently never catch up.

What I meant is that in his eyes this whole PC thing is a waste of time/money since all we do is play games on it or whatever stuff instead of doing something 'productive' with our lifes.
Hes not saying it but even till this day when I upgrade my PC and buy new hardware with my own money that I worked for I feel like I just committed a crime or whatever bad thing.

He thought that we will grow out of it after a few years when we get older but that never really happened.

I guess if I was making money with a PC related work then it would be different but thats not the case sadly.

 

[Greenslade]

my first own! PC was the Medion Titanium MD 8386 XL from 2005.

Pentium 4 640
1GB of RAM
a "Medion Radeon X740 XL" (a X700 Pro with overclocked VRAM)

You started the same year as me I tried to look your modal up on utube with no luck

 

[Bill_Bright]

What I meant is that in his eyes this whole PC thing is a waste of time/money since all we do is play games on it

Ah. Yeah, I understand. But every generation has their own thing like that. He probably has some stories about his first car, or first decent stereo system. Or his first stereo in his first car!

Free to do what you want after that

I was free - to some extent. But I got the kids. So being a single parent puts a lot of restraints on you too.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Lenovo Thinkpad T500 - not as old as you all veterans, but still fondly remember 6 lb. laptops. Only took 7 minutes to boot XP!

Edit: it ran Battlestations: Midway reasonably well. Between that, Zoo Tycoon, and Bloons Tower Defense, I got hooked on gaming.