What was your first PC?

[stillmatic11]

Intel 486, 66 mhz, 14.4k modem and was using MS-DOS. Played games like DOOM, Wolfenstein, Sango Fighter, Mortal Kombat 2 and Lotus.

[infamouskid]

mine was a 486 dx/2 66.
it played leisure suit larry and duke nukem, willy beamish, sango fighter and one must fall.
and i was a DOS Shell user who skipped windows 3.1 and went right into win95.

[recordman]

c=64 w/ 1541 (170k) floppy. Good times.

[Keas]

in January of 96 after returning a couple i settled on an Acer Aspire that had a really cool designed front cover (forget model number) with a p100 and 1mb of video card memory. i had to exchange it 3 times because the hard drive at home made alot of noise when active but not in store and finally found out that the model was using both Maxtors (the noisy one) and fujitsu's , staples where i purchased it was so nice they opened 4 boxes and comps to find a machine that had a Fujitsu in it.

Got the build your own bug when i found out i couldn't upgrade the video card except for upping the memory to 2 megs so bought a new case and a Matrox Mystique 4meg (WOOT!!) and moved everything to it so i could play Diablo the way it should be.

I still wish Matrox was a legit player in the gaming market

[ssbtech]

Mine was a Compaq Presario CDS944. 486DX4-90, 8MB RAM. 540MB HDD.

I still remember the serial number from calling tech support so many times.

[malbadon]

....From there I went to an 4.77 GHz XT with a 10 Meg Seagate Hard Drive.
.....Then I upgraded to a 286 8 GHz with 1 Meg RAM.

I like how no one caught that Gee had GHz computers back in the 80's It's like we've become conditioned to disbelieve how slow our old computers were

I'll join the list of people who started on the Vic 20 with a tape drive, then moved to a 286/12 for ages, then finally my first 486, a DX4-100 (on which I paid $220 for an extra 8mb of ram to play Wing Commander 2 if I recall)

[viss]

First PC was some custom build..can't remember what it was. I remember it was constantly infected with some virus. I hadn't started using the internet yet so how I got it was beyond me. It ran Windows 98 and I played SkiFree and Sim Town on it endlessly. But it was discovering Napster that changed my life! I had 25MB left on the computer and had to choose and delete songs because I didn't have enough space. And waited 20 minutes for a 3MB song to download..those were the days!

[deltone]

Colecovision Adam. I didn't really use it as I had no interest but my husband hacked around on it.

[bembol]

Our parent ls bought us this Generic PC's, I can't remember but it's similar to like MDG. I'm not even going to try time remember the specs. LOL

As for myself, I remember my boy and I at work saw this Dell ad at the back of Toronto Sun. A few days later I have the 17" Dell 8100 Desktop. He ordered a 19" and a bit better specs. I think it cost me $2,100 and his was $2,300.

All I remember is the quality wasn't we expected. After a few months Dell had to replace the Motherboard.

[kaws]

486DX33 then upgraded it to a 486DX266 with 8MB ram, sound card and 2x CDROM! So awesome.. I really liked the MS Encarta that came with the CDROM and Sound card bundle.

After that, it was a Pentium MMX 166.

[Techgeek32]

Few things that I remember of the first PC my parent bought to me is that it was pentium and had a very small HD. The OS was windows 95. I remember I wanted to install Nero one-two years after I got it and I couldn't because Nero was too big for my HD!

[Magoomba]

My worst purchase wasn't a $600 10MB hard drive, but rather one of the very first CD burners.
A Sony 2X CD-R for $900. Every other blank CD was a coaster. And that was when blank CDs were $20 each!
That's what I call Epic Fail.

[Mark77]

My worst purchase wasn't a $600 10MB hard drive, but rather one of the very first CD burners.
A Sony 2X CD-R for $900. Every other blank CD was a coaster. And that was when blank CDs were $20 each!
That's what I call Epic Fail.

Yeah I borrowed a CD burner that basically was one of the first Philips units from a friend (he got it at an Air Force auction for about $100 -- the thing originally cost the AF $16k apparently). The thing had a SCSI interface, was the size of basically a full-sized AT desktop computer, and basically if the screensaver wasn't disabled, or if practically anything happened on the host, would produce a coaster.

There's some stuff I miss about the "old days", but certainly not CD burners.

[time space]

Anyone remember "The Toronto Computer Paper"? These days, it seems to have been replaced with "papers" selling condos.

I think it would be more accurate to say it was replaced by the internet.

[Jimbobs]

Nah, could be me. My first PC was a TRS-80 Color Computer that I bought in 1981.

I may have you by a few years. The first personal computer I ever worked on was a HP 9100A in the mid-1970's which looked like a huge cash register: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HP0100A_1.jpg By 1981, I was working with the Motorola 6800 Microprocessor Development Kit (MEK6800D2) writing assemby code for real time systems, burning EPROM's etc. The next pc I had was an Apple IIe bought in 1983 complete with dual floppy drives and later a Z80 card so that it would run CP/M. Then on to the whole IBM PC family, including DEC's, Compaqs, Toshiba's, as well as various Apples .....

The thing is I never actually "owned" any of these because I could play with them all day at work. The first home computer I bought for my kids in the early '90's was a PC clone with 486DX33 processor. I think the chassis of that unit is still in the basement.

As for the Internet, I worked on that project when it was limited to academic research and military use only and later was involved in the first commercial roll out in Canada in 1993. I used to dial in to a number in Buffalo to show my kids how to connect to universities around the world - text only, of course!