In what year did you purchase your first PC and what was the model and specs on it?


Mine: (Purchased in 1992)

Packard Bell
486sx-20
6 MB RAM
120 MB hard drive
Oak Technologies video adapter

1989-90

Tandy 1000TX 286 8 mhz
640kb RAM
3.5 and 5.25 floppys
no hard drive

Good enough to play "Jetfighter" and "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat" which was all I cared about.

I had both a 386 and 486, but those were given to me.

The first one I purchased was around 1995?

Packard Bell Pentium 90
8 MB Ram (upgraded to 24! The first of many, many computer upgrades)
4 MB Cirrus Logic Video Card


Don't recall other details aside from the price. $2,000!

an IBM XT that I guess was 4 Mhz and had 256Kb RAM and had 2 floppy disks

Mid to late 80's, Commodores. That's either my 64 or VIC-20 (I had both)...




1989? Tandy 1000SX, 384K or 640K (don't remember), single 5-1/4" DD (no HDD), no math co-processor and CGA monitor...




1993. My baby! 486DX2/66 upgraded from 8 to 20MB RAM (for hundreds of dollars), Genoa VL graphics w/upgraded (1994) ViewSonic 17" CRT [next pic] and Soundblaster CD multimedia (perfect for AutoCAD R12)...

Apple II sometime around 1978

A 386 DX40 with 2 MB ram and a 40 mb hard disk. I couldn't afford either a CD drive or a sound card so it was the PC speaker for a while. To be honest most games came on 3.5 floppies in those days so the CD drive wasn't high on my shopping list.

My first games were Falcon 3,the original B-17,Gunship and Strike Commander. The latter required a second hard disk to be fitted because with the expansion pack it was hard to get it on the 40mb drive.

Date would have been around 1992.

C64 master race!

Circa 1985.



First actual IBM pattern PC was a 486 around 1993, although I didn't use it much for gaming and didn't get an actual dedicated gaming PC until 1999.

1985 was a fun year for me! I was 13 and my fondest memories of that year are:

Back to the Future
British New Wave music (ie Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, Human League, etc,)
Rowdy Roddy Piper and WWF wrestling in general
GI Joe
Transformers
Boston Celtics (yeah, yeah, we lost to LA but it was still a great season).
Miami Vice

A 1998 or 1999 Packard Bell

Intel Celeron 400mhz
Voodoo 3 graphic card

I don't remember anything else. I was a teenager and it was my cobaye for a lot of tests, hardware and software. It last something like 6 monthes

The next was in 2000, a Pentium 3 800mhz with a Nvidia GeForce 2 32mb I think. Changed in 2001 for a Pentium 4 1.5 ghz with rambus, but it was working well when I sold it, this time

like others mid 80's vic 20 up to a C-64 ,,Some wheres in the late 80's an IBM 8088 machine with two big floppy drives and no hard drive ever since then about every year or so had to put together to play some new war game//or a sim...And all the titles Chucky mentioned in his post were my first ones..

1985...graduating HS (a freaking miracle) and then technically becoming an adult (Aug. 31). Being that 18 was still the legal drinking age in Louisiana, I wasted no time in making a complete ass of myself, and on numerous occasions. I no longer had to hide my drinking but it almost cost me everything. I found myself alone by October and quickly cleaned my #%&*$# up by Thanksgiving. Wouldn't relapse until I started listening to Grunge.

1989...ringside seats at the Omni (Atlanta) for Wrestlemania (Jake the Snake Roberts, Macho Man Randy Savage, The Ultimate Warrior, finale: Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant...is what I remember).

Here's some not-so-awesome nostalgia...

The responsiveness of this site to me feels like I'm back on dial-up. Or is it just my crappy satellite ISP?

No Mark,that's how it's been for a little while.

I can still remember when I got my hands on Falcon 3. Large,heavy box full of goodies. Loads of reading material. In fact I bought Falcon 3 before I had a PC with the intention of trying it out on my step-brothers IBM. He was rather perturbed when he discovered how much free mem it needed to run. He then introduced me to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. When my own PC arrived he became my technical support for some while until I got DOS figured out. Now those were great days for PC gaming!

Sorry for the nostalgia rant

Apple 2 clone made by Franklin back in 1982. Paid way to much at the the time. $1489.89

1985, Spectrum 48k+

November 1988. Amiga 500 (A500) with a built in 3.5" floppy drive. Don't remember what monitor I had.

Pretty useless wasn't it?

I got mine in 79. Tried to teach myself basic LOL....

Text based Star Trek game I remember.

Early adopter anyway.

Worked with a PC-AT and then Mac's in the mid eighties.

Didn't own another computer till I got my first laptop in 1998.

I have been building my own PC's since 2001.

In 1994 I got a Mac Performa 630CD as my first home computer.

Then in 1997 I got my first PC: Sony VAIO PCV-220 PII 266mhz WITH MMX TECHNOLOGY...lol. I can't remember too many other specs but it had a 4mb ATI Radeon card. I eventually got the Voodoo II 12mb on the pass thru cable. 15" monitor.

Good times!

Megabyte Computer (local shop in town at the time) circa 1993:
486DX2-66Mhz (with the Turbo button!)
8mb RAM (upgraded to 16mb later)
120mb hard drive (upgraded to a 400mb hard drive later)
ISA ET4000 1mb video card (upgraded to a 4mb Matrox card later)
Samtron? 14" CRT VGA monitor
1X caddy-loading CD-ROM drive (upgraded to a 8X CD-ROM later)
ISA Sound Blaster 16 sound card with the midi port
14.4k baud modem (upgraded to a 36.6k baud modem later)

It came with:

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (CD-ROM!)
Jetfighter II (originally on 5.25" floppy! Got it upgraded to 3.5" disks later)
The Secret of Monkey Island (CD-ROM!)
Red Storm Rising (CD-ROM!)
F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0 (CD-ROM!)
Indianapolis 500 The Simulation (3.5" disk)
Megarace (CD-ROM!)
Lemmings (3.5" disk)

And some others I don't remember...

Actually I got a lot of turn based strategy games from SSI. Lousy graphics, but lots of fun.

1992

Packard Bell 486sx 25MHz, 4MB RAM, 170MB hard drive, and a CD drive. That CD drive ran the hell out of Rebel Assault before I graduated to X-Wing and Falcon 3.

Looking back at my receipts, I think I may have done something similar...

Looks like mine came with 8 x 1MB simms, and then my next receipt shows 4 x 4MB ($624.00). I don't remember how RAM could be matched back then, if I replaced 4 of the 1MB simms with 4MB simms for a total of 20 MB? I'll go with that for now.

My first was a C64, some time in the 80's. Including monitor, disk drive, tape drive, and an interface so I could connect an Epson dot matrix printer. I do recall spending a large amount of money for a word processor and a spreadsheet program for it. I will have to find the paperwork to properly identify the first real PC that I bought in 1994 but it was around $4k.

8088 5" floppy. It is still in the basement. it had no hard drive only Ram, some absurd low number like 760mbs. It has a 12" monochromatic monitor. I upgraded it with more memory through a pci slot and a 2.5" floppy. It would probably still boot up if I plugged it in. Of course DOS was the OS.

S!Blade<><

It was an AST 486/66, 16 MB (the extra 8MB cost almost 10% of the total price), 5.25 and 3.5 floppy, 340MB HD, CD (that was an extra $445), 15 inch color monitor. Total with tax was $4240 in March of 1994. I ate grilled cheese and ramen noodles for a very long time.

EDIT: In retrospect, that might have been my most expensive computer even compared to my top end rigs in recent years.

More like 760 KB????

Ok LOL, it has been 20+years.

S!Blade<><

Closer to almost 40 years.

Yea, I was just stating the first computer I had. My brother gave it to me 20 or 30 years ago as something he pieced together for me to begin learning programming on. It was slow and painful, with Pascal torturing me through it.
Now, I am curious to try to boot it, but I don't really know if I would have a clue as to how to do it anymore. I think it used a boot floppy if I remember correctly. Man, that makes me feel old.
I will have to go dig it out and post a picture.

S!Blade<><

Tandy Color Computer 2, got it in 1985.

Taught myself BASIC and had to write almost every piece of software I ran on it (aside from handful of the cartridge based games I had). All simple programs, of course, but the lessons (and typing skills) were useful in later years.

I still have the Color Computer 2, and it still works!

My first was an Olivetti 1100 about 1987 ?

Used to play Hack on it, a text based D and D game. I think the next was a 286 that played "Lounge Suit Larry" and Civ1.

Packard Bell Pentium 75 1995 $3000 Shortly after, got Fleet Defender Gold and Suncom HOTAS. Pretty excited :mycomputer

Marc..:

1982 ZX81. Returned unused as incorrectly ordered product, replaced by:
1982/83 ZX Spectrum release 1 48K (light grey keys) was still in regular use when I bought "Lightning Sim" for the princely sum of £1.99 in 1988 (still a game I play in emulator for the nostalgia hit, and to play with analogue flight controls in a keyboard control system... not seen better even to this day - the dogfights were fun, but the 'mission' - to intercept two nuclear armed backfires escorted by MiG23 was brutally hard, with limited time, fuel and armament - never did succeed and RTB). Also Gunship and M1TP

1987 (ish) Atari ST520. The main title I played was Falcon ST

1991 Speccy still in use, but bought a 386/387 with 4MB to run the newly released Falcon 3, amongst others. System board 'exploded' while in warranty, but a replacement was unavailable... so it was returned as a 486DX33, later upgraded with a DX(2)66 and 16MB of RAM for an obscene price for modest gains.

1999 Major update to K6-2 333 and a AGP graphics card, used with Flanker 2 and IL2.

2004 ish Whole system replacement, P4 2400 based.

2010 current system built - Core i5, GF 420, 8GB - since upgraded with GTX970 and i7 3770K, 16GB. Currently okay, but a whole system replacement is likely to be necessary to get more performance if needed.

I had that system - a hundred bucks down and a fifty bucks a month!

But before that I had an Amstrad. It was billed as a word processor more than a PC, but it ran BASIC.

1987 Tandy 1000 TX
8 Mhz
TGA graphics
640 kb RAM
CM-5 RGB color monitor

Eventually upgraded to 768 kb RAM and added a 5.25 drive, Adlib sound card and a Paradise VGA card, which allowed me to play Ultima 6, which was a chore, because it required me splitting the 3.5 inch disks on multiple 5.25's so I could swap stuff in and out. Basically the game was never intended to be played on a floppy, but... I found a way.

I didn't buy it--my parents gave it to me in middle school. I've never bought a computer for myself, actually. Ever. I've been building my own since the 90s.

1984: AMSTRAD 464

Why did I buy it? Word processing and games and price ($Same price as a Commodore but it came with its own green screen monitor, colour was avail but cost more of course)
Most played games? Lords of Midnight (turn based strategy), Zork (duh). Cassette tapes took about ten minutes to load a game up.
First ever flight sim? Dambusters (plan your ingress, instrument panel, letterbox style views, dodge the flak, balloons and fighters (you could man pilot, bombadier, gunner positions), get altitude, airspeed, attitude, timing right, blow up the dam)



The Amstrad CPC 464 was one of the most successful computers in Europe. More than two million computers were sold. Despite its ordinary characteristics (like those of the Sinclair Spectrum and often less interesting than those of the others like the Commodore 64 or Atari XL/Xe series) or odd features (like video memory or strange floppy disk format), it was very popular because of its really low price and its interesting commercial concept : all peripherals were sold together (like the Commodore PET that was sold years earlier): CPU/keyboard, tape recorder, monitor (monochrome green or colour).

A huge number of programs and peripherals were developed for this machine. It ran AmsDos (Amstrad's Operating System). AmsDos was completely embedded in the Basic using so-called RSX commands starting with |, but it could not format disks, you needed a special application for that. The 464 also could use CP/M 2.2 or 3.0 when used with an external Floppy disk unit (3" Hitachi, 180 KB / face). A lot of great CP/M software was adapted for the Amstrad CPC.

About 42 KB RAM was available for the user, the video memory and the ROM were mapped on the same addresses with a dedicated chip to switch the memory banks automatically.

I stayed loyal to Amstrad for about ten years - two or three longer than I should have...

My first ever portable/notebook was this little 64K RAM 256K ROM wonder, the NC100. Only for word processing. Showed about ten lines of text as you were typing. You hooked it up to a monitor and disc drive back at your desk.

I was however the envy of other journalists who were still lugging around Compaq 'portables' the size of a briefcase all the way into the early 90s. (They did have an inbuilt modem though so that you could phone through your stories, which made me jealous! You physically put the phone handset into two cups on the side of the machine so it could pick up the audio analogue of the modem screeching and beeping.)



Internet says it came out in 1992, but I remember using it at a place I lived in in 1991, so someone's memory is faulty!

Mine was a Pentium 100 with an 800 megabyte hard drive. 1998. I think it had 16 megs of ram. I can't remember anything else about it now. Bought it from a friend who built it from spare parts for me. Actually I physically built it under his instruction. I'd had plenty of time on way older computers (Atari 400 and 800, various Commodores, Apple IIe, oh and plenty of 386 and 486, can't remember the others), but that was the first one I actually owned.

I actually "gamed on the internet" in 1983 at my mother's workplace with some text/turn based game called "Adventure" on a green screen monitor. Can't remember the connection speed, but it was in baud, not kbps.

There'd sometimes be lag just on the next text. Probably take many minutes to download even 5 kilobyte jpeg file back then (if you even could have).

IBM PC in 1983. It was the second version of the motherboard, that could go up to 256K of RAM on the mb. Bought it bare bones, and added two half-height floppy drives, and an AST six pack card. That got it to 640K of RAM, and added a real time clock, serial port, parallel port and game port. Ran it with a green monochrome monitor for handling word processing and spreadsheets, plus a CGA color monitor for MS Flight Simulator and games. Had both PC DOS 1.1 and CPM-86 1.0 for Operating Systems. The two OS's were very similar, with CPM-86 being more verbose (which made it easier to use), but PC DOS (MS DOS) won out with IBM behind it.

With a whopping 640K of RAM, I would typically allocate some to a printer buffer and some to a RAM disk!

There was an add-on board to allow Apple programs to run, but it turned out not to be compatible with the floppy drives I had installed. Later on, I added a 20 Megabyte Hard Drive after the prices had gotten more reasonable.

I skipped the 286 (IBM AT and compatibles), and waited for the 386's for the next machines.

1982 Atari 800
48K RAM
1.7MHz 65C02 processor
Antic, CTIA and Pokey graphics and sound chips
TV for monitor

Later bought a floppy drive that stored 88K per disc, a modem and a daisy wheel printer.

And the saddest part of all that? I still have it all in my garage

I can't remember all the details, but it was 1998 and it was a Gateway PC with a Pentium type of processor running at around 500 MHz. I knew so little about computers that I was shocked that my first flight sim would not run properly because I didn't have a good enough GPU in it. And thus began the never-ending story of upgrading.

Heh, your specs were very close to mine and you bought your POS Packard Bell the same year I did!

ZX80 in 1980 modified so it had white txt on black screen rather than the black on white.
Commodore 64 with disk drive
then BBC B and the cassette tape was faster than the disk drive on the commodore 64.
At college I was working with a mixture of AIM 65s and a Cromenco System 3 with 8" floppy disks and at night school it was BBC Micros in a network.
Then the Commodore Amiga 500
at that point I built my first PC a 286 with a 50MB HDD
Then a 386SX with a 387 co-processor and that takes me up to about 1992
I went AMD for a while with the first Athlon 64 in 2003 and I have used a 64 bit operating system ever since

Now I am using an Intel i7 965 which was the highest spec CPU I could get 10 years ago, it has been showing it's age for a while especially with it's 24GB memory limit and the motherboard's lack of support for dual GPU cards but it still runs most of what I throw at it, the motherboard can be flaky and the power button circuit no longer works so I have to use the power button that is built into the MB

IBM XT 8088 clone circa 1985/6? Had twin 5 1/4 slots for the A and B drives.
Main thing I remember about it is that it took forever to run payroll for our 15 employees.


Wheels

Now I had a Xerox Kurzweil 68000 daughter board for my 386 PC, it was designed to read and translate scanned documents and also speak them out loud.

I was doing volunteer work for a government sponsored scheme to help people with disabilities use computers and IT, it was called LEAD, Linking Education And Disability.

The 68000 daughter board and software was donated by the local nuclear power station to another scheme that helped the unemployed train/re-train for work. The people on that scheme, well lets say some were not the shiniest tool in the box and one person had wiped the HDD with the software and drivers for the 68000 board so he could get more games on it. Luckily I got there in time before the data I needed had been over written and I managed to pull most of it back off the HDD and with a bit of cap in hand managed to get the missing bits of software from Xerox. Finding all the parts of that system which had gone to the "Job Creation Scheme" was a right nightmare as they had split it up and were using it as an ordinary scanner.

So at one time my 80386sx had a 68000 co-processor

I think we got it at Circuit City, in Shelby, NC.

A 286 in 1986 that cost ~$7000.