First computer I remember working on was one my father bought back in 1987.
It was an Olivetti M19 PC that had an Intel 8088 CPU running at 8 MHz (I remember it had a turbo switch at the back that allowed you to switch it back to the standard 4.77 MHz but, we never used it since the PC was already slow enough 🤣).
It came with the maximum memory of 640KB installed, had a 12" monochrome (green screen) with two 360KB floppy disk drives which we upgraded 2 years later to accommodate a 20MB hard disk drive in the second floppy disk drive bay.
I remember we received an array of software and manuals with that PC. That is where I learned how to use MS-DOS (version 3.2 being the version this PC shipped with).
Sadly, the PC died a couple of years ago and he gave it away.

In late 1991 he finally upgraded his PC to an AMD386DX-40 with 4MB of RAM, Super VGA monitor and 120 MB HDD (the soundcard came later). I still have most of that PC's components.

well the first computer I ever used (but cant remember doing so) was my dad's PC when I was 2 or so years old (so I wasn't really using it , more like messing around and pressing buttons) it had a monochrome screen (the text was orange ) and probably used a 286 This would have been in 1991 or so .

The first PCs I can remember using was the 2 PCs at my grandparents' houses. One of them I think was a 386, and I played Prince of Persia and Tetris on it quite often . The other PC was used to play Doom , Wolf3D , Aladdin , Lion King, Duke Nukem2 , it had WIndows 3.1. I would have to assume it had some sort of 486 in it, since it played Doom quite nicely.

The first computer I actually owned would be been in 1997 for my 8th birthday. My dad built a Pentium Pro machine with 32MB of RAM (I wasnt sure exactly if it was a Pentium Pro , but I can remember being told "its better than a Pentium , but not as good as a PII" and it didnt have MMX , leading me to believe it was a Pentium Pro). I doubt too many kids had a Pentium Pro system that they owned, which makes this pretty unique.

I first saw a PC in 2nd grade at my school, and was instantly captivated by it. Trough pressuring and a little emotional blackmail I got my parents to source me my first x86 PC - a 486 class machine built by a romanian company called REL Computers (they're still around, they just don't make PCs anymore). It was a 133MHz Cyrix 5x86, VIA chipset board, 8MB of ram, Cirrus Logics PCI video card, and 800MB Quantum Fireball HDD. No sound card, no CD-ROM drive. It also came with a 14" color CRT monitor and an OKI Microline dot-matrix printer. About the CPU - yes, I know, these are considered very rare now, and yes, it's possible it was actually a oveclocked 4x 5x86-120GP, but whenever I try to picture it in my mind I remember a green heatspreader with Cyrix 5x86-133GP written on it and a fan on top witch I had to clean two-three times a year and even replaced once. I got the machine for my birthday in October 1995, and have used it until late 1999, when I upgraded to an AMD K6-II.

I don't have any pictures of my first PC, but the case looked exactly like this one (sans the CD-ROM drive):

The case was made by Sunshine computer. I've been trying to find one like it, but I could only get a hold of the slightly newer model. I played the shit out of Dune II, Volfield, Jazz, Doom, Supaplex, C&C and lots of other 90s games - good times 😁

The 586 went thought several upgrades - first the ram was expanded to 16MB and the Quantum Fireball HDD was replaced with a 2GB Western Digital (1996). In 1997 I expanded the ram to 32MB and bought my first sound card, a Yamaha OPL3-SAx board made by some chinese company ( Genius SoundMaker - still use it in one of my builds). To go with it, I borrowed a 24x creative CD-ROM drive from a defective PC my dad had at work. In 1998 I got it a voodoo 2 witch allowed me to play quake (GL_Quake - regular quake still ran rather poorly) for the first time at acceptable framerates (not great, but VERY playable). All upgrades that went into the PC were purchased by me, using pocket money saved up from school lunches and some money I earned working part-time at a PC repair shop in my home town.

The K6 was purchased by my folks, as a surprise, and required my old 586 as a trade-in / rebate. Back then, they asked me "If you could get a new computer, what would you like to have in it?" - and of course, I asked for the then newly released Pentium II, a Riva TNT, 64MB of ram and a 4GB hard disk drive. What I got is what my parents could afford - a 450MHz K6-2, 64Mb of ram, 4GB HDD, and a VIA MVP4 motherboard with on board sound and video. I was both excited and disappointed by the new machine - sure, the CPU was WAY faster than the 586 - but the on board sound was of poor quality, and the on board-video would perform about as well as my old Creative 3D Blaster II on the 586 (trident blade 3D - not a bad card of an on board solution, did Quake 2 in openGL at 640x480 flawlessly).

I turned it on, expecting all my data and my 3D Blaster to be inside - they were not. Of course, when my folks told me what happened with my old machine, I threw a fit. For the Voodoo 2 alone they could have gotten the motherboard and ram in trade (yes, 3D cards were THAT expensive back then in my country) but my parents couldn't really be blamed, because they had no idea about the value of PC hardware and what was inside my computer. I thanked them for the wonderful gift, and politely asked them to take me to the shop they got the new PC from so I could re-negotiate the deal, and get the stuff off the HDD from my old computer. They didn't get the machine from the shop I usually worked for, so I wouldn't find out about the surprise. The other shop had appraised my 3D Blaster at 10% of it's real value, and had made my parents buy another AT case and PSU when there was in fact no need to. After I threatened to return the new PC, the salesman offered to return my Voodoo2 and the Genius Soundmaker, but also replaced the 450MHz K6-2 with a 400MHz K6-2 and the 64MB stick with a 32MB one. I didn't even mention the fact that there was no need to make my parents buy a new AT case and PSU.

In time, I added more ram to the K6 - it had 128mb at one point. I added another voodoo 2 (also a creative CT6670) - the only possible upgrade path since the motherboard had no AGP port and PCI cards like voodoo 3 and geforce 2 cost about 50% more then their AGP counterparts and were very hard to find. The CPU was overclocked to 450MHz and was used at that frequency for at least 2 years.

Most memorable games I played on my K6 were Quake 2, Unreal, C&C Tiberian Sun, Dungeon Keeper 2 and Homeworld (my favorite game ever).

Later in ~2002-2003 I replaced the K6 with an 850MHz AMD Duron / KT133 mobo (Matsonic I think), ATX case+psu and a radeon 7000. Kept my ram (witch by then had been upgraded to 128MB) + 4GB samsung HDD (witch I still have! an the thing still works perfectly!) and of course my 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 SLi setup. I still have the Voodoo 2 cards, the SLi cable and the pass-trough cable. I worked so hard for the first voodoo 2 card, I couldn't bare to sell it, and never have. The two voodoo 2 cards now sit in my P3 V2 SLi win98 box and see weekly use.

After that, I went troughs so many PCs - KT333 / XP 2400+ / Radeon 9000 - later upgraded to a Barton 2600+ and a 256Mb FX 5200 (back then i was under the impression that more vram = faster video card). I upgraded this when I won a Gigabyte nForce 3 board in a Red Alert contest when I was 18 and traded in my barton + mb for a socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+. A few years later, I upgraded again - this time to an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ on top of an Nforce 4 (Asus I think) with an 6600GT. Shorly after I upgraded to a 6000+ with a 7900GT (AMD fetish, I admit it).

My first intel PC was a Q6600 I got as a Christmas present (the CPU only) from one of my uncles. Again I traded in the old CPU and mobo for a LGA 775 MSI P35 Neo-2, and sourced me a built by nvidia 8800GTX sample from a friend who worked at a romanian PC magazine. This machine lasted for a while - it got 4GB of ram, a Q9550 and two radeon 2900XT furnaces (lovely cards - quite a bit cheaper than the 8800GTX witch died after a year of use and performed similarly).

The most expensive PC I ever owned, and the only top of the line PC I ever bought was a skt 1366 core i7 with 6GB of Corsair XMS3 DDR3, a GTX 480, Antec truepower quattro 850w, Thermaltake Shark all aluminum tower (witch I still have) and twin 250GB HDDs in raid. Other than that, I had a Phenom X4 960, a FX 8230, a i5 2500k then 3570k.

The last desktop I owned was an LGA 2011 i7 3820 / 16GB Corsair Vengeance, two R9 280x cards in CF (initially two 7950 cards inherited from the i5 above), 128GB Samsung SSD, 2TB WD caviar green, Gigabyte X58-UD3, OCZ Fatal1ty 750w psu all stuffed in a Cooler Master HAF XB. I sold that last year so I could go mobile (I spend at least 4 nights a month at the hospital).

Still have a few pics of my last desktop:

Same machine but with 3x Sapphire HD 7950 in it for funzies 😁

My current rig is a Asus ROG G751JY (i7 4710HQ / GTX 980m). I do miss tinkering with and customizing a desktop, but I prefer having my machine with me in the on call room.

tl;dr - started on a 586.

First used (early 90's) - BBC Micro at school
First owned (1992) - Amstrad CPC 464 w/ colour monitor
First proper family PC (1999) - Time AMD k6-2 500MHz ATi Rage 128 integrated 128MB ram
First own uni 'built to order' PC (2003) - AMD XP 2600+(?) MX440 ASRock pile of junk
First self built PC - cant remember sckt 939 a couple of times sckt 775 > fast forward AM3 Phenom II 550 Radeon 4830 > lots of cheaps builds again (kept buying and selling in between) > Sandybridge GTX 960

My first computer experience was a Philips P2000 at the last year of elementary school. But we only used it once. Later i got introduced to great systens like the c64, msx, commodore pc-1 a philips xt clone and some more p2000 at my friends places.
These where great times. Al those different systems and os's.
Our first home computer was a Schneider CPC-464 with monochrome display. Only had one game, rick dangerous and played it to death. Also did a lot of basic on that machine. Typing in codelists from magazines only to discover they wouldn't run because of errors in the listing.
Our first pc was a Philips p2230 12.5mhz 1 mb cga monochrome 20mb ide hdd and 3.5" diskdrive and a star lc10 printer.
Would love to get one of those again. But they where only build on year.
My first "upgrade" was a diy covox cable. Had great fun with it making music with modedit.
Remember the days that we went to a local computerclub. Dragging our pc with amplifier inside. All those amiga guys where clueless why we had a amplifier. Until started playing modfiles and asked the amiga guys for modfiles.
Later i added a 8bit adlib compatible soundcard to the system, followed by a 256kb 16 vga card. Halve a year later i had the money for a vga monitor and i could use my vga card.
Last 2 upgrades where upgrading memory to 4 mb and a 2 hdd.that i had to glue inside the case because the system had only place for 1 hdd. A lot of systems followed.

If my family's Atari 2600 doesn't count ( and it shouldn't) then my first computer I ever used would be the IBM PCjr's at my elementary school. I remember using logo writer software and some game where you had to solve math problems to escape from some dungeon... All in 4-color CGA.

uhn... a MSX, from a local brand, named Gradiente

The first computer I ever used was an 8k Commodore PET circa 1984 or so although I'd played on a friend's 2600 a year before. The previous owner of the machine sold it to my father because he'd upgraded to a 32k PET and twin disk drive. Funnily enough some 25 years later when the original owner retired he got in contact with my father and donated his 32k PET to me because my dad had mentioned how I'm interested in old tech. Our old 8k died some time in the 90s - I think the CRT eventually failed, but the original owner was so careful about preserving his stuff that the 32k machine works fine today.

I had to do the internal mod to get sound but software worked fine once I'd learned how to load games from disk - the 8k PET used only tapes and I'd never owned a disk-based Commodore before. In the 90s we eventually got an XT clone machine and I jumped on the PC bandwagon from then on, learning DOS and gradually upgrading my home-built PCs.

First home computer was a Spectravideo 318, then Vic 20, MSX.

Moved on to an Amstrad PCW, which was the first 'proper computer' I did some serious programming on. Lovely machine, even if it's high res mono and a tad slow.

My first PC was an Amstrad 2286, ran lots of software on it, and some of my favourites such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Ultima VI, and Prince of Persia for the first time. I finished WC2 on it as well, but really, it was too slow for that. It also had an unusual video card that supported everything from CGA, Hercules to VGA/MCGA.

The 486 (DX33, VLB) heralded proper OS experimentation - OS/2 was my main operating system, but also dabbled with Linux, BSD and others. I still have it, and will continue to use it as my low end retro box. Ultima VII was awesome.

The remainder of systems are less memorable. I kept my Supermicro 440GX based P3 system for a long, long time (till 2006), finally leaving it with a dual P3 1GHz and FireGL 8800 (Radeon 8500). Of the pentium and Cyrix MII systems, plus the pentium 4 used to drive a projector, they didn't have the power, flexibility or longevity.

Standout moments were :

First SoundBlaster Pro - great music at the time.
Maths coprocessor in the 486DX33 - a fractal render on the 286 went from 40 hours to 15 minutes!
True colour graphics in the 486!
First CDROM
First CD writer (bloody expensive at the time)
Having proper multitasking in OS/2
Voodoo2 - there's not a lot it's worth playing on it now, but at the time having full speed Quake 2 was stunning.
Getting online with a 28.8 modem, around 1994
ADSL, in 2003.
Going from a dual P3 to a Core2Duo with a fast PCI-e graphics card was pretty pleasant, if not quite of the 286->486 transition.
Virtualisation is definitely interesting to play with, I rate that as a standout change too. SSDs and virtual CDROMs probably count, too.

Well it's difficult for me to see any impressive moments after Athlon XP era... with my latest upgrading configuration (Athlon 64 3500+) I actually decided to let others upgrade to not see any reasons to do it.
I still think that computer saw best consumers moments in the 1995-2000 years where many improvements were made in both cpu,chipsets,gpu departments...

My first PC was a Videoton TVC back in 1987 (I was in the first grade of the primary school). It was the family PC, and at that time there were loads of Novotrade (later became Appaloosa Interactive) casette games around. The TVC was made to the hungarian market, with a keyboard that had the full hungarian ABC keys (with accents like áíüúüöüúóé).

Second PC was a Commodore 64 in 1988. I started programming on it with BASIC then moved on to some Assembly. We played a lot on it, and I also bought a hungarian Action Replay MK VI clone cartridge (named PLOFI), so I was able to explore the inner workings of the C=64.

Third PC was a 486 DX2/50 with 4 MB RAM in april 1994. It was used by my dad as a work computer (he used it to create name cards; some small print work, etc.) It was the machine I started study x86 programming on. From Turbo Basic, then Turbo Pascal to x86 real mode assembly. And of course my brother and I played a lot of Mortal Kombat against each other on it. 😀

The fourth PC was a Cyrix 200+ with 32 MB EDO RAM, back in september 1997. These were the secondary school years.I played a lot on it too, while started to dig deeper into x86 assembly. In the latter nineties I was able to disarm some simple DOS resident viruses with a plain debug.exe. I've also written some small antivirus applications for these viruses. Those were the good old times. 😀

Gonna resurrect this stale thread! Don't mind if I do. 😀

The first computer I used was my dad's home-built Intel i486 DX2/66 PC way back mid 1992, containing a whopping 2 MB of system memory, a 60 MB HDD, MS-DOS 5.0, some generic, run-of-the-mill 256k VGA card and both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disk drives, both high density of course.

This was the machine that exposed me to PC gaming. I used to play Commander Keen while my dad played Wolfenstein 3D. My dad stuck a 9600 baud modem in the machine for accessing BBSes of the time, then a few months after that, took the PC to his office for work.

Then in Christmas of 1994, I got a Pentium 90 class PC (Quantex branded) with 16 MB memory, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, 700 odd MB hard disk, and a smattering of games and edutainment titles. It also came equipped with a MAD16 sound card, which by all counts, was a decent sound card for Windows applications. It however, suffered horribly under DOS. The Sound Blaster Pro compatibility was lackluster and some games didn't even detect the thing properly. My dad fortunately replaced the MAD16 with an honest-to-goodness Sound Blaster 16 after I finished the 1st grade in mid 1996. Needless to say, my DOS sound woes were a thing of the past after that. 😀

A random picture of my brother and I at the PC in early 1995

After this, the rest is history. I was hooked.

First computer I owned was 286 running @ 16mhZ. It came in a huge generic AT case with switch on the side and "Casper" color VGA monitor. I don't recall the rest of the specs, but I do recall some of the games I found on the hard drive:

- Supaplex;
- Cadaver;
- Eye of Beholder 2;
- Some boulder dash clone.

It might sound funny, but as 9 years old boy I had no words to express my excitement with the machine.

Later on my Father gave me Logitech mouse (http://www.recycledgoods.com/logitech-c7-3f-9 … ree-button.html).

Soon this computer was replaced with 386 machine, with a much smaller case that I can't really recall.

Commodore C64 + tape around 1991.
2nd one was PC 386SX40, 2MB RAM, 120MB HDD, Trident 512kB - around 1994. 1st upgrade was memory to 4MB so we can play Doom 2.

First computer was some Mac in School, but the one i really remember

in 1996 we got our first computer (checked the dates with my Grandmother who bought it)

IBM Aptiva E40
IBM Cyrix PR166+
2.1gb Hard Drive (My dad upgraded to a 6gb later)
Modem/Sound Card
Video was onboard but upgraded at radio shack because he wanted to do CAD don't remember now.
Don't remember the original Ram amount, my dad had Radio Shack upgrade it to 64mb before we brought it home
Windows 95`

I played alot of my first games on it
Starfleet Academy
SimCity 2000
Civilization II

I ended up with this computer in 2000 after he replaced it with an AThlon 500 computer but I didn't really want it either.

My favorite time with one however was in High School in 2004.

At the time my system was this

AThlon XP 2600+
Geforce FX 5200 Ultra
512mb DDR 333
ECS board don't remember much
40gb Hard Drive
Dual Boot 98SE/XP

that's what I started taking to lan parties, and overall had a blast with. By the end of 2004 I upgraded with my buddies old parts to a Pixel Link Proview FX 5900XT, 1gb of ram, and a Gigabyte Nforce2 Ultra 400 board. Later on at the end of 05 my buddy again upgraded from his 754 rig to go to 939, and I got his Chaintech VNF3-250, Athlon 64 3000, 6600GT while he got himself an Athlon 64 3200, DFI Nforce4 board and a 7800GT.

Nice old thread. 😀 Before my first computer, we had an Intellivision gaming console that we got when I was in about 5th grade, in 1981. In the 6th or 7th grade, one of my friends got an Apple ][+ and I used to go over his house and get on BBSes and play pirated games. I bugged my parents so much that they finally got me an Apple ][e with dual floppy drives and green monitor. I think this was either late 7th grade or early 8th grade, and the year was 1983. I used the snot out of that computer, all the way through high school and college! Major upgrades included an Extended 80-column card that also doubled my RAM to 128KB, and the Mockingboard sound board. Finally, as a graduation present from college, my parents got me my first PC--a Packard Bell 386sx/20. It was the computer I played and beat Ultima 7 on, which started me on my DOS gaming adventures.

The first computer our family got was in 1996:

AMD K5 PR166 (116mhz)
16MB RAM
1.2GB HD
Tseng Labs ET5000 (i think) video card

I "borrowed" some more ram from the computer lab at school and turned that puppy into 32 MB. Later on I got a 40 GB HD and a Voodoo 3. That CPU took me from like 1996 to 2001 because I couldn't afford to get a platform upgrade, nor did I really know how to build a complete system (mainly the headers, jumpers etc) at the time. I went from that 116 MHZ K5 to an Athlon 900 MHZ, was like night and day!

I guess I'm the youngest here x_x

Around 2004, parents bought a desktop (Can't remember the model name since I was so young) for work. The computer either had Windows 98SE or ME (Can't remember). I don't know any of the specs, but apparently that same desktop was usable when it was 2008ish for flash games, I remember playing Oregon Trail 2 and 3 on that thing, those games were literally the only reason my child-self would take the computer out of the closest occasionally and hook up the heavy monitor screen. My family began to use computers at home ever since school caused the need to own one. Sadly that computer broke due to a younger sibling catching tantrums when he played games on the pc and kept punching, kicking, smashing the desktop. The desktop wouldn't boot anymore and would only beep if we pressed the power button. If we still owned it, I would probably be able to repair it, since it was likely a broken part.

I think it's so cool that we have such a wide range of ages. I really like that younger folks have an appreciation for this stuff. 😀

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum clone circa 1986 or so. It was software-compatible with the 48k Spectrum, but the hardware was modified with some cool features. Firstly, it had a full 64K of RAM rather than just 48k, with the first 16k being unlockable by writing to a certain I/O port which allowed loading a different interpreter instead of the one in EPROM. This also made the machine CP/M compatible if one attached a (specially designed for this particular clone) FDD unit. It also had a IEEE1284-compatible parallel port, which was very unusual for this type of computer, and the ROM was modified to include printing routines for some dot-matrix printers. The port was bit-programmable and bidirectional, which allowed me to attach custom-made hardware for some simple home automation. It also had a "turbo" button which would boost the CPU clock from 3.5 to 6MHz which was supported because it used a Z80B instead of the original Z80. Some games would crash at 6MHz, and also programs saved on tape in turbo mode could be loaded back in turbo mode only because the cassette interface derived its timing from the CPU clock.

Not bad for mid-80s.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=622