The first computer I used was either an Acorn Electron or an Amstrad PC1512. My dad bought the Electron before I was born and the Amstrad shortly after (around 1986). I have memories of using both but no idea which was first. The Amstrad was later replaced with a 286 (1987-88 ish), then a 386 (1991).

I actually wrote a bit about my gaming history a while ago here: http://diffusedion.co.uk/GamingHistory.html

First one I can distinctly remember was a 66mhz 486.
I don't remember all the specs but I think it had about a 500MB hard drive. Mostly used with windows 3.1, and I mostly played shareware games on it like Hexxagon and Brix.
That same PC was later upgraded to a pentium 166 with a 1.2GB western digital drive and 32MB of ram. I still have that system today and it still works. It has windows 95 on it.

I'm 30 but my siblings were 12-16 years older than me, so I grew up with some pretty interesting old systems available.

I'm not sure which one I played first, but it may have been the Atari 8bit computer my Aunt and Uncle had. It was the later ST-like style so it was most likely a 65xe or 130xe. I distinctly remember the odd flip-open 5 1/4 drive (I now know it as an Indus GT) and the standard Atari 2600 controllers, playing Tree Surgeon, Zorro, Ninja and others. I loved the games on that system and I'd love to get my hands on another one some day. It kills me to think that I actually owned this system myself for a while when they got rid of it, but I had no interest in retro stuff at the time and sent it to Goodwill 15+ years ago. All the games were basically copies, but they were all there, along with a highly valuable and rare Indus GT drive and a most likely working system. It had no monitor, so I had no interest in keeping it. Stupid stupid stupid...

At school I remember playing some really elaborate old point and click children's game in what would have been some time between 1991 and 1994. It may have been part of the "Living Books" series, but I have some memories of things I haven't found in those games. It was really impressive at the time, with full color, lots of animation and recorded dialog. Later on I actually played on an Apple II frequently... Oregon Trail was the go-to game there. "Educational"... sure... yeah... just let me hunt.

Anyway, at my house we had a Commodore VIC20 (along with a Colecovision, Intellivision, Atari 2600, Sega Master System and later an NES) and at some point in the very early 90s my brother won a Tandy 1000HX in a contest. No mouse, no hard drive, 256k memory... and no idea how to do anything on it but play with Deskmate and use a keyboard to "paint" with various colored patterns in the art program. I'd like to get my hands on one of these again to see what can really be done with it. We were all totally new to computers at the time.

Following this, we got a Packard Bell of some kind in ~1994-1995. It was outdated then as well. I think it either had a 386 or 486 with only 2 or 4MB of RAM... but we played sooo many games on it! It was really an awesome introduction into the world of modern computing, and I actually still play some of the games we got for it back in those days. Eventually my brother built his own system (I think he had a Cyrix 133Mhz), 3D accelerators started coming into the picture (I still own the cards and boxes for our first two... the Scream'in 3D Verite 1000 and then the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI)... memory upgrades, Pentiums... the first PC I owned personally was my Gateway from early 1999 with a P2 400 (I still have this system!) and then I built my own in ~2000...

The rest is history... 😵

Sorry if I up this thread but I want to read more stories about your first pc experience.

I first used my dad's PIII system in the early naughts. He loaded up Secret of the Oracle on it and let me play with his Gravis Analog Pro joystick.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I first used my dad's PIII system in the early naughts. He loaded up Secret of the Oracle on it and let me play with his Gravis Analog Pro joystick.

Well a P3 was a nice powerful system indeed. I was more oriented on AMD those days coming from a K6/2 it was obvious to go for its cpus.

Yeah, in fact that system was bequeathed to me by my dad and I tinkered around with it for several years.

It survives now as a motherboard and CPU in my "miscellaneous parts" bin 🤣

My first computer that I used was a NCR Decision Mate V running DOS 3.3.

I played Ladder like there was no tomorrow on that machine. I was 6.

The first computer I ever touched/used was called Colecovision. I remember it had Donkey Kong, Mouse Trap, Venture, Frogger, etc. I must have been ~ 6 years old.

......

...oh, you mean COMPUTER....as in IBM PC type? Hmmm...

Well, in that case, it all started with Commodore 64. From there, it was a 486-33 with 8MB, which was later upgraded to 16MB with a new ADLIB sound card and a 4x CD-ROM. Ran DOS and Window 3.1. We used to use Word to type up school reports and an old ribbon dot-matrix printer to print it all out. Paper had the tear-off holes on the sides and everything.

After that, parents bought a Packard Bell when I was in high school. It had a 100 MHz Pentium processor and 16MB of RAM and it had Windows 95. Wow, that takes me back. On-board 1MB graphics chip and a single ISA card that had the sound, 14.4 modem, etc. all built in. DOOM just flew on that machine, let me tell you. We bought an external ZIP drive for that one and had a flat-bed scanner. Pretty cool.

Then I got into college and talked them into getting me my own computer. It's the one I rebuilt last year, a 350 MHz Pentium II, 128MB PC-100 SDRAM, 10GB hard drive, 8MB Intel i740 based AGP graphics, and AWE64 Gold sound card. Had a 56K modem too. I remember those days, because it was a serious gaming type machine with Half-Life, Final Fantasy VII, Diablo 1 and 2, and some basic ROMs for NES and SNES. I remember Napster and Netscape Navigator, all running on Windows 98 First Edition. I still have that CD-ROM and the license key.

My next PC was the only switch to AMD I ever did with an Athlon XP 1800+ processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 AGP card. I put Windows XP on this one and it worked just fine up to my time in the U.S. Army in 2005.

I bought during my school training at Ft. Gordon a brand-new Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. I still have it today and it works. It has a 1920x1200 16:10 17" LCD display, a 2.1 GHz Pentium M, 2GB of DDR2-533 RAM, a 250GB HDD partitioned into a ~40GB and a ~200GB drives to keep Windows XP booting from the first 40GBs of the drive, otherwise it could fail to boot. I had to reinstall XP 5 times over the course of 2 years before I figured that out. It started with an nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI-Express card, but I upgraded later to a GeForce Go 7800 GTX 256MB card. I still have it and it still works.

My next system was my first desktop build in over 10 years. In 2010, I got an MSI Big Bang Trinergy, Intel Core i7-860 2.8GHz processor, 16GB DDR3-1600, 1TB HDD, nVidia GeForce GTX 480 x2 in SLI, Blu-Ray burner, full-tower Antec 1200 case and I put Windows 7 on it. I even bought a 2x120mm radiator and a water block for a GTX 480, but never went through with putting in a water cooling loop. I later included a 500GB hard drive to run Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but never could get the sound card to work properly. I also eventually got a 250MB Samsung 850 EVO and put Windows 10 on it and converted the 1TB to a straight data drive. Even limited to SATA2 speeds, it's still wicked fast to boot compared to what I'm used to.

Last year, I rebuilt that Antec PC with a Skylake i7-6700K with a Corsair H100i, a GTX 980Ti, 16GB DDR4-3200 clocked up to full speed, a 256GB m.2 PCI-Express boot drive with Windows 10, a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO for games, and a 3TB Seagate 7,200 RPM drive for data, my old Blu-Ray drive migrated over. The last 30 years has been one weird run.

I don't remember the first computer I used, but it was probably a Spectrum clone or a C64 respectively owned by two of my best friends, during mid to late 80s. I didn't actually "use" the computers but rather played games on them, but I remember being in awe at my friends inputting arcane commands such as LOAD "*",8,1 😁.

As for myself, I didn't own any kind of personal computer until I was 13, all I had up to that point was my NES. Then, my dad bought our first PC, a typical clone of that era with a 486SX, 4MB of RAM, 160MB HDD, 14in color monitor and an OAK ( 😒 ) display adapter with 256K of video memory. Supposedly that PC was going to be "for work or school ONLY" but that restriction ended a few days later when Indy and the Fate of Atlantis got installed. 😁

After a short while I upgraded it with a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, and later a CD-ROM drive. A pivotal moment was when Doom came out, a friend at school gave me the 2 disks of the shareware version and... it was a freaking slideshow. 😒 I still played it but that game would trigger an endless update cycle of computer components that continues to this day (albeit with a much lower frequency).

A TI-99. The first game consoles I played was a Fairchild Channel F. 😀

What a great way to do my introductory post. I must have been 6 years old or so when I began using computers. One of the first computers I remember using was a Printaform with the green monitor.

The first home computer was a Tek with the 8088 CPU, 640K ram and a humongus 42 mb HDD and an amber monitor and a 5.25" 360K drive. It was good for word processing, spreadsheets, DOS games like Alleycat, Flightmare, Hard Hat Mack, Chess, Centipede, etc, etc

After that one, we got a Tandy 1000 286 (which got stolen, so had to go back to the 8088 for a while) with the printer and joysticks (I still have one of them).

After being on 8088 for quite a while, we got an HP Vectra 33 Mhz and while we had a modem, it wasn't until the next PC (a 6x86 clone) we had internet at home.

First one i got was a Vic 20 ,it was a gift from my uncle. He upgraded to c64 and gave the Vic to me. That was around 88 -89 (still have it but i need to repair it)
Dad had a Sinclair Zx 81 (still have it and it works!) but it was really hard to load games with our cassette recorder. Vic was really easy to use.Well the games loaded correctly most of the times. I did make simple programs , copying the code on the tutorial manual. Played a lot at pacman, frogger, and a 3d maze.

The big jump happened in december '92 . Christmas gift (for the entire family) a 486 dx 33 with 4 whopping megabytes of ram and 120 mb hard drive. First games i've ever played here were prince of persia, monkey island and wolfenstein 3d. I remember also paris dakar and prehistorik. Later upgraded with a sbpro2, 2x cdrom, 4 more megs of ram,secondary 105 mb hard drive. I've played all Lucasarts adventures with that pc.Also Xwing , tie fighter, dark forces, and so on. I have very fond memories of that period of time.

We happily used this pc until december 1997, when we replaced it with a pentium 200 mmx

First computer — a 486 Toshiba Satellite 2xxx series laptop.

Looked like this:

That was around 1996. It was my father's work computer, so at first I couldn't really use it full time. It had 8 MB of RAM, around 520MB of HDD, no CD-ROM. The screen was a passive matrix. I'm not sure if it had AdLib (like some of Toshibas did).

Later this computer became my machine — mostly for homework. It did have some games:

- LHX. Looked really cool to me, but you can't play it too well when you don't speak English and don't understand the terminology (I'm from Russia).
- Prince of Persia — played it a lot, but I don't think I've ever beat it
- Supaplex
- Blockout
- a weird CHM file with parables from different religions and a Russian horoscope program. Here it is:

And that's it! We never had Internet at home, and my father never liked games.

My relatives' PC — Pentium II 233

My aunt was a programmer and lived with my grandparents, and she had a nice PC. It had a P2-233, 32 MB of RAM, some kind of a Nvidia Vanta card (I think). I now have a case that looks almost like that machine!

Though that case was ATX (not AT), the screen was probably a 14" Samsung Syncmaster 3Ne, and speakers, mouse and keyboard were made by Genius.

I used to visit them almost every weekend in the summer and would basically spend the whole day in front of that PC. Those were 1998-2001, so more of a Pentium III era. That is where I tried Doom and Quake. Noone ever told me those games were too "violent" or restricted me in any way. But I remember that those games were pretty scary/stressful for me, and I couldn't really play them for more than 20 minutes. 😀 Loved watching my aunt play them, though. We also played a lot of Worms: Armageddon together in a 2-player mode.

Other than that I remember trying to play a lot of newer games on this machine — with a varying degree of success. Black & White, for instance, had this weird thing where most of the settlers would be rendered black, without any textures — still loved that game a lot.

My first "proper" PC

We moved to another city, and I finally got a new computer of my own! It was around 2002, and finally I got a beast of a machine:

- Pentium 4 2000
- GeForce 4 Ti 4200
- 512 MB RAM
- 120 GB HDD

My parents promised to buy me a powerful PC as soon as we would move into our new appartment. So, basically, for one whole year I was reading through every hardware review I could find, then fire up Excel on my 486 laptop and write down the parts for the "perfect" PC. Then I would look for printed price lists from various computer shops and use Excel to make a price estimate.

For a whole year I was updating this spreadsheet on an almost weekly basis — pretty much obsessed. And, to be fair, my parents downgraded my dream machine only a little bit: Ti 4200 instead of a Ti 4600, no dedicated sound card and that's it. On the other hand, they switched the 19" CRT Iiyama for a 19" LCD by NEC — and those were pretty expensive back then — I think, they thought it to be a safer option.

This is the case of that machine:

Basically, this PC soon became my Morrowind machine. Also, X2 machine =) Ah, good times.

My first PC was AMD 286 12 Mhz with 1 MB RAM, VGA, 20 MB Harddisk Seagate MFM, without soundcard, in Hyundai case, Black-White Philips monitor. And I remember using Windows 3.1 on that, I played Commander Keen Dreams on it, I tried also Wolfenstein 3D but it only smooth in very very small window.

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC464 with green monitos; my first "Proper PC" was a generic Pentium 100 with 8MB RAM.

Tiger433 wrote:

My first PC was AMD 286 12 Mhz with 1 MB RAM, VGA, 20 MB Harddisk Seagate MFM, without soundcard, in Hyundai case, Black-White Philips monitor. And I remember using Windows 3.1 on that, I played Commander Keen Dreams on it, I tried also Wolfenstein 3D but it only smooth in very very small window.

This sounds very similar to my first computer! Well, it was my dads machine. It is the Wang Labs PC-260, AMD 286 12Mhz system with 1MB RAM, VGA and a ST-225 Seagate HDD. 1.44MB Floppy Drive too. No sound card, no mouse... it came with the original keyboard (15 Function keys...!) and the monitor. He got it in 1995 second hand to use for his electronics repair company. It ended up being my introduction to this crazy world of 'retro' computing. Even then the machine was quite dated as while it was built in June 1989. By the time 1995 came around the IT world had changed so much.

First game I ever played on it, and I will never forget that 'Welcome...', was Space Quest. The original AGI version. Such great times playing that game.

The computer had enough space for a handful of games, else we used floppies to run other games. It booted up into a text based menu called HDM 4 (Hard Disk Menu). It played Wolf 3D pretty well, all things considered. Also played Xargon, and Duke Nukem II. Yes, on a 286!

Over the years, I had swapped out the motherboard with slightly newer systems, like 386's and 486's, but nothing seemed to really suit the character that this machine had. It just *had* to be a 286. The only change I have kept is add a SB16 (a little new I suppose, but it'll do).

I still have the machine, although the monitor and keyboard are long gone. The machine itself needs some work, as it has memory parity issues on POST. I'll need to replace them with new ICs, but they are not socketed, so that'll be fun... there are 36 DRAM ICs in total.

I've recently been 3D modelling it in Blender - here is the latest version I have so far.

http://i.imgur.com/V0mJiSD.png

It's not the most handsome looking machine, but it is my first machine. It will forever be my awesome little computer that could.

VoodooChild wrote:

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

same for me, but when I used it was already to outdated (realistically it always was) and I was very little, I couldn't do much on BASIC, it was more about loading some games and hitting spacebar...

back in the 80s it was basically impossible to import things to Brazil, so we mostly relied on local clones, as far as I know the Gradiente MSX is a clone, not officially licensed, but it was the most popular computer in the 80s

SPBHM wrote:

back in the 80s it was basically impossible to import things to Brazil, so we mostly relied on local clones, as far as I know the Gradiente MSX is a clone, not officially licensed, but it was the most popular computer in the 80s

The Microdigital TK90X (brazilian Spectrum clone) was massively successful here in Uruguay during the 80s, and on a few other south american countries as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK90X

As I mentioned in the post above, one of my best friends had one. He had such a crappy tape player that if you touched or made a slight vibration on the table while it was loading, the process would fail, requiring to start all over again. 😁

I'm a little younger than the average in here it seems.

My first family computer was in 1999, an RM computer 600MHz P3, with 128MB RAM I believe, 10GB? hard disk, some kind of ATI Rage card, and a 17" CRT. quite a good computer for the time! I remember it playing Half-Life well on Win 98SE. Also played a lot of Midtown Madness .. loved that game, remember downloading lots of custom cars and tracks over a 56k modem and running up a huge phone bill much to the dismay of my parents (oops!)

I never got to enjoy proper DOS gaming, or interesting sound blaster cards until recently, finding out what I missed out on!