Our family computer, a Pentium 133 with 16MB RAM and Win95. And a CD-ROM drive of course. My father had an XT before that and he decided to buy that machine so that me and my siblings would use it more often. Windows 95 was brand new and term "Multimedia" was so catchy back then.
Anyway, he was a subscriber to a magazine about mainly PC hardware and that also came with a CD-ROM each month. It was filled with loads of demos for applications or utilities as we used to call them back then. However, me and my brother were far more interested in the game demos. 😊

First games I remember playing are Worms, Mortal Kombat 3, Fade To Black ... You just made me revisit some awesome memories friends. 😀 Around late 1997 my father got a Pentium II 233 with 64MB RAM (which was pretty substantial back then), a 4GB Quantum HDD and a Matrox Millennium II. Needless to say we would play a lot of the heftier games on there, but my dad quickly installed NT4.0 and that was pretty much the end of that hahahaha.
In late 2000, my brother got a Pentium III 733 with 256MB RAM and a GeForce2 MX I think and I got to keep the Pentium 133 for myself. I learned how to use DOS for the first time around then 😀.

My first computer was a Gateway 2000 486DX2-66 my parents bought me while I was in high school. With a 14" CrystalScan monitor It cost $1,700.00. Had a Vibra16 sound card and ran WFW 3.11 on top of DOS 6.22. They saved $200.00 by getting it with 4MB instead of 8MB of RAM (that's right, RAM used to cost $50 per megabyte). I'm grateful they did that -- it really taught me a lot about optimizing system performance and tweaking settings to get stuff to run well on 4MB. Kind of got me started with messing around with hardware.

When I built my first computer (a Pentium), I sold the Gateway to an elderly gentleman in my church. By then I had upgraded it to 8MB!

386SX-25

Don't remember that much about it other than being pretty sure about these few items:

Micron
OS GeoWorks
1 mb Ram
20 mb HD
3.5" floppy
Cirrus Logic based video card
PC Speaker

I remember it was a big deal when I got an actual driver to use the PC speaker and then later on, picking up the add on memory to bring the video card to a whopping 512 kb.

Ah, those were the days! 😉

No pictures, but remember it clearly 😀

AMD K5-100MHz (Used to play Avi Movies and flash animations, ownage)
64MB EDO
S3 Virge DX 1MB
Phillips Analogue Devices Sound Card
CD-ROM, Floppy, high tower.

I once tried installing Counter Strike on it (2002) ran at amazing 2FPS every 10 seconds 😁
Great times, kgen Sega emulator, paint, acdsee 3, winamp 2 (I remember i used to hate winamp 5, lagged like hell).

Had this computer for quite a lot of time. I am sad i didn't save the hard drive content.

First PC was a Pentium 100 that took about 4 months to build in 1994; had a generic SIS Socket 5 motherboard, 8MB of RAM, Trident TGUI 9440 2MB video, Aztec Sound Forte or Sound Galaxy, Panasonic 2x CD-ROM, WD 500MB hard drive, DOS 6.2 & Windows 3.11. Was upgraded several times during the late 1990s until the final version in 1999 that had a Pentium 233MMX, Shuttle HOT-569 motherboard, 32MB of RAM, Matrox Millennium II 4MB and Voodoo 1 4MB video, Sound Blaster 16 MCD CT1750 and GUS ACE 1MB sound cards, Maxtor 1.6GB hard drive, Mitsumi 4x CD-ROM, Windows 95 OSR2 and DOS 6.2. In early 2000 I built my second PC: Pentium III 700, Gigabyte 440BX Slot 1 motherboard, 128MB of RAM, Creative Labs Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT 16MB AGP and Voodoo 2 12MB video, Sound Blaster AWE64 Value CT4380, Maxtor 10GB hard drive, generic 8x CD-ROM and Creative Labs 4x CD-RW, Windows 98SE. For some reason I disliked this build's overall performance and sold it six months later (without the Voodoo 2 and Win98SE, of course); went back to my P233MMX until I got all the parts for my third PC: AMD Athlon 1.4GHz T-Bird, Abit KT7A motherboard, 256MB of RAM, Visiontek GeForce 2 GTS 32MB AGP video, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, WD 20GB hard drive, 16x Pioneer DVD-ROM and Lite-On 16x CD-RW, to which I added my Voodoo 2 and Windows 98SE. In mid-2001 I upgraded the CPU to an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ T-Bred, added another 256MB of RAM (for a total of 512MB), replaced the Visiontek GeForce 2 and Santa Cruz with a Leadtek WinFast GeForce 3 Ti 200 64MB AGP and SBLive! Value CT4870, added a Yamaha SW60XG MIDI card and an IBM Deskstar 40GB hard drive, and replaced the Pioneer DVD-ROM with a 16x Toshiba DVD-ROM. This configuration lasted for about 10 years with just minor changes and upgrades (and the addition of Windows 2000 in 2003); it finally burned out (literally) in late 2011. In fact, none of my early PCs have survived - most of the parts were destroyed in an unfortunate accident in 2005.

(Edited the hard drive brands and sizes for the Athlon XP. Got a bit too far ahead 😅 ).

Our first computer was a Commodore VIC 20 with a whole 3.3k of RAM 😀 We later got an Acorn Electron(the BBC Micro's little brother) a well. Had an Atari VCS before these 2 but thats a console so sure it doesn't really count.

I got my first computer in 1996, it was a pre-built system with an AMD K5 PR 166 (actual speed was 116 mhz), 16MB Ram, and a 1.2GB HD. It had some Tseng video card, but I don't remember which one. Later on, being the bad kid I was, I stole 16MB of ram from school and upgraded mine to a grand total of 32MB! Then I got a Voodoo 3 3000 for Christmas and I felt like a king. GLQuake Team Fortress was awesome! I still remember the server I played on had some Simpson's sounds, when you'd die it would play in Barney's voice "Uh oh, my heart just stopped!" and when you respawned it would go "Ahh, there it goes!" Here's the clip. And a bunch of other cool stuff.

It was 1999 I was 10 years old and I was told that I would have a computer in my room.

It was a Dell Dimension. It served me (and my Dad) from 1999 to about 2004 or so. On that machine I learned everything I should and shouldn't do to a computer....eventually when it finally broke. I took it apart. I wasn't allowed to take it apart earlier because it was expensive and no one in my family would have known how to put it back together. So when it finally went, I was allowed to go to town on it.

It's long gone, but I remember what its specs were.

It had a 450MHz Katmai Pentium III, in a slot 1 format. Because this was the first cpu I had ever seen, I was confused, as I had expected it to look like...you know a chip, not a cartridge for my Super Nintendo. It took a while for me to figure out that it was just what pentium iis and some pentium iiis looked like.

It had one stick of either 128 or 256 of SD133 RAM, I forgot which

It had an ide hard disk of somewhere between 10 and 15GB, came with Windows 98, updated to 98SE, then 2000.

It had an
AGP Nvidia TNT2 GPU
Turtle Beach sound card (stereo speakers, a microphone, and a sub-woofer connected to it).
56k modem
DVD Decoder card (Had no idea what it was when I took it out, because by 2004 the idea of having a separate card just to watch DVD movies was silly)
Floppy Drive
DVD Drive

In 2004 or so after making weird bangs and bumps for a few months the Hard Disc finally failed. At the time I didn't know what I know now, so I took out the parts to play with and dumped the case. Knowing what I know now I would have just gotten another hard drive and upgraded to holy hell out of it to levels it would have had no business with.

a custom P166 machine my dad built for my 8th birthday back in 1997 , had an ASUS motherboard , 32Mb of RAM (later upgraded to 64Mb) , a Sound Blaster of some kind (most likely some sort of SB16 clone) and Windows 95 , later upgraded to Win98SE. Also had an 8GB hard drive which was pretty awesome in 1997, though it didn't have any 3D acceleration of any kind. Had that machine until late 2001.

Not really the best kind of machine in 1997 , but obviously for an 8 year old it was great and it seemed like a big upgrade from the 386, 486 and early Pentium machines my dad and grandad owned , where I was playing games like Prince of Persia, Doom , Aladdin , Jazz Jackrabbit and Warcraft II.

Not really the best kind of machine in 1997

Oh come on. I had a 486 in 2002!

my first computer and Family's computer was a 2nd hand custom made PC back in august 1998 when i was 12.

Ciryx/AMD 486 DX-2 66Mhz
8MB Ram
Pcchips M919
Conner 100MB
Oak Oti077 1MB ISA
Olivetti Black n White VGA monitor
OS: Windows 3.11

in the next six months "upgraded" to:

AMD 486 DX-4 100Mhz
32MB Ram
Quantum 270MB
US Drives 32x
Epson Stylus 300
Markvision 14" SVGA Color
Genius Sound Card ISA (Crystal 4236)
OS: Windows 95 OSR2

I loved that PC, every upgrade for that PC was a HUGE step, like when i got from speaker sound to that Genius Sound card or when i played all my games in the new monitor, i never had that feeling again. I played Duke Nukem 3D, Lotus 3, Doom, Carmaggedon 1, Need For Speed, Warcraft 1, Syndicate...

Then my dad sold it in june 1999 (without say nothing) to an old customer due to serious financial problems, i was very dissapointed but i had no choice...

10 years later that man died at 83 and because we had a very good relationship with his family i got it as a gift back my first computer almost in the same condition, it was one of the happiest moment since i work in IT.

I remember those Dell Dimension XPS T450/T500s. They could take up to a 1.4 Ghz Celeron CPU and 768 MB RAM IIRC. Just remember not to plug a non-Dell power supply into them...

A tandy color computer 3 was probably my first real computer and I still have it after all these years and it's in great shape. Got it for Christmas when I was a kid.

My first real pc was a vetch pc partner 486 SX25 pizza box slimline style desktop clone. I remember playing tie fighter and x wing on that thing night and day...had a ch flightstick and got a sb pro 2.0 to round out the list of the 'major' upgrades I made to it.

smeezekitty wrote:

Not really the best kind of machine in 1997

Oh come on. I had a 486 in 2002!

thats a pretty extreme case though , I didn't know anybody who had a 486 even by 1997-8. Early on that PC was very capable but later on there were alot of games I wanted and simply couldn't get primarily due to the lack of 3D acceleration , I think one of the most demanding games I ran on it that also ran smoothly was the original Thief , or FIFA 2000 and Tomb Raider II which also ran very smoothly in software.

Thing is though , Im not actually sure what CPU was in that machine, based on the games I played I assume it was a P166, but I also have memories of being told it was a Pentium Pro of some kind . I do remember it wasn't an MMX or a PII for sure. the Pentium Pro option might actually make some sense since my dad was employed in networking and servers at the time and so may have had more access to something like a Pro than average Joe would.

[quote="Sutekh94"]

First computer I had to myself was this little Pentium III-based Dell Optiplex GX150:

Nice beige case next to your Dell Optiplex GX150! I use the full-tower version for my AM3 Sempron file server. Those Aopen HX series cases were truly built like a tank. 😀

computergeek92 wrote:

Nice beige case next to your Dell Optiplex GX150! I use the full-tower version for my AM3 Sempron file server. Those Aopen HX series cases were truly built like a tank. 😀

Thanks! That's my K6-2 system by the way. And yes, the case is built like a tank.

Beige cases are good. Ever had to change a CD in the dark in a black computer with black drive bezels?

I assume it was a P166, but I also have memories of being told it was a Pentium Pro of some kind .

There was a Pro 166. And it could have been like my "166" which was a Pro 150 with the FSB prodded to 66 and deliberately miss-sold.

I didn't know anybody who had a 486 even by 1997-8.

We still had a 486 at the cafe for web-access, and it was definitely kinda slow and sad by then. (Think I would have been using P75 in a Shuttle HOT-something board at that time.)

Ever had to change a CD in the dark in a black computer with black drive bezels?

It's /still/ a problem. I'm seriously considering moving the LED to where it'll illuminate the USB & audio ports.

pewpewpew wrote:

There was a Pro 166. And it could have been like my "166" which was a Pro 150 with the FSB prodded to 66 and deliberately miss-s […]
Show full quote

I assume it was a P166, but I also have memories of being told it was a Pentium Pro of some kind .

There was a Pro 166. And it could have been like my "166" which was a Pro 150 with the FSB prodded to 66 and deliberately miss-sold.

I didn't know anybody who had a 486 even by 1997-8.

We still had a 486 at the cafe for web-access, and it was definitely kinda slow and sad by then. (Think I would have been using P75 in a Shuttle HOT-something board at that time.)

Ever had to change a CD in the dark in a black computer with black drive bezels?

It's /still/ a problem. I'm seriously considering moving the LED to where it'll illuminate the USB & audio ports.

it may have been that . the first game I remember that really crawled was Red Alert 2 , even at lower resolutions it was pretty slow, not unplayable, but very slow, along with the FMVs being very choppy.

that could maybe narrow things down.

thats a pretty extreme case though , I didn't know anybody who had a 486 even by 1997-8. Early on that PC was very capable but later on there were alot of games I wanted and simply couldn't get primarily due to the lack of 3D acceleration , I think one of the most demanding games I ran on it that also ran smoothly was the original Thief , or FIFA 2000 and Tomb Raider II which also ran very smoothly in software.

I bought all my games in at the thrift store and most of them were old as in 1992-1995 so it wasn't much a problem.

We still had a 486 at the cafe for web-access, and it was definitely kinda slow and sad by then.

Maybe insufficient RAM? Even now a fast 486 (100MHz or more) is still somewhat usable for the web