I'm not that old, so my story probably sucks, but anyway here it is. When I was a wee lad, our school (early 2000's) had a computer lab. Now they have 3-4 of those and pc's in every classroom. They were old Dell desktops, and they had the CRT monitors on top of them. I remember playing a game called "kids pics" where you would draw, paint, etc. And one time in the early stages of web 2.0 or whatever the f its called, I remember going on a website for an "essay" (probably like 2 paragraphs) and it had the chat box popup and I told the person (dont remember if it was a real guy or not) to "f*** off" and "burn in hell" 😀. But my dad has been computing since the late 80's. He had his first work "laptop" (probably a portable, idk) that he said weighed 30 lbs. And then he told me about MS-DOS and this old pre-internet program for dos called "profs" or "proffs" (not sure if I spelled it correctly.) But I wish I was born at a time when I could see all this old stuff when it was new, only problem is it was way more pricey back then 😀

ahendricks18 wrote:

I'm not that old, so my story probably sucks, but anyway here it is. When I was a wee lad, our school (early 2000's) had a computer lab. Now they have 3-4 of those and pc's in every classroom. They were old Dell desktops, and they had the CRT monitors on top of them. I remember playing a game called "kids pics" where you would draw, paint, etc. And one time in the early stages of web 2.0 or whatever the f its called, I remember going on a website for an "essay" (probably like 2 paragraphs) and it had the chat box popup and I told the person (dont remember if it was a real guy or not) to "f*** off" and "burn in hell" 😀. But my dad has been computing since the late 80's. He had his first work "laptop" (probably a portable, idk) that he said weighed 30 lbs. And then he told me about MS-DOS and this old pre-internet program for dos called "profs" or "proffs" (not sure if I spelled it correctly.) But I wish I was born at a time when I could see all this old stuff when it was new, only problem is it was way more pricey back then 😀

It was a way different time back then. For once... Piracy was all done on physical media, such as floppy's or tape-drives.
(yeah.... You waited 2 months for a game, today pirates just download instantly)
If you did it legally, then you went to the shop and looked at all the boxes on the shelves. Just as you would go buy a book.

If you wanted to get something solved, or you had a computer problem, then you had to visit a friend, or attend at the computer-club.
Things took a lot more time to solve, and games were usually played by two people using the same machine. Just like console gaming.
There were no internet, and you had to memorise all what you were told. As you had to buy books, and not look for it on the internet.

Computing were really expensive, yet more social. Wich really is something that can not be reproduced on the internet.
Back then, if something new came along, then it was like "Wow, can computers do that?".
Things we take for granted today, were milestones back then. New stuff today, is like.... Meh', who cares?
It's all about things being done faster and more perfect now. Back then, something new was really a new feature.

The first PC I used was in school arround 1996, and I was 6 or 7. Our school had an informatics lab filled with 386s (and two 486s) with DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.11, and we learned super useful stuff like using "DIR" and "MD" 🤣. Also we had some awful games... I recall one Mickey-themed jigsaw puzzle game and one "Mario" typing game. Also we messed with MS-Word 6.
Oh.. and I vividly remember the day one of the older kids (3 or 4 years older than me) tricked me saying EDIT was the command I had to use to open websites... Lets just say I spent a while typing an URL given in a kids show I liked in the editor and feeling stupid for not knowing what to do next xDDD

My first x86 computer was a now defunct PC General clone 286/16 with flip top case, 256k vga, 1meg ram, joystick, 3.5" fdd, 5.25" fdd, 40meg hdd, mouse, 101 key keyboard 14" .28 dot pitch crt and 9 pin dot matrix printer. It didn't come with any OS so installed DrDos 6 and GeoWorks Ensemble Pro 1.2. Not long after I got it I installed a ThunderBoard sound card along with speakers of course. It stayed in that configuration for a few years then fitted 4megs of ram in sipps and a 210meg hdd then installed Windows 3.1 on it. Still have sheet with options breakdown.

The next upgrade was a friends cast off 486 mobo with 4megs if ram and 1 meg Trident video card. I desoldered the pins of the sipps and fitted the now simms to this new board and swapped over the rest of components. It was mainly used with Dos/win3.11 and the later Calmira shell. That system ended up as Pentium 133 or something like that with 500meg hdd and cdrom. Dabbled with OS/2 v3 on that. Can't remember what happened to it. I kept the ThunderBoard for some reason. That and the video card, which is now in a DeskPro 286 at work, were the only two items I kept off my original system. I still have the majority of software I'd purchased in the '90s though.

The next main system was a second hand IBM Slot 1 mini tower system. Not being a PC gamer it suited my needs just nicely. All I've done to it is add more ram. Sorta my OS give it a try test box. Mainly use Windows 98 on it but it has run BeOS, OS/2 Warp v4, QNX and for giggles a few Linux distros casually. It was the house holds main system for a long time until I was given a XP Home box. That lasted a few years. After that a few more XP machines have come and gone, mini towers and laptops. All someone cast offs. Most have been scrapped.

I have a HP P200mmx slimline box I'd saved from the skip which has been my secondary system for a long time, had from around 2001 or so. It was in parts scattered around in a warehouse and managed to salvage most of it, except for the cdrom and hdd. Had a few spares and put Windows 95c on it. It now it sports Red Hat Linux 7.3 Spent a lot of time getting rid of a lot of bloated crap and learnt a fare bit about Linux in the process. Upgraded the ram to 256megs and it's onboard vram to 2megs by scrapping an old PCI video card. Use Window Maker as its window manager. It sill runs sweet. One of the most reliable systems I've had.

The system I'm posting this on was a P4 system someone at work was throwing out so nothing special. Installed CrunchBang Linux on it and customised it a bit to suite my needs. Recently got given another XP Pro system but I think I'll keep that well away from the interweb 😉

Over the last few years I've accumulated a fare few Win3.1/95/98 era systems, namely 486s/Skt 7/SSkt7 systems, as well as a few Acorn Risc systems and spares. Always wanted a RiscPC from the first time I saw an advert of them. This is the era of computers I'm actually interested in funnily enough. Have one XT Turbo clone by Redstone Computers and a 386DX25 which was a freebee as well. My latest older system is Zenith z286LP Plus which came with a boot load auction lot just around the corner from me. I've had quite a bit of fun with it http://hackaday.com/2014/10/23/hackaday-retro … n-the-internet/ Kinda reliving my old 286 experience and then some I guess on real hardware. Has 8megs of ram which can be set as EMS or XMS in the bios, nic, SB sound card, parallel port lS120 and backpack cd rom.

I do like to help folks out on various forums who are into the older kit I like. It's tit for tat really. There's always something to learn mucking around with these old things.

First computer I used was either a TRS 80 Model 3/IBM PC at High school or my friends Atari 400 and 800 (the original models) playing Ultima in the early 1980's. My first computer at home was a Timex 2068 in 1983.

Back in '83 I was working in the Paging industry. Some of you tykes probably don't remember the days before cell phones when all of the doctors and drug-lords carried beepers. Anyhoo, our mainframe terminal had actual magnetic core memory. Large 10 X 20" double layered boards with hundreds of little iron doughnuts wrapped with wire. Although we had a commercial UPS as backup power, if for any reason the machine shut down, there went all of our subscriber programming! 😲 My boss/buddy had an IMSAI 8080 where he would dump the core memory and then print it out for the ladies in the office. This was amazing stuff to me then, and I realized how valuable a personal PC was. I wasn't too impressed with the IMSAI's poor resources though, and the then current Apple //e could run circles around it (digitally speaking.) So I bought an Apple //e, loaded it up with every conceivable add-on card and software, and had the time of my life. I was able to do the core-dumps myself then, which helped my boss a lot, since he was stationed in another city on the opposite side of the state. As we added digital voice recording to our pager's option list, I was able to interface to that device, not only to dump the subscriber info, but it was advanced enough to be programmable from my PC as well! The ladies in the office were delighted! By this time I had entered the Business World of PCs though, by buying a Panasonic Sr. Partner luggable. It had the 8088 with 512k of RAM and a 10 MB hdd. It seemed like things couldn't get much better than this! 😎

Slightly off topic, do C64 count as a computer?

Rod Primitive wrote:

Slightly off topic, do C64 count as a computer?

C64 IS a computer...

Then that was my first computer, not the 386 one I mentioned earlier.

I read these stories and I see many of us began with ~386 era. It's funny to me that I saw a just new 486 before even using daily 386 and 286 at school in labs along with the old TI calculators. But it was indeed an expensive configuration at that time and I was happy to live with a 386 and Dos.

Actually I am using a K62 as main pc, and I think is perfectly usable as everyday machine obviously not to make 3D rendering, but if I would need it I have to remember myself I used Autocad 12 with 486 100Mhz/120Mhz or similar configuration at school with Win95 as I used 3DSMax with Pentium early PIV machines.
My point is that everything you could do nowday with an high end PC, you could do it into a Pentium 1 machine.

About the C64, I also did see it before the 386/486 but everyone I knew having it used as a console. So I didnt basically see at that time any other programs but games.
So I prefer to consider my first experience with computer when meeting an x86 machine even if the C64 was indeed a great and powerful computer.

I bought a few C64s for the kids before I got my 286 but I never used the C64s that much myself really. Because of that I have more of an affinity to the 286 and x86 machines in general.

386SX wrote:

... but everyone I knew having it used as a console. So I didnt basically see at that time any other programs but games.

Yeah, same here. That's why I asked, I was so confused. 😐

The first computer I ever used was some sort of Packard Bell in 1994-ish. It was our family PC and my father remembers is being a 386 but given the case style it is definitely at least a 486 computer.

(Notice the orange bezel on the front, the original was busted and rather than refund my father they gave him a bunch of these coloured bezels)

The thing that sticks in my fathers mind when I ask about this PC is that he had an almost impossible time getting things to work with it, especially the game Soda Off Road Racing. 🤣

After that my father kept picking up old computers and monitors off the side of the road and we always had computers and parts stashed everywhere. However by the early 2000's he was over building computers and had whittled it down to 3 computers. A Packard Bell designer tower model of some kind not entirely unlike the one I have now:

(This is not my original Packard Bell, I got this one at the end of 2013 for 10$)

A Compaq Deskpro EP (seen here just barely in the upper left corner of this Xmas photo from sometime in 2004-2006 ish):

We also has some sort of Pentium 2 Compaq tower that was extremely ugly and ergonomic with all sorts of rounded edges. Unfortunately no pictures survive. 🙁

Around the early 2000's (Probably like 2002 because around there is also when we got a digital camera) we also got a brand new windows XP computer. It was an AMD Compaq Presario SR1750NX (I only have a stock photo for this one):

It stopped working though soon after and we were left using the older Pentium and Pentium II machines up until 2008 (I still have that Compaq case btw and it's been outfitted with a new AMD mobo with an AMD Athlon X2 6000+ and it has windows XP on it again. It's my fathers "new" gaming PC).
In 2008 I purchased my first PC ever! It was a refurbished IBM Thinkcentre 8183 for 100$, it was extremely basic but it worked for me since it ran Windows XP and I could play all those games I couldn't run with my other computers! 🤣

(I have to use a stock photo for this too since I can't seem to find the photo's I took of it before it got scrapped)

I quickly realized how limited it was though and decided to upgrade so I could play some of the more modern video games (Specifically Fallout 3 since I was already a fan of the original Fallout). So I went back to miComp in the Gurnee Mills mall and purchased a Hewlett Packard Pavilion a5433w and a Geforce Gigabyte 9500GT for a little over 500$, I also purchased my first flat screen monitor that day for an additional 100$ (Oh how I regret throwing out those old CRTs). This is what the original case looked like:

After in 2013 that HP's PSU decided to fail, however I thought it was simply toast and put it off to the side to get around to whenever.
At a thrift store in Waukegan I purchased this little Compaq DC7100 SFF to use as my main desktop for a mere 10$ (TEN DOLLARS, and it's better in every way than that IBM I paid 100$ for! 🤣).

It can be seen here in this photo from when I first got my Packard Bell (The computer under the Packard):

When I eventually did get around to fixing the HP I decided to upgrade it and revamp the whole thing. I bought 8gb of RAM for it, a E8400 3ghz Core 2 Duo, one of my friends gave my his "old" AMD Sapphire 7790 HD GFX card and I purchased a nice beige case off of ebay for 30$.

So now my modern computer I use every day looks like this:

It seems I've come full circle. 🤣 I started out on beige boxes in the 90's and had 2 Packard Bell computers and threw them out when I was a teenager and just recently I have gotten 2 more Packard Bells and turned my main computer into a 90's style beige box. 😜

^^
Ha! I bought these speakers today: Arowana AT-120;))
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Always after primary school lessons I go with my school friend to his yard and we've played on Amiga600. First my personnal was 8-bit nes famicom for cartridges (contra, tank, terminator2, duck hunt, paperboy, bomberman, ninja gaiden, mario bros etc) Some of my family member has great idea to buy this console on my first communion, I was about 8-9 years old. After this period I haven't opportunity to get access to personnal computer. I am from small province where in 90's wasn't easy enough to see a PC like in bigger cities. In about 1996 I saw first PC in my family. That was in my mother catering company, she had restaurant, ocasional celebrations and other accommodation stuff. In this place I had chance to use Pentium 200Mhz, S3 Trio, 32Mb ram. I remember from that place System Shock, Diablo, Postal, Quake. In late time there where probably upgrade of such PC, wasn't done by me only by my 6yr older brother. He introduced to me titles as Half-Life, Unreal and Quake2. Honestly I can say that my mind diametrically changed in possitive way of course at that time;) I never saw in my life before such as quality gaming! Since that I completely fall in love with gaming! I remember when I was like 13-14 and discover somewhere System Shock 2 game and Thief The Dark Project, hah! At that time there wasn't any translations of this game and I dindn't experienced English language yet. I started lerning this games step by step and I'm telling you this games are not simply and common. I think even adults experienced this titles from Looking Glass Studios as masterpiece, but what about child? These ones detonate my mind without any return...so when I become pure teeneger then I started learning how hardware works, since that time I never get bored with IT! That's why I'm here and that's why you are reading this text. You probably know how strong it is. Everyday I'm doing something with my hardware and this is passion. I'm making a total conversion on IdTech3 nowadys, but be quiet about this one! Still need C++ knowledge. On Vogons there will be definately older members than me, but this is my story. And honestly I never get a real taste of 486, just C64 or Atari in mean time.
Best regards to Vogons Members.

Godlike!

Eheh my evolution was a circle even with configurations. I am trying to go back as much as possible even for browsing and multimedia; next goal a pure Dos Arachne web machine.

First computer ever used? Likely an Apple IIe at school.

First home computer? The Apple IIc that my father bought used in 1986 from a friend of his. He sold it in 1994 shortly after we got our first PC. It came back to me sometime in 1999 and went to a friend around 2003 when I downsized the machine count. I have yet another Apple IIc here now... boxed even. Its a later revision with the memory expansion slot and improved keyboard.

I remember those speaker from Pentium I/II era... a friend had it and were quiet powerful. I don't remember the RMS wattage maybe 60Wx2?

386SX wrote:

I remember those speaker from Pentium I/II era... a friend had it and were quiet powerful. I don't remember the RMS wattage maybe 60Wx2?

2way speakers
4inch woofer
2inch tweeter
4ohm
req. response 20-20.000Hz
140W

-built in amp, bass/treble control

I remembered almost right. Nice speakers and with the right vintage look!

My best speaker was the DTT2500 Digital set. 5.1 at home at that time was really outstanding. Now it's like listening mono tracks.