In 1991 I was using an ultra-expensive IBM 386sx/20mhz , with the onboard 2MB ram, the onboard 512kb VGA, 80MB HD and..... speaker!!!! later I added an ESS card and when it came out a Yamaha SW-20PC ...

• Mac IIsi (my own)
• Various other MacII's
• Digital LSI-11
• NCR Tower 32
• Data General MV/10000

As best I can recall, my 386DX-25 was still my workhorse, with 5 MBs of RAM (the most expensive part of that one), both sizes of floppy drives, and an 80 MB Hdd. I can't recall the exact model, but the VGA was a Trident, and the DOS was 5.0.

I might still have had a second old PC, an AT 286 clone that ran at 12 MHz, with one MB of RAM. It had a Hercules Graphics Card clone in it, and a 40 or 60 MB Hdd. I'd kept that after getting the DX386-20 that had a lot of problems, and finally was RMA'd and exchanged for the DX386-25 (DTK).

IIRC, my first PC 😀

Year was 1991.

I was a Freshman in high school and the family and I had gone to Sam's Warehouse Club. At the store they were demo'ing a new spiffy CD-ROM!!! based desktop showing off Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. I begged and pleaded w/ my parents and thankfully they had the foresight that a PC would help with my school (HA!! it really didn't).

~$2600+ later (thank you grandma!!!) we had the following:

PC Brand (yes, that was the name of the manufacture)
386sx 25mhz
4 meg ram
110 meg hd
1x speed CD-ROM
2400 baud modem
DOS 5.0
Win 3.1

and

A very nice solid wood desk from Sams (IIRC that alone was like $400-500). I still have it to this day, it just needs a slight surface refinishing and it'd be good as new.

A couple of great stories about this PC:

1) As soon as I got home and got it unpacked, I just had to fiddle around w/ the hardware. I took off the front bezel and saw these little clip things on the side of the CD-ROM. So.. what did I do? Yup, that's right.. I started to unhook the CD-ROM drive. I had literally NO idea what the heck I was doing. I booted it up and... yup... NO CD-ROM drive was found. I was so frantic.. I thought I ruined the PC!!! Since we didn't know what we were doing, we boxed everything back up and got an exchange at Sam's. Yeah, quite comical looking back at it, also a huge waste of time/energy.

2) That summer (the summer before my Sophomore year), I was now well into messing around w/ DOS and whatnot. Well I had messed up something in the OS. So I was frantically trying to 'fix' my hard drive. I was like "Oh... lemme try this FDISK thing". Next thing I know I'm completely fubar. I knew that returning the PC to Sam's was out of the question, so I called up PC Brand. The tech guy was amazed at what I had done. He literally cused over the phone, not at me per say. He very begrudgingly said if I shipped him 45 3.5 disks he'd send me the backup image of the HD.

So.. needless to say the couple weeks that I was out of a PC that summer I played up Street Fighter II on the SNES like no other 😀

I think I got my first PC in 1989, and used it for about 3 years. I think it was this thing -

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=183 (Webpage shows an Amstrad PC 1512)

8086 CPU, possibly 640K RAM (can't remember), nice n sharp monochrome monitor, 20 or 30 meg HDD, 1 x 5.25 drive (no 3.5), no sound (prolly had internal speaker).

386SX 16MHz
Creative Labs Sound Blaster
40MB HD
Onboard VGA
MS-DOS 3.0

1990? That would've been a 12MHz 286 with 640K RAM, 20MB hard drive, EGA, 1.2M 5.25" floppy and 720kB 3.5" floppy.

In 1990 I was using my trust Amiga 500 upgraded to 1mb 😀 didn't own a monitor yet so I was using my TV set
Was still occasionally using my Commodore C64-II but sold it in late 1990
Still own my Vic 64 which i got in 1986 😁

People I knew back then mostly had Amiga's, Atari and Mac's back then....pc's weren't very popular around here

Kippesoep wrote:

1990? That would've been a 12MHz 286 with 640K RAM, 20MB hard drive, EGA, 1.2M 5.25" floppy and 720kB 3.5" floppy.

Hehe, we had a very similar setup at home back then. I remember the 3.5" drive's motor being so worn, I had to get it going by poking it with a potato knife 😁

Excuse me for my American potato orientation, but we don't have any special knife just for potatoes. For butter, we do, and some other things, but not for potatoes. What's different about the one that y'all renamed in honor of the potato? (In my lexicon, a "peeler" may have blades, but the swivel changes its character from being a KNIFE, and of course, neither of its blades faces OUTWARD.)

Peeling knife?

In 1990 I was still using an 8 MHz Wyse 286 clone with 640K RAM and a 40MB MFM HDD (plus 5.25" 1.2MB and 5.25" 360K floppy drives) from 1987 (I thought it was a year or two older, but recently looked at the motherboard as I was desoldering a transistor for a project).

It had a Paradise SuperVGA card and a Morse SVGA monitor, although not until late 1990 or possibly early 1991. Originally it came with an EGA card and monitor, but the monitor blew out around 1989 after being operated for too long with an Epson MX80 printer sitting on top of it (blocking the heat vents). We replaced the EGA card and monitor with a Hercules MDA clone card (i.e., not made by Hercules, but compatible with it) and amber-colored monitor. We spent around a year with the Hercules setup, limited to Hercules and CGA (via SIMCGA) games before upgrading to the Paradise SVGA setup (obsolete to cutting edge in one jump!).

It had no sound card until after Wolfenstein 3D was released, around which time I purchased an SB 2.0 and a Gravis Gamepad (both of which I still own but haven't used for quite a while). It wasn't as good as my cousin's 386SX25 with an SCC-1 and SBPro (which sounded awesome in X-Wing) but it was a huge jump from EGA (or Hercules/MDA) and PC speaker sound.

We used that PC as our main family PC from around 1987 all the way until around 1994, when we scavenged a 386DX-33 out of the trash pile at my dad's work. I was ecstatic because Doom had been out for a few months and I couldn't play it on the 286. I also was finally able to hear speech in X-Wing, which required EMS-managed memory beyond the standard 640K. Even better, it had a 3.5" floppy drive in addition to the 5.25" so that I could play some games like Lemmings that came with my SB 2.0 on 3.5" only.

Edit: We did keep the 286 running for quite a while, but eventually it started dying (probably due to loose chips or excessive dust buildup) and it would make weird noises and type strange characters on the screen by itself in the middle of the night. Around 1995-6 we finally ended up putting it out of its misery and building a 486DX4-120 to replace the then aging 386 😀

1990.. no PC.
Late in 1991 my dad's company had this project where employees could obtain a new PC for less. That was how we got the first PC:

386DX-25MHz (initially without co-processor)
1MB RAM
5.1/4" and 3.1/2" floppy drives
40MB Harddisk
256KB graphics card
14" VGA screen
Seikosha Dot-matrix printer
MS-Dos 5.0

It was a nice gadget, but not much more then that. Later it was upgraded to a 486DX2-66, which made things more interesting.

MiniMax wrote:

Peeling knife?

If you're calling a potato peeler a "knife" then ya we Americans have that too. Those get used for carrots and other things too. 😉

I never owned a 386. I have used them rarely but mostly after the 486 had supplanted them.

Aah, i wanted to participate in this thread since yesterday and i still can't remember anything other than vague memories...

It had a turbo button, so it's definitely not an 8088/8086...

Didn't it switches between two digits and one digit number...? So it might've been a 286? Hmm, maybe there's a pic on the family album...

Hey i was 5 then! Five year-olds are innocent--they don't have 😈 hardware addiction! Not that i know of...

My 286 had an LCD panel on the front and a turbo button that would toggle it to some slower speed (maybe 4.77MHz for 8086 compatibility?). Never really used it.

Mine should have been Triumph Adler-labelled 286-10 with EGA, amber monitor, 2x20MB harddisk, 5 1/4 and 3 1/2' floppy drives. PC speaker only of course 😀

Before that it was an Alphatronic textmode-only computer with 8085 CPU and two 5 1/4' drives [ASCII games 😀 ].

In 1990 I had an ITT Xtra, which was a typical XT clone.
It had an AMD 8088, 640 KB RAM (distributed between the mainboard, an ISA RAM expansion and some piggyback modules), CGA, 360 KB floppy, and a 10 MB HDD.
The harddisk was beginning to fail by then, so I started saving for a better machine.

Next was a Compaq ProLinea 3/25zs, a 386sx "pizza-box" slimline desktop. All components were integrated into the mainboard, leaving only two ISA slots and no space for a CD-ROM. I upgraded it to 10 MB RAM (very expensive) and added a Tseng ET4000 and a Soundblaster 2.0.

After that, I never bought a pre-configured system again... 😉