I bought my first PC in 1988. Before that I only had commodore 64 from 1983 to 1988. My first pc was 286 12Mhz with trident vga card that had 256Kb of video memory, 1MB ram, 1.2MB and 1.44MB floppy drives and 40MB seagate hard drive. The case looked like rather normal IBM clone with turbo and reset buttons and the PC had one of those big ibm style large red power switches that are in power supply and at back corner of the pc. I also had a normal 14" vga monitor and keytronic keyboard.

In 1991 I bought a 386 motherboard with 33Mhz 386 cpu and 4MB of ram and also 350MB hard drive. I upgraded my 286 with those parts. I didn't know much about differences of speed between video cards back then so I just used my old trident vga card. I had to drill some new holes to the case because I remember that all the screw holes of the new motherboard did not match with the old case. Only problem I noticed after upgrading that there were some games released where it would have been nice to have 512KB video ram and being able to use 640x480 svga resolution with 256 colors.

In 1995 when win95 was released I built a totally new computer. Pentium 90Mhz with 16MB ram, 1Gb quantum fireball drive and S3 Trio64 PCI video card. It had a full tower case (which I still have) and 1.44MB floppy drive only. I don't remember having any problems with it. In 1998 I upgraded it to pentium 2 300Mhz, 64MB of ram with Asus P2B motherboard and I also added a diamond monster voodoo 2 card but I kept S3 trio64 as the main video card.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-01-09, 07:55:

There were only few reasons for private PC in the eighties: - working at home doing accounting/engineering/writing - learning h […]
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MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-08, 22:39:

I honestly struggle to see why a regular person would need a PC at all in the 80s. Home computers seemed to be just fine for all everyday tasks, as well as being better than PCs for gaming at the same time. I know 8bit computers were popular of course but I see that a ton of people did end up with a PC in their home back in the 80s too. Just not sure what that speed was really used for in the home? Were people just kind of making bad purchase decisions or have I missed something?

There were only few reasons for private PC in the eighties:
- working at home doing accounting/engineering/writing
- learning how to use a PC, usually for a potential job
- enthusiasts
PCs started flooding home market after first usable Windows (3.0) release in 1990, at that point XT clones traded at somewhat reasonable ~$1000 with monitor.
In 1991 those same XT clones piled up at usual clearance spots for less than Amiga 500, and $1000 got you 286 with HDD and VGA. Going with 16bit console like $150 Genesis/$199 SNES was cheaper in the short run, but brutal $50-60 cartridge prices quickly added up.
1992 386SX was in that ~$1000 spot, perfect combo with Windows 3.1.

That's essentially my story. My 286 was a second-hand model that was a "clearance" item, more or less (company wind-up).
Got it with chassis/motherboard/PSU and floppy drive.
(My dad and me upgraded it with 386 era parts like 80MB Conner HDD, 4x 1MB SIMMs; VGA was on the motherboard.)

We also bought a monitor there, I had to choose between a pretty monochrome monitor and an ugly IBM PS/2 monitor in colour (both VGA).
I've ended up with the IBM.
Though it me took about 5 minutes to make a decision which one to take. I guess I stressed out everyone, hah. 😅

A multimedia kit followed (PAS16+CD), because CD-ROM was considered a "must have" at the time.
All those shareware CD-ROMs with games, FLI, GIF, PCX, MOD and WAV files..

Funnily, the 5,25" floppy with 1,2 MB was still in wide use, too. Like a cousin to the 1,44MB floppy.
Many PCs still had such a drive.

Except mine, sadly. I had to borrow my dad's 386 PC for copying 5,25" disks to 3,5" disks.
We used QCopy 4 on DOS, I believe. It created 1:1 copies on a sector basis.

Games wise, I got an used NES first (second-hand), followed by SNES set for birthday or christmas.
One friend of mine had a Sega MegaDrive, at the time, too.
The games weren't cheap, that's right.
But on the other hand, there were solutions to the problem.
- It was possible to rent games for a little fee (video game shops, VHS rental etc)
- Some games could be tested in the video game corner of a department store
- You could exchange games with a friend
- Super MagiCom

Despite all odds, it was an interesting time, still. The simpler technology of the day still had that magic to it.

Edit: @Baoran That's interesting, thanks for sharing. I believe that my 286 had an ATI VGA Wonder on the motherboard, but it was dog slow.
In retrospect, I believe it must have been using an 8-Bit connection.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-09, 13:16:

Despite all odds, it was an interesting time, still. The simpler technology of the day still had that magic to it.

Edit: @Baoran That's interesting, thanks for sharing. I believe that my 286 had an ATI VGA Wonder on the motherboard, but it was dog slow.
In retrospect, I believe it must have been using an 8-Bit connection.

I don't know what model of trident I had back then. It must have been some early model. Maybe 8800 model. Since I never tested video card performance back then I don't know how slow it was in reality. I think it used 16bit slot at least.
In any case it was probably too slow to continue using after upgrading to 33Mhz 386 but back then I didn't even think about there being vga cards that had difference in performance.

I was at the right age (13 years old) in the right place (Western Europe, Italy) in the right years (1993) to fully enjoy the beginning of the golden era of gaming. Ah! and I also started first (1989/90) with an Amiga500, then in 1993 they gave me a fully equipped DX266. I think there cannot be a better combination, I lived the entire era of gaming as a protagonist, until the end of the 90s (end of Pentium3) when I then stopped playing. It was like being at NASA in 1969.

I still remember being shocked watching Strike Commander running in my DX2 when I went to pick it up. and then I remember when a friend of mine arrived and gave me the floppies saying "try this, it's just come out, it's called Doom", I remember what a shock Dune2 was. All played as soon as it came out, I was there at the window watching the glittering golden era of gaming

I bought pc parts new off store shelves largely just based on what looked and sounded cool and what I could afford. Some times I was familiar with the brand, eg sound blaster or creative, so I went with the brand I liked. Other times someone told me that X thing was cool so I tried it. Mostly I just picked the item off the shelf that I thought was cool. Bit of a messy trial and error process but it worked and lead me to lots of great things (and some bad ones). It was a very retail experience.