The following events occurred while I was in the UK...
It's "complicated" ...
First computer in the house was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k games were gamed, loaded off cassette tape, messed around with the BASIC a bit. A few years down the road, later 80s, when peripherals got cheap 2nd hand, I tried to make it "more serious" with an Interface 1 with serial, a ZX printer (Sparky McFirehazard), hard keyboard, and microdrives... but I didn't get the microdrives working too well, think they were worn/maladjusted, would stretch the tape on cartridges and fail to format. About this time, I was making cow eyes at the Spectrum 128 +3 with floppy and dropping heavy hints to the 'rents, but nothing came of that, nor of suggesting the Archimedes was the education positive alternative. Then I was looking at the Sam Coupe, maybe a bit prior to release, was teased for a couple of years IIRC, but by the time that came I realised it belonged in 1987 and it was soon gonna be 1990, 8/16 was out 16/32 was in. Being a brokeass teen, I just had to squirrel away some cash and wait until...
Amiga 1200, which I bought soon after launch, with HDD installed. Woohoo, games plus real computing... and about a third of the ask for a PC with any stones at the time (And that would be a clone, a Compaq etc would have been double again). I would regard this as my main "Personal Computer" until 1996. But knowing that this x86/DOS/Windows thing was endemic to the world of business etc by now because they were all boring and shit, I more or less concurrently with the Amiga dived into learning about IBM PC compatibles, and it gets more complicated...
First IBM compatible PC waaaaaaasssss.... An Amstrad PC1640 ... or was it an Amstrad PC1512 ?? Was it both? Was it neither? I picked up a very large box at junk price containing well used PC1640, PC1512 two monitors, some disks, their keyboards and mice... and plugged them in annnd... nothing-ish... yeah these were very much fixer uppers, but had signs of life. One monitor, forget which, think it was the color one, had zero picture at all, but the PSU for the PC was good. The mono, for the PC1512 I think, had a lot of picture problems... but I got it sort of working, with lines and a tear in it, and it powered the machine fine. Someone had been poking around inside and cables were disconnected the floppies were set wrong, and the RAM upgrade in 512 was badly seated... Anyway, somewhere along that line, I sorta had a working frankenstein setup with the 1640 running off it's own monitor but using the 1512. And I could sorta use DOS and GEM but the disks that came with were full of bad sectors. So I had some PC hardware running but was it "My PC" ?? Hmmm nah... So as I am going to computer fairs to pick up nice shiny stuff for the A1200 and pick the junkboxes for anything to help the Amstrads, I, on the lookout for a monitor, come across an IBM monochrome for $5.. Deal! I say, and then discover I bought a monitor and a whole 5160 and keyboard. So...
First IBM PC was a 5160 PC XT ... but it was still just meddling hardware not "My PC". It came with MDA, 386k RAM, 2MB LIM card, MFM HDD interface and FULL height 10MB MFM drive. Single 5.25. It shook the desk on disk activity. I think it had a 3,xx version of DOS on and had a version of WordPerfect which took up most of the disk and maybe some card games, but it was slllowwww. The Amstrads had acquired V20/30 chips not sure if some production had those or whether upgraded and they were at 8mhz I think so those, even with just floppies and bad sectors felt way faster to use than the 5160. I was already spoiled. At this point I didn't think of trying a V20 in the 5160, or they were V30 and I couldn't anyway or something, or I didn't know shit. Anyway, what transpired was Frankenstein PC setup Mki II which was an Amstrad powered off it's monitor, with 10MB MFM HDD crammed in, using the 5160 mono, and having stolen the 2MB LIM card also... WordPerfect was almost worth using on it... still wasn't "My PC"
I guess we were into '93 by now, the 486 was becoming entry level and 386 was being sold off in a panic. The IBM XT was sitting there in it's slowness, half "borrowed away" into the Amstrad speed racer 🤣 and I was still going to computer fairs.... leading me to score one of those M396 type baby AT boards with a 40Mhz AMD 386SX on for a decent price, but I could only afford 2 1MB sticks to go into it and the cheapest AT keyboard on offer, also picked up a clone herc/CGA card for a buck or something. Anyway, on return, this went into the 5160's case, giving me a stonking 40mhz of 386 speed on 2MB RAM and a 360kb floppy, with full hercules mono when I plugged in the monitor. Think this was the one I also managed to get CGA in mono out of, on a spare "security" video monitor. I had a 2 week stall on getting it working though due to this board being configured to not run if the keylock was open, so I eventually figured to put a jumper on it. Concurrently we had also scared up fresh system disks and a fully working ECD monitor for the Amstrads, such that one complete Amstrad, now with 10MB HDD could be used standalone. Which became my parents computer as I was onto faster and better things... when I got all this shit together...
Needing "AT Parts" to flesh out my 386, I bought a 5170 system unit for all of $2 ... but it turned out it had very little I could use really... also it was the 6mhz one and felt slower than the Amstrads. "Stole" the LIM card back out of the Amstrad because it wasn't getting used really. Tried getting it going in the 386, but had too many conflicts between expected EMM386 type handler and the actual LIM driver. So into the 5170 it went. I managed to cram Windows 3 on the 20MB drive in the 286, and with that and the LIM, somehow I could launch more on the 286 and have it run at a crawl, vs what I could do with 2mb total on the 386 board. Along the way I had picked up a 40MB IDE and i/o card and the 386 was sort of a system. The 286 was sort of a system, futzed around on it. But anyway both were still sharing the monochrome monitor, apart from sometimes when I hooked up the CGA mono lashup. By now I was learning a lot faster due to having internet access at college. Could gopher up files and programs and save them to floppy. I had got a 1.44 floppy and a 720kb floppy in the 2nd amstrad, which I was using for 720 to 360 transfers.
Messing around with all of this, I still find time to actually attend college a bit, and enter a competition, which netted me some funds, and real computing classes were approaching at college. So I bought a refurbished Zenith Z-lite 320L, which since it had fully useable win 3.x and I used it for turbo pascal classwork etc, is a good candidate for the first PC compatible "My PC" and it was even what I first played Doom on. I fondly imagined I would be able to take notes on it also... nope... technical classes are not amenable to pure stream of text note taking AT ALL. Back to trying to de code spider scrawl of my own messy scribble. I typed up essays and project work on the A1200 still, was still my "main computer", the notebook being an accessory machine.
Shit! You say, will you come out with it and tell us what your first PC really is??? Well yeah I'm trying to get there. I visited more computer fairs, 386 got beefed up to VGA, 4MB and inserted into it's own minitower, on the cheap as deals were found, and got a 12" PS/2 type VGA monitor... storage was $$$ still, found another 40MB to put in it. It was kind of getting there. Games even felt worth playing on it, did a bit of Doom on it, but yeah, this thing feels like a bit of a dog, even getting to a decent spec... compared to the fluidity of the A1200... so it isn't my main rig still. It's getting to be the Pentium era almost.
Upgrade time for the PC, Amiga ecosystem falling apart with demise of Commodore, no way forward on that platform, now we're "all in" on the PC I guess, *sigh*. Being a natural cheapskate, Pentium was too rich for my blood, the P75 got heavily criticised in press, knowing more in retrospect, I might have stretched for that, but what I did get was a UMC VLB board and Cyrix 5x86 100GP... this started out with the ISA VGA and I/O and gradually gained RAM, HDD, VLB cards.. Anyway, by the time it had 1MB CL-5428, 8MB of RAM and a couple hundred MB of storage, it was "My PC" my main rig, Amiga was now 2nd fiddle.
Every configuration up to and including that rig had a "Ship of Theseus" chain back to the 5160, and also some parts along the way were in and out of the Amstrads, though I don't think anything came "from" them. I carried that forward with the original 5160 speaker through the later K6-2 machines into my athlon XP, then somehow I lost it, or the IBM FRU tag fell off and I am not sure which it is.
Anyway, pick a candidate.
Edit(s) further musings..
Games: I just got "into" the PC side as the 5.25 games had been cleared out and sold off so I was not finding a lot on the shelves. Was hard also to find PC/XT titles at this point. However as there were many more stronger gaming platforms in the UK, I don't think the PC games shelves were ever very large or well stocked until it "broke out" post Doom. All that got talked about in general computing mags was the likes of Links386 and Wing Commander before that. Anyway, had a copy of Spectrum Holobyte Tetris that eventually ran great on the Amstrad, then also had some shareware games Xonix a Painter clone, and some others and text adventures. Ran Titus the Fox and some other platformer on the Amstrad, early version of Hoyles worked well too. The 386 saw things like micro machines, epic pinball, doom, elite plus, and frontier elite which I didn't think was as good as on A1200. 286 never really saw many games due to hercules mono and I didn't know about the CGA emulator then for on the mono display and CGA on the video class mono was a bit awful. Anyway, think the only game I had seriously going on that was one summer break I had Moria286 going on it, to play as I was waiting for things to complete or get bored/stuck on other machines in the spare room setup I had for that while.
Can't clearly recall what graphics adapter that the 286 arrived with, I had a multi protocol Paradise P-EGA card, maybe that was it. I didn't fully comprehend the EGA capabilities of the Amstrad ECD monitor at that point in time, otherwise I would have tried it. There was not much EGA/8088 stuff around so I am not sure if the Amstrad was set up right for EGA and used it, or whether it was just doing CGA default modes of games etc.
Irony of the story there is that mid teens tried to get another computer out of my parents, who thought they'd done their duty buying one, which launched me on a path that ended up giving them one working Amstrad, then later a T1100 or T1200 Toshiba laptop/portable that I bought for cheap then got bored of, but ran everything the Amstrad did, then before I moved away a full DX2-66 Minitower with 16MB and internet connectivity (33.3 modem)