RAM 256mb
voodoo89 wrote on 2026-08-31, 23:37:Actually feels kind of high, more like 64mb, yeah. Sorry for the quick double posting, would have edited if the option existed.
While not the first PC I owned, the first PC I 'built' was the PC that I helped my dad build when I was a child, sometime around 1988.
My dad was working at a computer manufacturer at the time (nowhere special, basically just another beige box assembler buying in parts from the far-east, but on a larger scale), and had bought all the parts with employee discount. I have memories of us spending a whole evening putting it together on the dining room table; I have a specific memory of having to stand on the table to reach or see something, for some reason. Many good times playing Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road, Leisure Suit Larry 1, Commander Keen, some Centipede clone, etc. Mostly pirated copies my dad got from work. 😉 I don't think my parents quite realised how age-inappropriate LSL was at the time! Probably should have been obvious when I threw a tantrum one time because I couldn't answer the 'age-verification' questions, primarily because I was a small British child and didn't know who Richard Nixon or Joe Dimaggio were. 😆
That PC was later upgraded to a 486 DX 33MHz, 8MB RAM, Tseng Labs ET4000 SVGA (VLB!), 15" monitor, 130MB HDD, 3.5" floppy, Sound Blaster Pro, 2x Panasonic CD-ROM. The only remnant of that system I still have is the 486 chip. Funny story with that chip is that my dad bought it from work at a knock-down price as it was a 'reject' that they couldn't sell because the ceramic package had been dropped or something and had the corner chipped off. Still worked fine, though! And continued to do so for many years. Probably still does. 😄
I didn't get my own PC until 1997, when I put together a Pentium 166 MMX system that I bought with my own money.
Almost nothing.
It was a compact desktop 386 PC picked up from a place you'd normaly scavenge for retro parts in the very late 90s. It was built by a 3 letter company, their logo was on the top left on the front bezel below that a big power button, the same size as the company logo. The left half of the front bezel was a translucent brown tinted plexiglass door that flipped open downwards. Behind that 2 horizontally mounted 5.25" drive bays and the right most space a vertically mounted 3.5" floppy drive.
I kept the case for a long time and the PC vent through multiple upgrades to Pentium 100 MHz, Pentium MMX 200MHz with 32MB RAM then finally a Coppermine Celeron 900MHz with 20GB HDD 256MB RAM and a TNT2 M64 16MB graphics card. Sold it around 2005.
Ever since I've been looking on trading sites if I can find one to buy back, but not remembering the 3 letter manufacturer, I can't do targeted searches.
My first was a loaner from a friend deployed in the first Iraq war. A 286 IIRC. I bought a 386 from Compusys in 1992 for $1460us, and still have the advertisement from Computer Shopper and the receipt. 386 DX-40, 4MB RAM, 125MB hard drive, 2 floppies, 1MB SVGA, keyboard, mouse, DOS5, NO WINDOWS! Also have receipts for Turbo C++ Pro in 1990, and Slackware 1.1.0 in 1994. Don't know where and when I got Windows & OS/2, or memory and hard drive upgrades, but I'm pretty sure I had at least hard drives in that loaner. Can I say triboot? DOS, Windows, OS/2, linux? I think it was quad, with Windows separate from DOS because I was juggling different DOS versions on one partition. Or maybe I'm confusing 3.1 with 95. The next upgrade after getting OS/2 was to 20MB RAM. I don't remember much else except lots of games that I still have. But that box is long gone.
After that, I built a dozen or so until 2002 or so, after which I mostly got laptops and those little sandwich size boxes. Then I built 3 about 8 years ago, which I still use, but that's a different thread.
I got my first PC in the summer of 1996, and it looked something like this:
It came with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 (regular, not for Workgroups). Some of the first games I played on it were Duke Nukem 3D and Stonekeep. Both had been hyped up by local computer magazines, so I had my dad buy them together with this PC. They remain some of my favorite games from that era even to this day.
Our first family computer, which my dad bought in late 1993 was a generic pre-built clone with the typical baby AT case with MHz display, turbo button and rocker switch. Specs were as follows:
I have fond memories about it, but more about those times than the computer itself: learning MS-DOS and how to use a computer, programming in Turbo Pascal, also many of my friends got similar PCs around that time so we had fun sharing games and discovering the LucasArts/Sierra graphic adventures and other classics of that time (I was an NES kid up until that point).
Shortly after buying it I added a 5.25in 1.2MB floppy drive and a Sound Blaster Pro 2, and then it went through multiple incremental upgrades during the following years until I gave it to my sister in 1999 (by that point it had the infamous "VXPro" Socket 7 motherboard with a Cyrix 686MX and 16MB of RAM).
The monitor was hot garbage, it took a long while to display an image even when new, and failed catastrophically in a puff of smoke after around 1.5 years of use. It was replaced with a much better one which lasted until the end of the '90s (14in IBM, same as the ones used in Aptivas around that time).
The only thing I truly miss about that original PC is the case, which was a pretty common variant but for some reason I haven't been able to find a similar one in decent shape around these parts during all these years.
HwAoRrDk wrote on 2026-09-01, 02:30:I don't think my parents quite realised how age-inappropriate LSL was at the time! Probably should have been obvious when I threw a tantrum one time because I couldn't answer the 'age-verification' questions, primarily because I was a small British child and didn't know who Richard Nixon or Joe Dimaggio were. 😆
Funnily enough, it was my mom that bought me a copy of LSL1 (VGA version) in 1995 (I was 13 at the time). Not sure if she actually noticed the lady's legs in fishnets displayed prominently on the cover 😆 . It was part of one of those collections of PC "classics" being released periodically as ultra-budget editions around that time, so I asked her to buy them as they were sold in a store she visited frequently when shopping. It was incredible to get really really cheap original games as up until that point sharing/pirating was the norm, though things started to change somewhat when CD-ROM became commonplace.
Never been particularly nostalgic regarding what's gone before, PCs or otherwise, but I'll share what little I do remember.
First proper PC (preceded by various Amstrads - CPC464, CPC6128, PC2386) was custom built in the UK by Viglen around late 90 / early 91. Don't have any of my own pics of the desktop case, but I've attached someone elses with the same case below. The actual specs are where things start to get somewhat hazy, but here goes...
Viglen Vig/33
- desktop case (pictured)
- Mylex MNE486 motherboard (EISA) with 32MB memory
- 486DX 33 (upgraded to a DX/2 66 later)
- Mylex DCE376 caching disk controller (EISA) with 4MB cache
- primary hdd was SCSI - a Seagate Wren 6 (St4766N) 676MB formatted capacity (full height in the bottom two 5.25" bays)
- Audio & Video - don't recall either but suspect something fairly basic
- 3.5" 1.4MB floppy
- MS-DOS + Windows 3.0
- Viglen 14" colour monitor
In 1994 and 1995 I remember I used to carry around a box of 1.44MB floppies with games I'd gather from various places - schools, my dad's workplace, public institutions that had computers (my dad was a teacher) and so on. I'd keep my favorite games on them. Whenever I'd get unsupervised access to a PC for more than one hour I'd pop a disk in and start copying my games. Usually hide them somewhere on the C drive. My favorite by far was Dune II - The building of a dynasty. I had it archived with ARJ.EXE and kept it on 3 floppy disks. The first disk had ARJ.EXE and the last part of the 3 archives. I'd copy that first into a "Directory" as we used to call them back in the day, nowadays people call them "Folders". Then copy the other two, and ARJ.EXE -x -a dune2.arj in the current folder. When my dad came to pick me up after he'd finish whatever he had to do I'd copy my save files over to a 4th disk.
My fist PC was a Cyrix 586 of some description. Norton Commander 5's NCINFO identified it as a 133MHz model, but I'm not sure that was it's actual clock speed. I do know it was a Cyrix CPU with a glued on green or blue heatsink with "cyrix" in white written on it as I opened up the PC dozens of times to clean it or play around with it's insides. It was a PC my dad got from work in 1996. One day I came home from school and found boxes piled up in the old apartment’s hallway. A 14" CRT, keyboard, mouse, printer and computer. I didn't even wait for my folks to get home - I began putting everything together (as in unbox them, put them on a desk in the spare room and plug everything in). I do remember I pestered my folks for a PC for a good two years but the things were pretty expensive compared to the average wage back then so I didn't have high hopes of actually getting to own one. Both my folks were computer illiterate but my dad's work did use computers.
Specs:
- 14" Color CRT - Logix branded. Analog controls. Could do a maximum of 1024x768@59hz but in was so blurry it was nigh unusable.
- Full size Mitsumi keyboard - don't remember the model. I do remember it was AT, it had a pig-tail cable and it was clicky. No windows keys. It also had a slit on top where you could put a pencil.
- 3 button Serial mouse. Some sort of logitech clone since that's what MOUSE.COM reported finding when I ran it. It was not made by logitech, that much I'm sure of. It was kind of chunky and made of a tough semi-gloss plastic.
- Oki Microline LPT dot matrix printer. I think it also took A3 paper but I'm not sure. The thing was huge.
- Minitower AT case with a MHz display that showed "133Mhz". Pressing the turbo button dropped to 8mhz. The power switch was turquoise and round. The case had rounded modern looking (for back then) features and did not match the square 80's looking monitor at all.
- Aforementioned 586 CPU by Cyrix. Glued on green heatsink with a small fan clipped on. I vividly remember braking one of the plastic tabs holding the fan to the heatskink one time when I tried to clean it. I did like messing with the PC's insides a lot. Sometimes I'd leave it w/o a cover. I ended up re-attaching the fan to the heatsink using a zip tie. I think it was probably a 120Mhz model despite what NCINFO was reporting. It ran great. I finished C&C95, Red Alert95 and Starcraft on it so it was a pretty speedy 486.
- Unknown UMC chipset motherboard. Brown / orange PCB. 4 72 pin simm slots, 3 or 4 PCI slots (one occupied by the VGA card), 3 ISA slots. CPU was right under the HDD cage in in the middle of the motherboard towards the front of the PC. Ram was at the top of the board under the PSU. So were the two IDE connectors. It had a PS/2 connector and breakout bracket. In 1999 I bought an optical PS2 mouse and it was amazing compared to my old serial ball mouse. Judging by the layout and features, the Shuttle HOT-433 is a perfect match and also has a PS2 mouse header - BUT it has AMIBIOS, and I don't remember having that on my PC. It's possible I did but never accessed the BIOS (never needed to or know how back then). My first memory if accesing BIOS was of an AWARD bios, but it's possible that was from my second PC, and memories are blending with one another. By looks alone the brown HOT-433 with a coin-cell holder is a perfect match to what I remember having.
- 1MB Cirrus Logics PCI card. Don;t remember the exact model. I think it was some variation of the CL-GD544x. Yellow PCB, green traces.
- 800MB Quantum Fireball HDD. Noisly. I used to fall asleep listening to DEFRAG.EXE do it's thing.
- 8MB of ram - a single stick, green PCB, 4 large rectangular memory ICs.
- 1.44MB FDD.
Came with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11. It also came with a bit of accounting software. That lasted a whole month until I figured out I can delete them to make more room for games.
No CD drive. no Sound card. No lan card. Bought all of these in the following two years with by saving my allowance and working part time.
I used that machine up to 2000 or so then we upgraded and my dad got rid of it without letting me know, and before I had a chance to transfer my stuff to the new machine. By that time my PC had a 32x Creative CD-ROM drive, a Yamaha OPL3-SAx sound card made by genius, and 24mb of ram (2x8MB + 2x4MB). Most likely my dad had to return the PC to his workplace, but he did so along with my hard earned upgrades. I could have kept the CD and sound card, those would have dropped the price of the new computer by a bit...
Socket3 wrote on 2026-09-01, 19:46:In 1994 and 1995 I remember I used to carry around a box of 1.44MB floppies with games I'd gather from various places
That actually reminds me, back in the day of Windows 9x and screen saver passwords, I used to make it a challenge to figure out the password at the stores (Sam's Club, Circuit City, etc) and I'd bring floppy disks with me to see if there were any installed games worth grabbing. 🤣
I'm envious of everybody who started out in the 286-486 era, I missed that time entirely because my parents never bought a computer when I was a kid. I did get exposed to some DOS through friends and whatnot, using PK zip on a floppy drive to copy games. I remember one friend got an old 286 in the early 90s and we tried to install a game called Corridor 7 and it ran atrociously slow! I was so green I did not know that 2 frames per second was not normal. I also had no clue about "minimum system requirements."
My firest is Cyrix 6x86 PR120 ps:I remember that, back then, the Intel brand was something
my family could only dream of—completely out of reach.)
Gigabyte Motherboard
16MB Edo Ram
S3Trio64v+
Ess 1868（Sound Card）
1.4GB HDD
8x CD Room
Windows 95
This entire computer cost my father about $1,800.
I started out with an NES but things really got interesting when I saw my friend's uncle with an Amiga 500 playing Lemmings. I eventually got my own Amiga, an A1200 in 1994, mere weeks before Commodore went bust. My family could not afford a PC and the idea of buying a 2nd hand one was never considered. Some of my more wealthy friends parent's started getting PCs around this time; I remember one of my friends getting a 486 and playing Sim City 2000 and Heretic on it.
I stuck with my Amiga, probably for too long, but some of my friends in school also still had them and we would swap games, this was how I discovered Monkey Island. The Amiga version is still my favourite.
I built my first PC from 2nd hand components that I bought at a computer trade fair that was held locally every weekend. I got the idea to do it by a friend at school (I was 14 at the time). I saved my pocket money, birthday and Christmas money and after about 9 months I had scraped enough together to build my first machine:
FullYes 82430VX (socket 7)
Pentium 75
32MB SD-RAM
Cirrus Logic 2MB 5446 PCI
AudioExcel (CMI8330) Soundblaster clone (ISA)
2nd hand AT desktop case complete with PSU
15" compaq monitor (very yellowed!) - my dad helped my buy the monitor
1.44mb floppy
12x CD-ROM drive
2.1Gb WD Caviar HDD
Serial mouse
AT Keyboard
The total cost was around £200. I initially bought a 2nd hand "sold as seen" HDD which did not work (341mb Quantum), lesson learned and then had to save for another several weeks to get the WD Caviar. The motherboard was also sold as seen but worked perfectly and ended up being a lot better than expected for the £15 I paid. it can't have been very old as it was one of the first things I bought in either late 1997 or early 1998.
First OS: Windows 95, installed from floppy disk!!
First games I played; quake, starcraft, railroad tycoon 2 and lots of transport tycoon! Then half-life came out and blew everyone's minds.
It was always overclocked; the P75 worked fine at 100Mhz but I wanted more. For the first 5 years or so, I didn't have manual for the motherboard (eventually found one online) So I had to figure out jumpers myself - not sure how I didn't kill it.
I am not sure if I still had this system as my base when I bought myself a voodoo2 (12 mb, naturally)
Inevitably, I fairly quickly upgraded from and retired this system but hung onto it. I only (regrettably) sold it in 2018 as I had to have a clear out before a house move (Wife's orders). during the intervening years I upgraded it with "old useless hardware" that i picked up for pennies on ebay:
Baby AT Tower
Pentium 233 MMX / (sometimes used a K6-2 400)
64MB EDO RAM (32MB was the max SD-RAM the board could use, so it had to go)
Voodoo 2 paired with either S3 Virge DX375 or
32MB Geforce 2 MX 200 PCI
Awe64 Gold (which I think cost £10 😮)
After ~7 years not having one, I've ended up with a similar machine. Just can't get away from this era. Such good memories.
System 1: K6-3+ 600MHz! MS-5158 (430TX), 256MB SDRAM, Voodoo3 2000 PCI, AWE64 (Dos/95-early 98)
System 2: Athlon XP-M 2800+ 2.4GHz, SL-75KAV (KT133A), 512MB SDRAM, FX5900XT, Audigy 2ZS (late 98)
System 3: i7-2600k, P8P67-M, 2x4GB DDR3-1866, GTX 460 (XP)
After our Macintosh Plus reached EOL, dad brought home a locally built 8mb P100 in a desktop case with stereo speakers built into the sides of the front of the case.
No idea what the motherboard or graphics were but it had an ISA ESS sound card with some combo of eights, sixes and ones in its name. It was a good card but did some obscure channel polarity inversion and/or conversion to mono bastardry when recording from the cd analog input. When recording certain tracks into the Win95 sound recorder I’d end up with some instruments isolated as though they were studio stems, not that I had the knowledge to articulate this at the time. It was just interesting computer magic.
SO ANYWAY main lasting vibe of this machine was the Windows 95 CD Sampler which was a revelation - Jurassic Park’s “Interactive CD-ROM!” moment in my living room - and the included demo of Fury3 and some Microsoft visual atlas/encyclopedia/spinning globe multimedia extravaganza.
Dunno what it was called now but it had the most amazing comfy intro music which I haven’t heard since then but which thirty years down the line I’ll call “World Utopian Scholastic - Simba’s positive vibes remix feat. Nala”
386DX40, Amiga 600, Pentium 75, Celeron 300A, Pentium III-S 1.4, Athlon XP2400+, Pentium 4 I do not care for, Pentium M 780, Core 2 Q6600, i7 3770K
Our first PC was a 286 with CGA graphics and 40 MB HDD from 1995 to 1997, we joined quite late in the game 😁 It was the best computer ever! Never malfunctioned. I remember playing Defender of the Crown, GP, Prince of Persia, Civilization, Sim City, Street Rod, Railroad Tycoon, Arkanoid, Alley Cat, Arcade Volleyball, Gorilla.bas etc., and I also created some very primitive games in QBasic. Sometimes I just typed stupid things to DOS, and it was still fun. Those were the times! Then we switched to AMD K5 PR100, 16 MB RAM, SVGA graphics, and sold the old PC to a neighbor. A few years ago I asked them whether they still have the 286, but unfortunately they threw it out several years prior.
The legendary Olivetti Envision (the swan song of Olivetti)
Not my first computer (that was a TI99/4A), nor the first PC I used, but the first PC I had at home at my disposal, bought in 95 few days after the release of Win95
It was way ahead of its time, wireless keyboard, VFD display, optional MPEG decoder, remote controller, SCART output, ability to display 800x600 resolution on a PAL TV, in short a mediacenter/HTPC released a decade before such terms were created.
Also it had a GUI driven BIOS setup, with mouse support, and it did SW power OFF , when most PC where still based on AT PSUs, and had a WORKING standby, independent from the OS installed years before the ACPI specs were published.
Last but not least it was a antracite, in an era where everything was ugly beige, light gray in the best case scenario.
The one in the foto is powered by a AMD 486 DX4 100 (easily clockable to 120)
there was also the P75 variant (easily clockable at 90Mhz)
I still have both of them, plus a second P75 I got a decade later
The first computer that was mine was a hand me down from my aunt, a Gateway Solo 1150 laptop. Celeron 500, 32MB RAM, 5GB HDD. I played so much Rollcage on it.
98/DOS Rig: BabyAT AladdinV, K6-2+/550, V3 2000, 128MB PC100, 20GB HDD, 128GB SD2IDE, SB Live!, SB16-SCSI, PicoGUS, WP32 McCake, iNFRA CD, ZIP100
XP Rig: Lian Li PC-10 ATX, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, Core2Duo E6850, ATi HD5870, 2GB DDR2, 2TB HDD, X-Fi XtremeGamer
It's not really a PC, but around 1979 I used a PDP-11/70 running RSX-11M Plus, much of the time I was developing kernel mode device drivers for it so it was effectively my PC!
The first x32 PC I bought was a 2 x Intel Pentium II (Deschutes) 450MHz [dB0] @ SL2WB, 256MB, Diamond Viper II Z200, Adaptec AHA-2940, Gigabyte GA-6BXD and ran Windows NT V4.00 SP6, I built it myself. I still have it and it now has 2 x Intel Pentium IIIE (Coppermine) 1.00GHz [cC0] @ SL4KL, 512MB and usually runs Windows 2003 x32 Enterprise Server R2.
The screen shot was created from SIV save files with the Pentium II one being from 31-Oct-2002, just before I updated the CPUs.
The *very first* pc I ever used, was the PCjr my dad bought in the 80s for his police work.
It was sufgiciently pc-like that the police dept's database software would run on it. He kept casefiles on 5.25 360k floppies, and worked at home from time to time.
Mostly, we used it to play the bundled game (kings quest 1, with tandy sound) and some text adventure games.
*edit
the PCjr had the Racore Drive II expansion, giving it a second disk drive and expanding its RAM to the PCjr's 512k maximum. The jr memory map is strange, and video memory starts sooner than on the normal PC.
It was much later that I got a 486 sx, that mom got us for school work. The teachers were assigning typed homework, and *greatly disliked* the 10pt courier of the SmithCorona typewriter my sister and I used to satisfy that obligation. She finally caved after the Nth parent teacher meeting.
This is the same machine I bent over backwards setting up FusionPC mac quadra emulation on, to further meet the obtuse requirements of the teaching staff.
But, it's also the machineI really started DOS tinkering on. Learned about DOS networking, memory management, hardware assignment, and all that stuff on that AST Advantedge 486.
*edit
The 486 came with 4mb of RAM, an aztech soundblaster clone, an Epson color impact printer, and a CDRom drive. It had Cirrus Logic integrated VGA, and came with win3x with a custom shell program. It used a slot riser, and had 3 ISA slots.
My brother ponied up for some upgrades, and I installed them. Finding the computer in a state of disassembly gave mom a mild apoplectic attack, after which she decided I needed a summer job. She got me my position at the shystery mom&pop computer place that was my first job.
I got *all manner* of computer experience there. The 90s were a ... wild time...
