So long ago. I think the first was an Apple 11e with an external 256K floppy drive that loaded Basic OS every time computer was turned on? 1984 or 1985?
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Worked for a year doing odd jobs to afford it (was a teenager). Bought it at a computer show. Never booted, so I had to learn how to fix it.
This was a theme. First car was a POS, so I had to learn how to fix it, too.
That's so sad that the first computer you scrap enough money to buy as a teen just doesn't boot. 😠
The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe.
The first computer I owned, was the very first eMachine.
I do not remember the specs on either.
First computer I ever used was probably some crusty old gateway with windows 95.
I pretty much only had access to my parents old desktop computers until I hit highschool when they bought me some dell POS that could barely run cs 1.6 in windowed mode.
First PC I built myself was a 770 and some first or second gen i7 that my buddy sold me for 20 bucks lol.
Been building my own computer every few years since. I am currently on a 3080 and i7 10700k that I have overclocked on all cores to 5.2ghz.
I'll probably build a new system in a year or two when the 6000 series cards drop. I am foolishly hoping that Nvidia has some change of heart about pricing by then lol
CS 1.6 in windowed mode sounds awful.
Jensen and Co are not going to have a change of heart about anything. Willing to bet good money on this. :)
I do not miss my barely 30fps windowed mode laptop gaming life haha
Yeah it's really disappointing honestly. AMD cards just don't have the raw performance and the it seems even though Intel's second gen cards were doing alright they don't want to keep going down that path which sucks. Nvidia needs proper competition and amd hasn't been giving them a run for performance in a long time now.
At one point I was also reliant on a gaming laptop, (thankfully 17 inch and with a dGPU), but desktops (with nice ~30 inch monitors) are just so much better.
Both AMD and Intel want to be in the position Nvidia is in right now. ~3 players is not enough for a true free market.
- MOS Tech 6510
- 64KB RAM
- MSD SD-1 5.25" floppy drive
It is sitting in my office, and still works though I need to replace the Power Supply as the OG one is known for killing C64's.
Cool that it's still around.
I wish I still had my old computers. I am glad this one survived. I miss my Mac plus and my gateway2000 486. I also wish I still had my Athlon 2500 xp-m or my old DFI lanparty setup.
So much computer history and overclocking.
I miss my old Pentium 3 Windows 98 machine.
There are a few games that I think still would work better with Windows 98 on a relatively high resolution 4:3 monitor (Simcity 2000, SimTower, Theme Park World).
Warcraft and StarCraft!
Atari 800 so 6502 1.8 mhz 8k ram cartridge and 5 1/4 floppy. That was my first family computer, the first computer I bought with my own money was a dell T450 Pentium 3 450mhz and an ATI dedicated 3d accelerator card and a 19" Trinitron monitor that I loved to degauss for that satisfying bong noise
What year was this for the Atari 800?
The Pentium 1 build I described was on the parents money of course since I was a pre-teen. 🤣
The Atari 800 I had around 1985 or so, I was like 4 at the time, playing donkey Kong and an amber screen
Macintosh 512k.
One day my dad just came home with one of those because the company was swapping them out. I couldn't have been older than 6 or 7 years old.
Fun fact: I grew up to be a huge Apple hater. Despite being at the PC constantly ever since I've never got in the habit of typing with all my fingers.
So:
a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor at clock speed 7.8336 MHz
512 KB of RAM
512 × 342 pixels
The Hard Disk was a whopping: 0 Tbyte. It had none, instead you had a system floppy. 400kb.
But I had a plugin to ad an additional floppy that stored multiple softwares (and a incredibly huge library of videogames).
Never got a chance to use systems without an HDD. Parents office had older 486 computers with Win 3.11 (circa 96), but they definitely had HDD.
I would play around on they while waiting for mom to finish work.
I don't actually remember the models, just the story. This was around 2010.
My first job, I saved every penny I'd made working with my dad over the summer installing wood-pellet and solar heating systems in Australia.
Took that to my local computer shop and picked out a laptop I'd had my eye on for the whole year (I don't even remember the brand on this one tbh, too long ago for my crap memory). It was the last one they had of that model; so they had to take the display unit, format it, and give me that. Halfway through that process they shut it down and handed it to me; said I could turn it on at home and it would finish re-installing windows and all would be good. (spoiler, no it was not)
When I got it home, it refused to start at all. After a bunch of screwing around (pretty new to computers, didn't really know what I was doing and had no one with tech experience around me) I took it back to the store and was told it had corrupted the recovery partition it was re-installing windows from and would have to be sent to the manufacturer to be fixed.
From there we decided to trade it with a slightly cheaper HP laptop (HP Pavilion I think? One of their models with a fingerprint scanner and dual graphics) that became my gaming machine for the next like 7 years. Plus because of this being the shops screwup: they gave me a 1tb usb drive, a laptop bag, and a random wifi router all for free. That drive saved me soo many times holding important data while I screwed up the OS and reinstalled crap while I experimented and learned. Then the router got DDWRT flashed to it and became a wifi client bridge for connecting wired clients to wifi during LAN parties. That poor laptop went through hell; being the testbed and primary machine for my teenage shenanigans, but it held up pretty well considering. Stripping it apart once a year or so to clean all the dust out and refresh the factory thermal paste helped quite a bit.
A fond memories. It all works out in the end.
Eventually I replaced that laptop with a custom built rig housing an i7-8700k and an RTX3080 that now hosts 30ish docker services and serves media to friends+family ~12 solid hours a day on average.
Thanks for comming on my walk down nostalgia lane.
Sounds pretty painful for your first purchase with your own money (that's a special kind of experience), but it sounds like you got a good deal on the trade-in. 😄
8088, 10Mhz. But if I pushed the button it would slow down to 8Mhz. That made Red Baron easier to control.
640kb RAM. Because nobody should ever need more than that.
2x 360kb floppy drives (5 1/4"). Eventually upgraded with a 40 Mb hard drive. The salesman said that was so big we'd never fill it up.
CGA graphics. I eventually upgraded this to a used ATI Wonder EGA card. That let me use my RGB monitor in interlaced 640x350 graphics mode. The flickering just proved I wasn't epileptic.
MS-DOS 3.3. It also had a board called Trackstar, that was an Apple IIe. I was taking classes at school at the time, and the school used Apple.
2x 360kb floppy drives (5 1/4"). Eventually upgraded with a 40 Mb hard drive. The salesman said that was so big we'd never fill it up.
This was before my time (FDDs were on their last legs by 1997), but I am guessing at one point dual FDDs was a good thing to have.
The salesman's pitch sounds so quaint in retrospective.
What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rino? seriously though I do remember cutting my finger prying the stupid plastic cover for a 5 and a quater sized slot to put a optical disk reader in. was not my first one but I remember doing that.
My grandmother had an Apple IIe that I remember using as a little kid.
The first computer that was "mine" more than anyone else's... I can't remember the exact specs, but it ran Windows 3.11 and had an 80MB hard drive. I remember that much.
Store bought, 6510 1.023 MHz CPU, 64KB RAM, VIC2 video with shared memory, SID 3 voice sound, Single 160KB Floppy, BASIC 2.0 OS
and let us know if you still have access to the computer.
I do! I used it for about an hour just two weeks ago.
Nice! I wish I had my second PC for a retro Win98 rig. The first one I described was cool, but I think the second one would be a better fit for real world retro use).
64 KB RAM sounds comically low even though I am aware of computing in the 80s/70s.
Acer Aspire 5532. It had a single core Athlon 1.6ghz processor, 3gb of ram, 160gb of storage, and it ran windows 7. It was cheap and it was SLOW! To be honest, I do attribute it with expanding my knowledge of computers, as I almost immediately started researching how to make it acceptably fast, which led me into engineering.
I don't work in a technical field (but I do interact with technical fields), I am glad I went through the (late) 90s and 2000s, it has helped created a modicum of independence when dealing with tech solutions.
P2 with MMX. Think we ended up getting a Voodoo 2 for it as well. Same SoundBlaster and some ridiculously small disk and RAM. Win95. It even had a turbo button and a locking power button.
It was an upgrade from our Amiga 1200.
Fond memories of shoulder surfing the BT guy when he came to our house - peeked a test number for dialup and got about half a year of internet for free.
Had Turbo button as well. Even back then (I was a pre-teen), I didn't really understand the logic of the turbo button, I think I had it on all the time.
Popping the thing open to short the power switch when it was 'locked' was my introduction to PC internals, electronics in general, and disobedience :)
I'd have been about 8 at the time. Good years.
After that I think we had some nondescript P3 beige box and then went to a Haswell P4. Ran hot as lava.
It was a Bluechip IBM clone (the motherboard was a Hyundai), 8086, or 8088. No idea what RAM it had, probably 256kb. It had a monochrome (green) monitor, and two 5.25” floppy drives. A loud mechanical keyboard, and no hard drive. I had to boot MS-DOS from floppy each time I turned it on.
No internet for a few years yet.
Green monochrome?
I never really encountered old school monitors. Everything was 800x600 in 1997 with 8 bit or perhaps even 16 bit colour.
I don't remember for sure, I was less than 10 years old. 😄
Some auld Packard Bell in the 90s
The first PC I built myself was a 20 mhz 386 with 4mb of ram and an 80MB Seagate MFM drive paired with an RLL controller to get 112MB of storage. I based my build around a computer shopper article on building a Unix PC ( this was years before Linux).
I just found my ABC motherboard manual a few days ago and threw it out.
Pentium 200mmx, 32 mb ram, and I think a 5gig hard drive with windows 95. I don't remember the original display adapter, but later it had a voodoo banshee put in it. We also upgraded the CPU to one of those evergreen technologies k6-2 400 MHz. Later we switched to windows 98 and a bigger hard drive. I think we must have upgraded the RAM too, but I don't remember. It was a true ship of Theseus.
Edit: also don't remember the original sound card but I think it ended with a sound blaster live with the emu10k chip.
5 GB seems like a lot for Win95 era.
We also upgraded to Win98 (with a new build) in maybe 2 years. Win98 seemed a lot more usable than win95 from what I remember.
I purchased a 4.3gb hard drive in the late 90s. 97 or 98 possibly 99. So a 5gb is not out of the realm of possibility for win 95. Especially if they did not upgrade right away.
Definitely, I am just going from memory. 5 GB for 96/97 seems a bit high, but possible.
I may be misremembering. It may have had a smaller drive initially.
Yeah the exact details are difficult to pinpoint. I had to double check my initial memories.
I thought I had a Riva TNT2 on my first build, but I checked the launch date and I realised that it had to be the 2nd build, which me remember that the first video card I had was a S3 ViRGE. ))