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Your first computer.

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T

tedtropy

$50/hour, but no kissing on the lips and colors must be pre-separated
Chances are there's been threads along these lines but...the search function and all.

My first computer was this little beauty...

ab2hra.jpg


In particular, it was an IBM Aptiva 2144 that my parents bought for me in late 1994/early 1995 (I just turned 29) at a McDuff's electronic store (they were owned by Tandy, the Radioshack folks) in a mall that now looks like the set for a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.

This was shortly before they started bundling Win95, so I had myself a beast of a Win 3.11 box with a 486SX/33MHz processor, 4MB of RAM, (surprisingly it could max at 128) a 2400 baud modem (shitty even for the time) and I believe around a 200MB HD. I eventually spent what I recall was well over $100 to eventually up it to 8MB. Prior to that I had to make a custom bootable floppy to free up enough extended memory to run Doom 2. To round it out we got a 14" high-resolution CTX monitor.

A few years later I had the option of upgrading the processor to a Pentium 83MHz Overdrive processor or the 486/DX4 100MHz. My naive young mind opted for the one with more megahertz in the name, but either way it was a hell of a bump at the time. I can remember a beautiful heyday of DOS first-person shooters and AOL 2.5 (which my parents made me quit for a few months when I charged close to a $300 bill before they went flat-rate), the death rattle of the system more or less signified when I tried to run the Quake 1 multiplayer test and the turtle icon (less than 10fps) constantly appeared in the corner of the screen.

Shortly after that my dad let me pick out a Compaq Presario 4000 tower with a bitchin' K6-2/233 from Best Buy. I shoved a PCI Riva 128/ZX in it and my 3D accelerated era began...but that's for another pointless thread.

For a kid that was always abit more tech/dork oriented I actually entered the computer age pretty late in the game - alot of friends around my age started out on Commodore 64s and the like, but I'll always look back fondly on those days of technowonder, before working in the IT field eventually crushed most of the awe for me.

Let's be nostalgic together, GAF.
 
it was bought in 2000. it was some crappy packard bell that was running on millenium edition.

IT FUCKING CRASHED TWICE WHILE INSTALLING. windows me scarred me for life.
 
I adored my 64.

Jumpman - 1st game - took 18 minutes to load from data cassette.

The 1541 Disk Drive was to arrive about a week later.
 
i think the moral of this thread is that you were still living with your parents and they were still paying your bills and buying you stuff when you were 30
 
A 386 with 4 megs of RAM and 80 Meg HDD! I had to use a boot disk to get Doom to run well.
 
I had an apple II when I was really little. I have no idea where it went, but it was the first computer I ever used!
 
My first PC that was actually mine, and mine alone, was an HP Pavilion. I don't remember what model it was, but it resembled the 514N case.

Mother of God that was the worst computer I ever owned.

...Mostly in part because it had Windows ME installed on it.

Crashing every 30minutes to an hour for absolutely no reason... I about threw it out my window in rage a few times.
 
Either my Dick Smith VZ-200 or my Commodore VIC-20, not sure which came first, but my first real DOS PC was an Olivetti XT with Hercules Monochrome monitor and I played Carmen Sandiago, Prince of Persia and Street Rod on it.

VZ-200

VZ200.jpg


VIC-20

VIC-20_friendly_brochure_p1.jpg
 


Atari ST ftw, who needs an Amiga?

On this I played my first RPG, Walls of Illusion, my first side scroller Moon Patrol and the glorious Winter Games. I may be the only person on this planet who beat Walls of Illusion too.
 
Not just a Commodore 64, but a portable Commodore 64. Jesus, what a small screen. Lucky I'm not blind. My dad's company bought it for him, as I recall.

x8ZmHG5tYm1okf0oJRFPmk8Co1_500.jpg
 
All I remember is that it was a Penitum II with a 3DFX card and it was back in like 1998.
 
My earliest computers and boldest memories of them:

Commodore 64 & Spectrum -
tape deck, rudimentary games, peek and poke in basic

IBM PC -
probably less than 33hz processor, it was my dad's business machine, he used it for Lotus 123 (1980/90s Excel)... it managed games like Wolfenstein and Commander Keen. I used to spend hours on an EA animation game called Cartooners, and Monuments of Mars. I remember being amazed by GEM (a windows-esque GUI) before I experienced Windows 3.1

Tiny Computers 166mhz PC with Voodoo 1 card -
Played lots of Yoda Stories and Quake 1... I lost the Quake 1 CD early on, so played it a lot with albums in the drive... so my memory of Quake 1 isn't the NIN / T Reznor ambience, but U2's Pop. Very strange experience.

My auntie also had an Amiga 500. Used to play lots of Gods and Super Putty.

In terms of consoles, I used to have to visit my best friend to play the NES, my first console was a SNES, and I got the Megadrive a year later. I fondly remember all those early pre-console computers though. Very cool. The commodore in particular got me into Basic / Programming etc.
 
You kids, starting with your megabytes of RAM.

Fucking half-meg RAM expansion for the Amiga was the size of a wedge of cheddar and cost like $300.

And the C64, I mean when you turned it on you got this:

COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2
64K RAM SYSTEM, 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

get that? by turning the machine on, you lost 26K of your 64. 'cause it booted into BASIC.

One GAF avatar could not even remotely fit into the memory of that thing!

/mylawn


((edit - ohgod Atari400 BEEPBEEP BEEP aiieeee flashback)
 
Cousin had a commodore 64 which I used to hoard when I went over, then we got a 386 with DOS and I used to play elmo's adventure, midnight madness and alf LOL

Those were the days
 
NEC PowerMate — 100MHz, 8MB RAM, 4x CD-ROM, 1GB hard disk, Windows 95. I had used a lot of different older machines up to the point, but this was the first one that was mine.

Encarta was the coolest shit.
 
Can't remember what it was. I'm 24, and we got our first computer when I was 12 I believe. Had windows 95. My first interactions with a computer were on 3.1 with friends who had a PC earlier and some oldass Macintosh that my friend's father used for work.
 
An old compaq from my dad's office that ran Windows 95. I remember playing Descent and Myst on that computer with my older brother, we shared a room at the time and had this really cool double desk. My PC gaming career begun with that machine, kinda crazy to think how much more powerful the one sitting on my desk is.
 
http://lowendmac.com/ii/macintosh-iifx.html

A hand-me-down Macintosh IIfx from my Uncle way back in '94 when I was 14. Along with the device, which came to me with a whole 8MB of RAM, was an old Syquest external drive with two 80MB discs that were scary as all hell to eject.

I have fond memories of playing Wesleyan Tetris on that damn beige box, giggling like a school girl whenever the program cursed at me for completing a line. oh, the hours spent on CompuServe and AOL looking for and downloading warez, hypercard-created porn and - most importantly - wracking up massive phone bills in the process.
 
The first computer that I used from my house was a mainframe in the basement of the Lawrence Hall of Science, accessed via a teletype.

The first computer that was actually located in my house was an Apple II.

The first computer I bought with my own money was an Amiga 1000.

The first PC I purchased was a Gateway 486 DX2 66MHz.
 
Tandy with an Intel 8088. A whopping 4mhz! And all I remember is it was KB of ram. Great stuff.

The first computer I built was a 766mhz AMD Duron. That was around when 1ghz was announced. That was a big deal.
 
mcrae said:
i think the moral of this thread is that you were still living with your parents and they were still paying your bills and buying you stuff when you were 30
Click to expand...
Not sure if serious.
He turned 29 just recently.
 
When they were new and relevant, I got an Apple IIGS for Christmas.

152esz9.jpg


The next year X-mas, I got a 2400 baud modem and 1MB memory expansion. The memory card was the size of today's video cards. I think the damn thing cost like $200-300 !

Last Apple product I've owned. My parents made a big mistake and bought into the Apple mystique. For my purposes, I would have been much better off with an Amiga. And it probably would have cost less money.

I remember constantly seeing all these cool games and finding out there wasn't a IIGS version only regular Apple II. And worse yet, some IIGS specific games were 8 bit ports. I'll never forget seeing the back of Gauntlet's box. The ST and Amiga looked arcade perfect. The title screen looked good and then the game started. My jaw hit the floor. The IIGS version looked worse than the NES port. I read on the internet a few years ago, it was because it used recycled C64 assets.

There were some good IIGS games though. I still remember the time I was on Applelink and asking for help and got to chat with the creator of Bard's Tale III, Burger Bill Heineman.
 
_APPLE2E.GIF


Apple IIe with a whopping 128k of ram!

I was always jealous of the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. I remember looking at those Three stooges screenshots with so much hate.
 
tandy-1000sl2_1s.jpg


Tandy 1000. Man, you can't measure the impact of having a computer at a young age in the last quarter of the 20th century.
 
600_vtech_laser_486_0700.jpg


486 DX/33 with 4MB of RAM and VESA Local Bus (VLB) graphics. We upgraded it with a 14.4kbps modem and a cheap soundblaster pro knock-off. At one point I had a Gravis UltraSound ACE in there, too.
 
If we can cite first things we ever touched, I have a pretty good one – an Osborne Portable, playing what was termed Hunt The Wumpus. I think that was my first actual game, perhaps aside from maybe an encounter with Space Invaders somewhere thereabouts.
 
Got ours in fall of '93 I believe

I can still remember the afternoon my mom brought it home, the giant Windows user manual with the sunflower on it, the huge HP printer, the CRT monitor, both kinds floppy drives

Local shop built.

486/33
Windows 3.1

Many hours of Wolfenstein 3D Shareware and Ultimate Doom were played on that thing.

I remember when my mom and I heard about Quake we wanted to play it dearly, but then read you needed a Pentium processor. We were both sad.
 
A 386 25 MHz
4 MB ram
2 20 MB hard drives
128 KB VGA card

It was BEAST (for a computer from 89/90)

Windows 3.1 ran like CRAP on it lol (used MS-DOS with my still favorite file manager of all time... Directory freedom)

had no sound card... When I went to my friends house, he started up Jill of the jungle... And the midi music from his sound blaster 16 melted my face off (I was used to PC speaker at that point)
 
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