Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

Just a little project I'm doing for an emerging technology class. Any input would be appreciated.

Do you remember your first PC? List a few things you remember about it.

My first PC was a Packard Bell, with a Pentium 1.44 Mhz processor. Upgraded memory, and came with one of those new confangled CD-ROM drives. Had a one gig Hard drive that had to be replaced a few years later. Still works!

The first PC my family had (I was seven when we got it) was put together by the now defunct company XEOS. It was a 386SX, 8/16 MHz, depending on if you'd hit the turbo button or not. Originally there was no CDROM (hadn't been invented yet) or sound card. We had a 11.6 kbps modem, a 5.25" disk drive, a 3.5" disk drive, and an 88 MB hard drive. It would still work, but my folks got rid of it a long time ago.

My personal first PC, I built when I was twelve out of used parts. It had a 150 MHz IBM/Cyrix processor, which I would eventually upgrade to a 233 MHz Pentium, the fastest the motherboard could take. It had a 6.4 GB hard drive that I got for my birthday. I've still got it, and it still works, there's just no real reason to use it for anything.

I don't remember the RAM numbers for these...That changed around a bit through the years.

i cant remember my first PC's model. but what i do remember is that is was slow as hell, and couldn't hold a lot of data.

Oh do I?

It was a 1987 IBM we bought secondhand from my uncle. Used bit floppy discs, and there was no operating system other than MSDOS. Big, heavy monitor, maybe a 13" one. Had a dot-matrix printer that still used the spools to feed things through, but there were so many games for it!!

Remember Pong? Well, we didn't have Pong. We had Table Tennis. Ooh, and Ball! Know what Ball was? A circle that bounced from one side of your monitor to the other, passing through columns of different shades of green. The ball would get DARK OR LIGHT OMG!!

Heh... yeah, that was fun.

I remember having an old mac, with this game i loved. Glider :D

The little paper airplane, and you fly it through the house! :)

And then i had an PC, maybe 200mhz Processor, and 32mb of RAM. Oh, And a 300mb hard drive xD

I believe we had a small custom one. I dont remember how fast it was honestly but I remember it had 32mb of RAM. And a 1.7 GB Hard drive i think, or at least thats what the hard drive said when I replaced it with a 20 GB, but the system was running on Windows 95 at the time then it got upgraded to Windows 98 and then we replaced the motherboard entirely with a Pentium 3 system and the ram from that board was able to go on the new one. Thats what my family had for a while that I can remember.

My first official computer that I owned ran a 500MH Pentium 3, Windows 98SE, 128Mb of SDRam (I got the computer in 1999 or 2000 I forget) with a 5 GB Hard drive which got upgraded to a 40GB Hard Drive. Also had the 2x CD-RW Drive, a 100mb zip drive, and the 3.5" Floppy.

Commodore VIC-20

It had massive program cartridges...and an external cassette tape drive...you had to fast forward a set amount of time to access different parts of the program...it was pretty wild...
:3

Mine was fun. It was a custom PC built around 1990, with a 200MHz Pentium cPU, 64MB of RAM, and a 6GB harddrive. It was faaaast for it's time. It killed me, however, because I didn't recieve it until 2001. @_@

Commodore something or other :p

insert floppy, start uploading program, go make coffee, when coffee is done, type paper, and then nothing.....didnt have a printer for it :p

so really, all you could do with it is type stuff and then delete it.

XDD
not even yesterday, a buddy of mine was showing a mac he built out of old parts, and he had that game installed on it


anyways, my first PC that was really "mine" is kinda hard to discern...i suppose it was that old toshiba laptop, ran windows 3.1 on top of a DOS shell. was 10 when i was given it and it only worked for a while before system files got effed and it got tossed, so i dont recall specs...

My first PC?

As in IBM-compatible, or just as 'Personal Computer'?

The first Computer in the family was my brother's Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K('Speccy' to fans, Timex sinclair 2000something in America) way back in 1984.

The fun times we had with that... Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, The Hobbit, Tasword II wordprocessing, making fun of the C64 crowd...

My first PC was a Brother BC5000SX(I think it was named) in 1990.
It was a i386sx/16MHz, 2MB RAM, 5.25"/3.5" floppies, 42MB HDD, 256KB Video RAM, 14" monochrome VGA monitor. DOS 5.0
Sweet machine...

In 1993 I began working at the office I still work at, and well...
The 386DX/20MHz machines they bought back in 1990 couldn't touch it. :-)

Didn't take long before I added a 387 co-processor, upgraded to 4MB RAM, installed Winblows 3.0...
Later it got a 2x CD-ROM, a 120MB HDD, and 8MB RAM...

Then a few years later I replaced the MB with a IBM Cobolt with a 486BL3/75MHz processor, Vesa VL-Bus graphics card...
And it was suddenly faster than the high-end PCs the CAD-users at the office had... again...

That machine later got a Kingston 'overdrive' type chip which was clocked at 133MHz and gave it the performance equivalent to a 75MHz Pentium. I also gave it 16MB RAM and a 420MB HDD and defiled it with W95 and handed it over to my father who used it to transfer music from LPs and tape(not cassettes, but those big spools), and even to 'clean up' the sound by filtering away clicks, wow and flutter.

The machine that replaced it, though...
(The first I had custom built from the beginning)
Maxi Tower with 5 half-height front slots...
133MHz Pentium, Intel MB, 64MB RAM, ATI RAGE Pro PCI card with 8MB and TV-out.
1.2GB HDD(Quantum fireball)
4x CD-ROM, 3.5"/5.25" floppies, Iomega i800 tape streamer, 17" Goldstar monitor.
And of course, it ran OS/2 3.0 'Warp', then 'Warp Connect', 4.0 'Merlin' and now eCS v1.0 (waiting for 2.0 to be released)
It now also sports a set of 3 x 6.3GB 'Server class' SCSI HDDs and an additional 2.3GB IDE Fireball.

But what really started my obsession with computers was the rather 'diminutive' Psion S3a PDA back in 1995.
7.68MHz NEC V30(i8086 compatible) 512KB RAM, Black/Gray/White screen, QWERTY keyboard, WYSIWYG Wordprocessor and Spreadsheet, Fully Pre-emptive OS with graphical UI.

all I can remember of my first PC was that it was slow as hell, the monitor was old and the screen was messed up, it had an eye-burning yellowish color; I remember it made wierd and very, very loud noises whenever I was doing something like opening a program or so; the CPU was of one brand and the monitor was another brand; I think it was pentium I, though I can't remember. I really never worried about the RAM or bus or anything cuz when I got it I was like...8 years old or so.
even if it was old and not cool, I still liked it very much.

The only thing I can remember of my first PC is that it was written 133 in lights to show how powerfull he was... Now that I think about it... WHY DID I GIVE IT TO SOMEONE ELSE !!! NOOOOOOO

the first computer that i used was awful, it was a partial installation of windows 95 (don't ask) and only had enough memory to have text documents and about five programs. No internet we didn't have it yet

a few years later after we replaced the hard drive the monitor got all... glithcy. the screen would get a purple tint and in order to fix it you have to hit the top of it. Good times. why did we get rid of that monitor.

A laptop size of an old computer screen, with detachable keyboard, hardware power switch and all. It started up with a black screen full of white text, and would open Windows (something below -95, don't remember how those were called anymore) only if I typed "w" and pressed enter.

Neighbor's kind little girl removed the minesweeper accidentally. Been used just for word-processing ever since.