Did you build it yourself? What OS did you use? Did you have internet access?
Feel free to outline the component brand names and model (if you remember them) and let us know if you still have access to the computer.
This was in Jan 1997. It was running Windows 95 (Windows 98 wasn’t released yet). No internet (we got dialup later in the year; maybe in the late summer). It was built by my parent’s colleague (company system admin), I was too young to build my own PC.
*Pentium I 133 MHz *1.5 GB HDD *CD-ROM Drive *FDD *Sound Blaster 32 (remember getting Sound Blaster Live! In the next build). *32 MB RAM *S3 ViRGE 325 (4 MB RAM if I remember correctly).
I think the colleague who built it sold it off when we got a new build.
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
Good question, I don’t know! This was around 1985-ish
It was a 30 kg (60 odd pounds) beast, white, with built in 4-6 inch black /green monitor and keyboard and it used round small (about 2 inch diameter) cassettes to load data from, hidden under a black panel. It had 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, and I played games with it…there was chess, racing, and some more.
I remember having to put in the cassettes in a certain way, then press a thumb switch to make it load the boot program which would give me a menu from which I could select games to play.
My dad brought it home one day, some insurance company dumped them en-masse.
Anybody who might know from that description what machine it was?
Only thing I can come up with is a Commodore Pet but the cassettes were just normal cassettes. The memory was about right and the weight is sorta close. Anything else you remember? You’ve piqued my curiosity. As far as round storage like you described the only thing I’ve found was something called DecTape. But those were used on things beasts like a pdp-8 or pdp-12s. Not something you’d have in your house.
Let’s see if you can guess what this was….
Operating system EOS, OS-7, CP/M, TDOS
CPU Zilog Z80A @ 3.58 MHz
Memory 64 KB RAM 16 KB VRAM
This was in early 1984
A Tandy device (guessing without doing a web search)?
I started using computers around 95/96. Our consulting professor did show us an example of Tandy laptop back when I was doing a masters degree in the 2010s.
A Coleco Adam. I spent hours writing games for that thing. And it broke all the time. I must have returned that thing like three times. Then we had a house fire (unrelated to the computer) and I got a a Commodore 128 (which I just now realized also had a z80). I spent hours writing games and software for that too. Guess it was destiny I work in IT.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😄
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.
My first computer was a Dell 486DX @ 66mHz with 8MB RAM, a 514MB hard drive. It ran Windows 3.1 initially, and I think we upgraded to 95 eventually. Many a day playing DOS games, especially those 1000 in 1 discs with tons of shareware.
I remember those 1,000 in 1 discs, they were somewhat common in the mid 90s when CD-ROMs started taking off.
They’d be plastered all over tech stores end caps and cashier lanes, and sometimes places you’d never expect. But boy did they open my eyes to PC gaming.
TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1. 4k RAM, 1.77mhz Z80 CPU Cassette tape for offline storage, but I mostly just typed the program back in.
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 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. ))
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.
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.
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?
First few proper ones I knew what what going on with where this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC472
And a bunch of Atari st machines!! God the Atari stuff was glorious for the time!!!
But before that had the older amstrad and a Hitachi peach iirc, but I was too young to really know what was what with those.
640×200 pixels with 2 colours
Did you ever use this mode?
By the time I got into computing (96), I think 800x600 with at least 16K colours was relatively common.
I am not even sure what you would use 640x200 with two colours.
Hmmmm, good question, this was a long while back and I was young, I suspect we used the two colours higher res mode there when using word processing and other text based stuff. I remember playing answer back junior quiz and it was awesome it had multiple colours!, but no idea what resolution that ran in tbh. You have got me wondering about that machine now, might have to do some reading on it later today.
