your first PeeCee, memories

[mikele]

in the end of 1997 I bought my first PC, it was already underdog at the time - 486DX4@100 Mhz. It was intended to fulfill my game needs, since my A600(020/25) was broken and my PowerBook 170 was just for email/office purposes. Well, the truth is it didn't grew on me - spent several weeks playing Doom and some other FPS (funny how I envied those PC users playing Doom during my active Miggy years!). Finally replaced it with Sony Playstation after 6 months or so.

My first PC that I actually liked was PII 333, which could play mp3s and run WinUAE at the reasonable speed with a frame skip option on.

[hardwir3d]

My first PeeCee was a P166MMX, 32MB EDO, onboard sound (and went to buy a SB AWE32 the next monday!), S3 Virge 4MB (pos) and I think a 2.1GB HD. Bought it on Feb 14 1997 if I remember correctly.

I remember being all pissed when I noticed I couldn't scroll windows or directory contents without the mp3 player's output getting all messed up. Major disappointment. Only got solved when I got a new PeeCee, a 300MHz AMD / 100 MHz FSB box. Finally windows was able to scroll without messing up the mp3 lolz.

[turrican3]

pentium 120 16 mb ram edo with win95 doom heretic and destruction derby

[Locash]

hmmm I think its probably playing the excellent Star Flight on a 286, EGA graphics and PC Speaker .

The first PC I owned post Amiga was a P60 with a long devision bug, 8mb of ram and a Gravis Ultrasound MAX. Used good old Dos with Win 3.11. Getting the POS Gravis drivers and midi patches working was a nightmare but well worth it for sound that was way ahead of the Creative offerings..

[paulo_becas]

Ok, my turn.
My first PC was...
An PC1 from Olivetti
CPU: 8086... Speed... 8Mhz
Double Density Floppy drive
Monochrome CGA Monitor
NO HARD DRIVE
MS-DOS 3.2 Floppy
NO MOUSE
I think it speaks for itself
Even then it was sh.....

Here it is very close and personal.

[athiga]

year 1991
ok first growing pains was amstrad 1512 rubbish amiga wins

1992/3 ish
came along my 386dx 40 with coproceser (fpu to us) mother board had some onboard cpu cach memory card trident 1 mb gfx adaptor an io card for mfm hd maybe a 20 mb the memory was doing well to go over the 512k and floppy com port parralel port and sb 16 with a cdrom port (ide) x1 cd speed ,all isa 14 inch vga monitor runing dos 6
the fun bit was writing the start.bat loading the drivers into memory himem.sys cd.sys ect and sounblaster.sys and drivers that was fun
playing wolfstien doom id games stuff beat amiga but miggy held on to most 2d games ok
and when windows 95 came along did nothin but bitch how slow it was
how much mem it munched ect but adopted it eventualy
to run d3d games that didnt do dos and for my voodoo2 cards features

what amazed me was webb on a floppy msdos browser ect

[lost_lemming]

my first memory of the peecee (1997ish) was me thinking "so, this minesweeper game... it's crap!"

[kremiso]

it was my father one, so not properly mine
year : the game i remember i was (unsuccessfully, due the low specs ) trying to make work at decent speed, was Alone in the Dark; so probably 1992

a PS/2 IMB, 286cpu, monochrome monitor + MCGA
one 3.5 drive, HDD 20MB, MS-Dos
lovely keyboard, almost impossible to destroy, with a good 'click' sound when pressing each key

well, perfect for GORILLA.BAS and Commander Keen

[phx]

Always used Amiga and Unix systems for anything serious.

My first Windows-PC is still my recent one. ASUS G20CB. Got it around 2016/2017, because I absolutely wanted to play Elite Dangerous and Kerbal Space Program. I replaced Windows 10 by Windows 7 immediately when I got it. Still running 7 and only using it for gaming and watching videos.

[eXeler0]

Reluctantly in late 1997 (or possibly early 1998). It was some cheap Cyrix based win95 machine, was still using a high specced A1200 in parallell but needed Photoshop for some editing work.
Admittedly, web surfing was a step up also..

[Megalomaniac]

I finally got a generic Pentium from a local company to me during my GCSE year (age 15). Officially bought it to use Pressworks which I needed for my studies, but that didn't get that much use. Had problems with in initially, but I got about 2 1/2 years from it with just a few upgrades. First games I bought were Earthsiege 2 (which I got into and got a long way through) and one called Blam! Machinehead (no idea why I picked that one, to this day - think I played it about 4 times). Within a year I had Grand Prix 2, Civ 2 and TIE Fighter Collectors' CD, which were my first big favourites. Never got as drawn to Doom style games or other 3D action games as most people, didn't enjoy Tomb Raider at all (and, having tried it again in DOSBox much later, still don't). In an ideal world I'd've been able to get those games for an 060 Amiga with loads of memory and a graphics card. Was a nice step up from an Amiga though, especially once I'd gone online later.

[ScottC2010]

About 1997 if I remember, I bought a Pentium 100 board from a company called Primrose Computers as my dad new the owner and then put it together with 48MB and an S3 Virge 2MB, 4.3 GB Quantum Bigfoot and SoundBlaster AWE64, later I upgraded it with 4MB ATI Expert @ Work and then a 4MB 3DFX Voodoo which I then upgraded to a 12MB 3DFX Voodoo 2. 15" Monitor and CD writer (24 Speed). Tomb Raider and Sega Rally ran quite nice as did dungeon keeper and flight unlimited. I later got a Cyrix M2 and then an Athlon 600MHz and got the memory up to 96MB which ran half life and red faction quite nicely. I do remember playing a demo of a star trek game which you could battle in 3D with any ship you wanted but I can't remember the name of it - i would love to find that again. For the OS I started with Win95 OSR2C and then 98 SE and finally Me (Never had any problems with Me so I don't know what the fuss was about, same with Vista) Lots of memories playing quake/quake2 (I am playing Quake 2 on my recently acquired PPC power mac) as well as descent and hexen 2. Glad i kept myA1200 and CDTV though!

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by ScottC2010

I do remember playing a demo of a star trek game which you could battle in 3D with any ship you wanted but I can't remember the name of it - i would love to find that again.

I suspect it's this game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_T...rfleet_Academy

[Keatah]

I first got into computers in the late 1970's and early 1980's with an Apple II and TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Also had a Ti-59 calculator. Still have all of them today.

First saw an 8086/8088 in the early 80's. Played Flight Simulator on it for about 10 minutes. That's all I was allowed to do. It was a serious machine for serious wordprocessing and not to be touched by "children".

I bought into the Amiga not long after, for graphics and art. And it fulfilled that purpose. But soon I wanted more and stated eying a 286, but it was out of my price range of course. So stuck with Amiga and Apple II for a while.

Got to noticing all the sciencey proggies for astronomy and fractals on the 286-486. Unlike anything I could ever get on any other computer!

Finally got a 486 DX2/50 in late 1992. 4MB RAM, 1MB CirrusLogic 5422 videocard. A whopping 212 MB HDD. And the wondrous Microsoft Windows 3.1 with MS-DOS 5.0. Finally a real operating system I could do productive things with.

This was serious hardware and it performed like such. Wordprocessing was a whole new experience. Got a SoundBlaster soon enough and was blown away, naturally.

Then in 1993 Doom and Raptor came out and I decided right then and there that it would be my gaming platform going forward. And the burgeoning emulation scene just kicked everything to a new level after that.

I would grow into and out of Pentium II 266 & 450. Pentium III 450, 850, 1400. Pentium IV (short lived). Then a Pentium M and finally recently i7 and i9 rigs.

The main attraction on the PC were the serious astronomical and science applications, not games. Those came later. That and the file interchangeability. Everybody seemed to be getting on that bandwagon. No longer did I have to do conversions and ask others if they could accepts this, this, or that.

Also got to experience the early 3D industry via RIVA-128, TNT2, GeForce4, and Voodoo2.

[masteries]

A Pentium II 233 MHz, with 160 MB of SDRAM at 100 MHz
(a stick of 128 MB and another one of 32 MB),
Sound Blaster 16
and a Voodoo 3 AGP card with 16 MB

Impresed by the 3dfx support for DOS games,
as well Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament work
like a charm in this PC setup.

[ScottC2010]

Originally Posted by Locutus

I suspect it's this game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_T...rfleet_Academy

Thanks - i'll check that out

[Snoopy1234]

my first PC use was around "90 at Dad's work. A TASRAM DX4 PC clone with SoundBlaster and 14.4kb modem. I never intended to have my A1000 online so this was a first. Logging on to local BBS's like KeelyNet and others. I still have the PD copy of BLAKE I downloaded then. I also used XTree file manager a lot and enjoyed roaming around the HDD.

[Reynolds]

I had a late arrival to the pcs' world and stayed at it's frontier. Bought my first stuff in 2004 from my workplace's IT stuff when it's price was volunteered for the tsunami victims in Phuket (IIRC), it was a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4290, a PentiomII based laptop. I was always behind the general minimum, as I used that till 2009 when bought a Core2Duo desktop config. Actually I have a Dell laptop still with the same CPU, and don't really think I should change that :P

[golem]

My dad got me my first PC reconditioned from work. It was an Apricot Xen 386 with a small hard drive (my first one) and I got Win3.1 on it from disks from a friend. Also it ran Wolfenstein. It got me experience relevant to work and I got my first job in IT soon after. My first big pay check I upgraded my aging 500 to a 1200 of course.

[PatmanQC]

Not sure what year this was probably 85 or 86 but I had a friend of mine whose parents were loaded. He told me his dad had a game called space quest on the PC and began describing in-depth of the crazy things you could do.