Does anyone else remember the 286s or is it just me?

[vsmora]

I can feel myself welling up with nostalgia. Ignoring my beloved Speccy 48k, the first household computer was a Dan 486SX-25/4Mb/210Mb, VL-Bus, no sound or CD. I remember breaking it the first day we had it, when I tried to up the resolution to take advantage of the 14"->15" monitor upgrade we'd paid an extra £85 for . I had picked the wrong video driver and didn't know how to change it back from Dos so had to quickly learn how to reinstall Win 3.1.

Later came the thrill of OC'ing it to 40MHz successfully. Back in the day I had massive conditional batch files to optimise base memory and sound emulation modes to get games to work with the subsequent SB Pro and GUS Wavetable cards (yeah baby ).

Part of me misses the days when we had to juggle IRQs, set jumpers, load drivers in the correct order etc. and didn't have Google as the universal answer for everything. There was such a sense of achievement when one got things just right, which I just don't get nowadays from a "4.4.6012" driver update . (OT: when was the last time you received a product that was "finished" and worked properly with decent drivers in the box?)

 

[paulselhi]

The first "PC" we had was a 12MHz 286 with 40MB HDD (winchester), 4MB RAM and 2MB graphics card*

HDD ? Luxury.. I had to make do with Amstrad, no HDD only twin FD's. I used t' dream of 'aving 'ard drive.


Tell that to the kids of today..and they won't believe ya

 

[Duke]

HDD ? Luxury.. I had to make do with Amstrad, no HDD only twin FD's. I used t' dream of 'aving 'ard drive.


Tell that to the kids of today..and they won't believe ya

Floppy disks you say? Its all about the tapes! (ok back on the C64 and Amiga)

 

[beefybarn]

My first real computer was a DX4 100 i think. Went to put windows 3.1 on it and found my younger brother running his magnets over the floppy disks, he is still alive by the way .

 

[chuffnut]

Well my first computer was a VIC20 that came with the game Metagalatic llamas battle at the edge of time , anyone remember that?
Upgraded it with a switchable ram pack.
Moved on to a 48k speccy and brought a wobbly joystick adaptor.
Atari ST520fm single sided disk drive.
Then on to an Amiga 1200.
Then on to a Hp pavillion with a Amd K62-300.
Then i got hold of a P3 coppermine on a Pcchips mobo which if i remember correctly would take a slot and a socket processer, not at the same time though.
Next , Amd Athlon throughbred B at a rated 2600mhz.
Now have a trusty Q6600.

 

[olivier renault]

286, god that's old. But at the time, you were better off with an Amiga or Atari (proper fanboy geek-war that was too). I was in the Amiga camp. Amazing machine. When the 486, Doom and 3D sims (Chuck Yeager woohoo!) came out, that was it though. Then Pentiums and Quake... Start of an era.

Oh yeah, first machine was a Tandy 8086, with a weird graphics adapter (16 colours CGA). A few games we worth playing on it, like Ultima VI, Populous. I broke it by doing 'random programming' and poking the memory in weird places. It worked, it broke and my parents got me an Amiga 500 instead! Glorious!

 

[darklighthim]

I remember my first real PC having an AT motherboard and many ISA bus slots plus i think it had one I/O connection on it for a keyboard. We then upgraded to another AT board but this time with something special.......PCI slots and 2 of them to be exact.

One of my first computers that i remember the most was the Amiga we had although i can not for the life of remember if we had a 500 or what but i loved the Amiga.

 

[SABRE70]

My first PC was a 286 10Mhz with a 20 Mb HDD and a 3.5" floppy

Still have the cpu doh

 

[keng]

I modded a ZX80. Bought a second hand, full travel keyboard from Henrys on Edgeware road. Wired it up, I spent hundreds of hours with that thing.

 

[biuro74]

Huh, I've had my first Commodore plus/4 in 1987
But I'll tell you something sad that you probably never heard of. It was over the Iron Curtain, when having foreign currency was forbidden for ordinary people. And buying such computer was a foreign currency only matter - yep, one of many paradoxes of those times, like C64 price was 300 DEM (Deutsche Mark - because of Germany was the nearest country where you could buy it) whether people earned about 20-30DEM monthly.
So imagine that people organised themselves and every year a nationwide gathering of users took a place. Every single year it was a big party (couple hundreds of users presenting their hardware and thousands of visitors) where people exchanged software between themselves. And every weekend smaller copy-parties took a place in whole country, but the main difference was users sold a copies for money. Nobody was aware it was a theft, everyone did this and averyone could do this; there was even plenty of ads in newspapers. Some of them bought cars, better computers from such profits. Reason was simple: there were no originals in the market and demand was just huge, it's another paradox of central-controlled market.
But I remember this climate, it's nothing what you can compare with.
And 80286 got spanked by Motorola 68020 anyway

 

[blitzyuk]

My first pc was an Intel Celeron 433mhz cpu, 32mb sdram, 6.4gb hard drive, 8mb gpu it cost me about £500 when it came out it wasnt long until i upgraded the graphics card to a Riva tnt2 32mb and managed to buy myself a 40gb hard drive managed to max out memory at 192mb. It was the beez knees at the time.

 

[Kutter]

mine was a DX2-80 some kind of IBM processor bought the tower from a guy in manchester. All i remeber was buying a new game then spending about 2 hours doing a boot disc just to play the damn thing. ( xwing etc )

 

[glenimp617]

My first computer was a tandy trs80

First PC was a 286

 

[scrlk]

Sorry... had to.

 

[Mana]

heh my first pc was a 486 dx 33. My first game i ever played was some sort of maze question and answer game on Microsoft Encarta '95

 

[mrtckane]

lucky ******** all of you, my first pc was

intel pentium 3, 128mb ram and a ten gig hard disk

this was in 2004! and i'm 26.

i was a late adopter.

making up for it now.

 

[Loony BoB]

When I was growing up, we had a 186, 286, 386, 486 over the years. Good times. Still have the 386 somewhere at home in NZ, I think - and if it is still there, I'd keep it purely for playing oldschool games.

 

[Samiad]

It's weird reading threads like this. When someone says 'my first PC was a 486 DX2/66' my first emotion is jealousy! I'm conditioned to forever think that spec is godly, as it was when I was getting into this stuff. My 386sx40 was just so much slower it hurt.

I'm quite glad my first PC didn't have onboard sound as I will always remember that initial WOW when I finally plugged in an 8-bit SoundBlaster. It blew my mind at the time.

Same thing a few years later when the Voodoo cards came out - no more pixels! But the pass through quality and dithering effect was pretty horrible.

 

[Frum]

Mt first real pc was a 286 with 2mb of ram... used it to play eye of the beholder as i remember

same as that I brought it just to play eye of the beholder!

 

[mattyfez]

I remember a feeling of pride getting wolfenstien 3d working on a 386 monochrome laptop... it was a Compaq. I messed out 486 but remember being jealous a friend who had one, my next was a Pentium of some description.