What was your first (PC) computer, 286,386?

Blackjack Davy · 18 Aug 2016 at 12:46

AMD Duron something or other. Had several more AMD chips before I finally had an Intel. Felt like I'd sold out.

Selekt0r said:
Sinclair ZX81 in 1981 - with extra 16KB (yes, KB - not MB or GB) RAM pack

Followed by BBC model B - which I stupidly junked several years ago when we moved house

Electron, BBC Master, Acorn A3000. None of these were PC's though.

Burnsy2023 · 18 Aug 2016 at 12:51

Blackjack Davy said:
Electron, BBC Master, Acorn A3000. None of these were PC's though.

They most certainly are PCs, just not IBM compatible PCs.

Bluntwrapped · 18 Aug 2016 at 12:58

A Cyrix 233 was the heart of my first proper PC. Had a 3DFX Voodoo 2 Banshee and a 800x600 monitor

Was pretty pants for gaming, coped ok with Microsoft Motocross Madness but fell to it's knees with the first Alien vs Predator game lol. Gave me the platform to the knowledge I have today so in a way it's the best PC I have ever had

Blackjack Davy · 18 Aug 2016 at 12:58

Burnsy2023 said:
They most certainly are PCs, just not IBM compatible PCs.

We didn't use the term PC for them then, only IBM PC's or compatibles used that term and were strictly for business/office use only, IBM coined the term PC as I recall. They were generally technically inferior to what we colloquially termed home computers the only reason the office folk used them was because the software was compatible across a wide range of hardware.

Apple most certainly did not refer to their machines as PC's either iirc and were sold in direct competition to what were recognised as the IBM PC or compatibles.

NexusK · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:01

Amstrad CPC464 with tape deck and green screen monitor. Was dead jealous of my mates with their disk drives and colour monitors.

Soupy · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:02

Long time ago, Apricot PC, with 166mmx cpu, within hours of getting it the hood was off and overclocked it to 233 and solid as a rock with stock h/s and fan ... I felt like king of the world !!!!

aardvark · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:06

checjb said:
My first PC that I owned was a 486 that I wrote my PhD thesis up on. I remember at the time it was the absolute dogs danglies (in my eyes at least). I managed to get my supervisor to buy me a "huge" HDD, which I think was a mighty 1Gb and cost an absolute fortune.

similar to me.

bought a 486 dx2 66MHz with 8mb of ram (yeah i splashed out!) - got it to write my thesis as i didn't know anything about computers at the time (never had one at school, barely used one in my degree).

Tosno · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:07

IIRC a 75mhz packard bell Pentium with windows 95 from Tiny computers.

Dynix · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:09

I had some kind of Atari with loads of games. Later had some kind of eMachines with Windows 98 or ME on. Can't remember the specs exactly but vaguely remember it being a 450MHz Intel CPU, 32MB RAM and 8GB HDD or something similar.

antran · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:10

I built my first pc with a pentium 3, can't remember the rest of the spec with the money from my part time jobs

Lustral · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:10

Oh mine had the Soundblaster AWE-32 card in it , my god that card was long !

sgavan · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:12

First was a Philips videopac G7000

But the first PC would have been the Amstrad CPC 464

Clearcut · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:12

Pentium II 233mhz
32mb RAM
2GB hard drive

I remember playing Quake 2 after installing a Voodoo 4mb graphics card and switching to Hardware Acceleration. I nearly fell out of my chair.

Feek · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:20

Bunch of n00bs

My first computer was an Acorn Atom. It came with 1k of memory on board and a 1MHz processor. I upgraded it to the maximum of 12k on board and BUILT a 24k memory expansion board. From scratch.

Here's the computer itself.

And here's the bottom of the memory card. Lots of soldering there!

The inside of the computer. See that toggle switch hanging on a bit of wire at the top? That overclocked the processor to 2MHz.

And the top of the 24k memory card which I built.

I fired it all up in 2011 and it still worked - It got sold on eBay for a decent sum.

Kainz · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:30

I've spent the morning reading about my first computer - an Amstrad CPC464. I come onto OCUK and immediately spot this thread

I went from an Amstrad CPC464, to an heavily modded Atari 520STE, then onto a 486-SX33 that I equipped with a maths co-processor to turn it into a DX beast!

Somewhere down the line some random game called Doom arrived and I struggled to run it. Ended up buying a 586 CYRIX processor instead....great idea that was! (They had crap floating point performance that FPS titles relied on).

Hambut_Bulge · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:30

Lustral said:
Oh mine had the Soundblaster AWE-32 card in it , my god that card was long !

Had one of those too. Kept it for years

Always been a bit of an AMD loyalist, and started out with this

33Mhz 486DX
4MB RAM
160 MB HDD
3.5" FDD (no CD of course)
VESA Local Bus graphics card (don't remember which make, but also very long)
VESA Local Bus Disk controller (added some extra cache on the I/O)
Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse

It cost about £1500 if I recall...

Rimsy · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:32

shaf said:
It was a super machine.
It was a Packard Bell.

Not words that are often seen together

Mine was a 386sx somthing with about 4mb of ram running dos.
Played tie fighter a treat!

clockwork.satan · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:32

Mine was a Pentium Pro MMX@200Mhz, with 8Mb of RAM and (I think) a 20Gb hard drive. It also had a fancy (at the time) graphics card in the form of a Matrox Mystique.

All in lovely beige. Mmmm.

new boy · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:34

Pentium 3 with a geforce mx2 and a massive 640MB of ram as the previous owner played a lot of everquest so chucked tons of ram in it.

Mart2912 · 18 Aug 2016 at 13:36

All I can remember is that it had an intel processor at 333mhz, and it came with Total Annihilation, my first PC game.

What was your first (PC) computer, 286,386?

Hitman