first computer you had?

[lost_soul]

The other day, I was looking at some old computers from the early '90s and '80s. It makes me appreciate having an abundance of spare machines from the P4 era around, which are still perfectly adequate for most tasks sands new games. The Apple Lisa was about $10,000 when it came out and only had 1 meg of RAM for example. That would be over $20,000 today! The abundance of P4s floating around for cheap can still play Hulu, Youtube, music, browse the web, do school work, and almost everything else.

 

What kind of computer hardware have you owned in the past? Were you impressed with it at the time?

 

I was first given an old 386-33 MHz around 1994 or so. It was fun to play with, but couldn't do much in terms of gaming. I got Rise of the Triad going on it, but it wasn't pretty. It couldn't handle Doom or Descent without a memory upgrade, which I never got to do.

 

Then around 1997, my step-dad's brother built and gave me a Pentium 100. Sure, it was a little old even at the time, but I loved it! It ran all of the games I wanted to play (Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc very well.

 

Of course by 1999, the P100 didn't cut it anymore with Thief and Unreal around. We put together a K6-2 400 machine from cheap parts at a local Fry's. We reused an old case and power supply to save cash. I had a Permedia 2 video card in there that I had been given by a teacher who had recently gotten a Voodoo 2 or something. That card ran Quake 2 engine games well, but it struggled with Unreal and Quake 3. I eventually saved up and got a Voodoo 3 3000, which was a HUGE improvement.

 

I had that K6-2 system until 2002 or so, when it couldn't run many new games anymore. I got a P4 2.53 GHz machine that year, with a gig of RAM and a Geforce 4 ti4600. That was a fantastic machine, up until around 2005.

 

Then I scraped together a cheap Athlon 64 3200+ system with a real DX9 capable video card. This was around the time PC games started going down hill. I've had that Athlon 64 machine ever sense. In 2008, I got a new laptop to replace my 2002-era laptop. I wanted one with NVIDIA graphics, so performance in Linux wouldn't be terrible. This laptop is my current TDM machine and best system at the moment.

 

I've also got a Parallel Zip drive, which I purchased new in 1997. It still works to this day. I put some important files on the disks that I don't want to lose, boxed it up, and shoved it in my closet. If it lasted thirteen years, it may last another ten, by which point my main hard drives may be dead. It never gave me any trouble, and spent the past eight years sitting out in the open on a shelf.

[Baddcog]

i bought a used texas computing (the only licsensed mac builder)rig from a co-worker in 2000. it was crap and a waste of money, shortly after i bought a compax presario i think 750mhz, did pretty good for t2 (i played the bafford demo shortly after i got it when a freind loaned me T2.

from there i was hooked on thief but windows ME crashed all the time.

 

then i was given a 900 mhz gateway, ME again, alittle faster, not much better.

[nbohr1more]

Commodore 64!!!!!

 

I recall spending an entire summer with Gary Kitchen's "Game Maker" trying to create a Zelda clone then the floppy disk went corrupt. I have never mourned lost pixels more... (This was after becoming somewhat of a C64 veteran before NES revitalized the console market...).

 

It wasn't 'till well after college before I bought my first PC... P4 1.8ghz with Geforce 3 Ti-200 and 256MB DDR266 Ram... Windows 2000.

Edited October 10, 2010 by nbohr1more

[lost_soul]

One could also run FPS games on 1982 hardware. I was pretty surprised to see this! They have them for the ZX Spectrum.

 

Wolf3d could have been done at least 8 years earlier.

Edited October 10, 2010 by lost_soul

[Mortem Desino]

I just used my father's throwaway computers every time he upgraded. He has been a computer consultant and programmer since before I was born.

 

I started out on my father's apple][e attempting to play "Wasteland" and "Maniac Mansion" when I should have been playing "reader rabbit". I accidently saved over my older brother's wasteland party, and he was hopping mad about it.

 

Then I upgraded to the old 486-33 playing the Ultima games, and one or two native windows 3.11 games from CD. After that was a Pentium MMX computer where I first delved into more mature and complex games like Betrayal at Krondor, doom, quake 2, Diablo II. That lasted me for a long time, borrowing CDs and Floppies from friends, playing multiplayer via laplink cable direct-connection, and occasionally 56K fax modem online.

 

When I reached 6th grade and my brother went to college, I went dumpster diving at nearby schools' network services, and made a working laptop with a beefy 446 mhz processor and 2 mb video card and 45 minutes of battery life. Used that through high school, occasionally using my father's 1.8 mhz p4 desktop for modern games. Entering college, I built a close-to-top-of-the-line desktop (dual core @ 3.2, Radeon 4850 1gb) and have used it ever since.

[Fidcal]

Those FPS games were pushing the Spectrum a bit too far and looked very rough. The Spectrum probably was its best with the 3D Isometric platformers like 3D Ant Attack and Knight Lore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_game#Isometric_platformers which had good strategy and clean graphics using two colours to overcome the Spectrum's two-colour per 8 x 8 pixel block. I played those games for hours to finish them. There were no gamesaves.

 

My brother first showed me the Spectrum in 1983/4 and one of the pacman type games was written in BASIC so he was able to break in and change the key config on a 2-line command input at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes he accidentally scrolled this up slightly and broke part of the maze wall. While playing, if the monsters got out through the gap he would say "they can blunder out but they don't know how to get back in." This was my introduction to AI. I puzzled over this for days. At that time the computer was to me a complex calculator. But it was clear the programmer never intended these sprites to get outside the maze so how could they even move about? And what did it mean 'they don't know how to get back in.' That started my interest in computers and soon I was writing my own little programs.

 

I had many versions of the Spectrum with various drive systems. I had an Atari ST and curiously I just threw that out only a few days ago! It had laid in a cupboard for so long it was forgotten.

 

The Spectrum was 41K RAM + 7K screen RAM. I had twin 780K DD floppy drives which seemed huge at the time. A modem that accessed Prestel and bulletin boards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system was an early taste of networking and the thrill of talking to people in other parts of the country through computer magic!

 

My first PC had a hard drive of about 40MB as I recall and for a long time (it seemed) I only needed about half that. I scarcely remember how I progressed through various PCs as my brother and I often swapped hardware. I do recall two early events. Fighting a guard outside the scepter room in Bafford at about 1 frame per 10 or 20 seconds or so. I soon learned this was the PC swapping memory to the drive. Similarly, my first taste of the internet was waiting minutes for most web pages to download. A RAM upgrade, probably to about 256K, solved that. I must have got through 8 or 10 PC's by now I should think.

[Noisycricket]

386 33Mhz cpu (in TURBO! mode) with 1MB of Ram. I took the bus to downtown Seattle and paid $40 at egghead software for an additional Mb of ram to play the first Novalogic Comanche game. Now i have 30,000 mb on my phone.

[rebb]

Haha, i remember that TURBO! Button.

My first PC was a 386 33Mhz, with a Turbo Button to 40 MHz ( yeah, that impressed the ladies ) ( ok, maybe not ), and one of those Removable HD Slot things, you could pull it out on the front, some sort of Internal/External HD Hybrid. Incidentally, that thing was also the only HD that fried on me so far ( fingers crossed ). With lots of work on it.

 

I miss PC Speaker Sound btw

[grayman]

Commodore 64, and I still have it, though it doesn't work.

[BigBadWolf]

I was just a kid when my dad got a 386 computer. Kings quest and Loom i can remember playing.

Then my parents got a 486, but i didnt play it much.

We had a HP celeron junker after that.

 

My first computer was a compaq athlon xp 1800 80gig hdd and 1 gig memory with geforce mx400. It was killer when i first got it.

 

My second computer i built, was a Athlon 3600? with 2 raid0 120gig sata hdd , 2 gig ram and a ati Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb, that rocked for quite a while.

 

My latest pc i built in 2008, AMD Phenom X4 9950, 4gig ram ATI Radeon 4870x2, 2 OCZ 60gig SSD raid0. Im also using old parts for a data storage pc.

[PranQster]

The first I owned was in 1992... a generic beige box 386SX-16MHz with 1 Meg RAM, 40 Meg hard drive and a VGA graphics card with 256K memory. The first week I had it I upgraded the SIPP RAM to 2 Megs and then I got an Oak Technologies SVGA card with 1 Meg... allowing me to view 256 color graphics in 1024x768 resolution. I was stylin'!

The first I ever used was an Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 model 2 in about 1981 or '82. We used to load 'Taipan' from a cassette player.

 

Ok, since this thread has so many complete PC histories in it, here goes:

 

1. The 386-SX16 I mentioned earlier.

2. Replaced the 386 motherboard with an IBM Blue Lightning 75 MHz. and upgraded the RAM to 16Megs.

3. I forgot... but think it was a 100MHz Pentium.

4. Celeron 300 MHz.... forgot RAM and Hard drive specs... Orchid vid card with 4 or 8 Megs RAM on it.

4. Dual CPU's with modified Celeron 500's (pencil trace trick for SMP)... Canopus Pure 3D Voodoo card http://www.tomshardw...or-card-reviews,42-4.html combined with a Canopus 2D-only card.

5. Upgraded dual-Celerons to dual-PIII and Canopus cards to an nvidia Riva 128, then that to Riva TNT2.

6. Riva TNT2 > GeForce2-GTX

7. AMD Duron 1200

 

... and so on... about 2 or 3 AMD CPUs since the Duron and as many Vid cards.

... now:

 

Desktop 1: AMD Phenom X4 9650, 4Gigs RAM, dual 320 Gig drives,MSI K9N2 Diamond mobo, MSI GeForce 8800GTS vid.

Desktop 2: AMD Athlon X2 5000, 4 Gigs, GeForce 7200

Laptop: HP DV9000 series from fall 2007, AMD Sempron X2, 4Gigs RAM, 250G system drive, 500G drive for /home partition, nvidia 7050m GPU.

 

1992 - 1999: MS-DOS 4.0 through DOS 6.2, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, 3.11 for Workgroups, Win '95, Win '98.... ran Windows Me for 2 days and replaced it with 2k Pro. Also ran IBM OS/2 and BeOS.

November '99 to Dec. 2002 used only Win 2000 Pro and Win XP. Tried a couple Linux distros, but wasn't ready for that at the time.

Since Jan. 1, 2003, all have run Mandrake/Mandriva Linux... only.

Edited October 11, 2010 by PranQster

[Sotha]

C64 -> Amiga500 -> 486 -> PC#1 -> PC#2 -> PC#3 -> PC#4 -> PC#5 -> PC#6

 

Can't remember the specs of the PC#1-PC#5 anymore. My PC#6 specs are listed in the hardware survey thread.

 

I have very fond memories of the C64, Amiga. Both the C64 and amiga still work, even after the amiga got some coke on its power supply. All PC's from 486-PC#5 have been destroyed by time. (Okay, they lost some components and it wasn't worthwhile to get a replacement) And they've been handled with respect.

 

EDIT: oh, forgot, I've also PC#5.5, which is my work laptop. I'm not counting in my wife's computers.

[Melan]

We had a Spectrum 48k, bought around 1987 or 1988. It wasn't much of a gaming computer, but after some time, I got the best thing I could for that rig: a copy of Lords of Midnight. This game, in just 48k loaded from a casette tape, was a 1st person (!) strategy game where you could move around in 8 directions on a map of some 2-3000 fields - you could only see as far as distance and terrain would let you, which was incredibly immersive, especially when you saw an approaching army, and could only see the approaching flags from the distance, not whose side they were on. The objective was to recruit allied lords to stop the onslaught of Doomdark, a Sauron-like menace, whose armies would also be marching around on the map and recruiting (or pressuring) the lords to their cause. It is an amazingly complex game with morale and exhaustion rules, hero units, monsters, geographical names, custom heraldry for the various lords, and multiple victory and loss conditions. It is also mercilessly, relentlessly hard, way too hard for 9 years old me. All in 48k, which is the size of a smaller animated GIF. That's some programming genius there. You can find a lot of materials for it on http://icemark.com/, including PC conversions, some with updated graphics.

 

 

I got my first PC in 1994; a bit late, but it was fairly good for the time - 486 processor, SVGA monitor, 4 MB RAM and two floppy drives. It is interesting that adjusted for inflation, it was significantly more expensive than what I have today.

 

[edit]666 posts!

Edited October 11, 2010 by Melan

[lost_soul]

These old computers may be in the trash, but the content that people created with them will live on. I'm talking about the mod scene. A wile back, I visited the Mod Archive and downloaded hundreds of their highest rated songs. Most of these were made in the 1990s, probably on Pentium class machines. Some of the melodies in these songs are so pretty that I listen to them every day... again and again.

 

This may be part of the reason I am interested in older machines. It seems like music in games went down-hill with the switch to completely digitized audio. Just compare UT2004 to the original UT, Unreal 2 to Unreal, Deus Ex Invisible War to Deus Ex, etc. It seems like when the musician has a limited tool-set, they focus more on the melody.

 

EDIT: I've had my share of laptops too. I didn't include them because they don't get used as often except the current one. There's a 2000-era K6-3 sitting over here with 192 megs of ram. I wanted to hook it up to the stereo and use it to stream music. It works, but the DAC in there isn't so hot. You can hear the computer "thinking" in your headphones or speakers. Modern machines do not have this problem. It really isn't that noticable, but I want crystal clear audio. Try connecting a good pair of headphones to an EEE PC some time. The thing produces beautiful sound... no background noise at all! It is amazing, considering the $259 price I paid for it.

Edited October 11, 2010 by lost_soul

[Fidcal]

I guess I must still have a copy of Lords of Midnight amongst my boxes of old Spectrum tapes. I never finished it but admired the graphic compression using the same components over and over to make up scenes from the location data. And remember, 7K of that 48K is screen display leaving only 41K for the program + data! Zero bloat.

[greebo]

ATARI 800XL, bought sometime in the early eighties (1983?). I still have that one, it's working, including the Competition Pro joysticks and the 5.25" disk drive.

[LEGION]

First there was C64, was able to burn capitals into TV-screen, but no major games, but I´m not sure if there even were major games that time? A friend had a game called COBRA, it was like the movie (same name) with Sylvester Stallone, but my mom saw me playing, found it too brutal and TOOK IT AWAY!!!!!!!! !!!!

 

Ah, I remember a game I played often, it was called IMPOSSIBLE MISSION, nothing to do with the movie, but it was fun, lots of elevators, looked good. I also had Pitfall, Wonderboy and an Indy-Car racing game. I don´t remember another special game I played often or liked. I had lots of Floppy-disk from same friend that gave me COBRA, but most was crap. I also remember sth called 'Scheiss Schweiss', that´s german for 'damn sweat'. But I can´t tell what it was, I think I never got into it...

Oh, I once saw the game for ROBOCOP for 100 'Deutsche Mark', today like 50€. But never could afford it! I loved the movie that time, the first of course...

 

Ok, then in hmm, say 1997 I became, äh got a Pentium 133mhz, 32 MB RAM with Win95. (also with a pre-boot-software called 'Microsoft Navigator', imitating a living room environment for starting windows programs...) So, the first game I played was that intern Windowsgame 'Golf', that I played a lot. Holding LMB to charge the hit.

 

The first game I bought myself was Need for Speed II! Then came the 3dfx Voodoo1 on the market, that I bought, so the first 3D-accelerated game I played was, drum roll please: the demo of Shadows of the Empire! And the demo of Jedi Knight, that I played before in a res like 400x300 or sth like that because I wasn´t aware that I could increase res! Damn, it looked so good as I saw it first time in 640x480!!!! And then in 3D-accelerated-mode!!! :blink:

Ok, I won´t describe every game I played that time, but only one left: The first ego-shooter I bought was Unreal, in the uncensored US-version!! I LOVED it!!! * Loved it more than Half-Life. These two released the same time, my friend said Half-Life is better, but I persisted for Unreal. It just had better music, though I must admit today, Half-Life was better...

 

I could tell the story for Thief Gold that I bought in 1999 too, but I wrote that somewhere before and I guess you´ll get bored to hear that...

 

*the German release of Unreal got all the blood from the first level censored, and no blood-decals when shooting enemies, but also german text was included, now read this: When patching the german version with the english patch, all the gore was back! Including the blood in the first level, that were just textures, but the german text remained! This was the same case for the german censored (and still indexed) version of SiN, english patch un-censored the game, but in this case the german text was also gone, but who cares?

 

Maybe you´re wondering what I mean with 'indexed': Germany has a bureau (called BPJS that time for: bureau for youth-endangering prints) that tests games for it´s brutality and what not that could have bad effects for the german kids. So, games like US-Unreal and even the censored version of SiN (just the case that you shoot people was enough, for that reason german Half-Life came with ROBOTS instead of Marines!!!!!) were put on an index, that meant: You couldn´t buy those games in public! It was forbidden!!! But gladly, the US-version was on sale in the first weeks, so I got both versions for SiN and Unreal, but I don´t know how I got my hands on the german versions? I´m sure I didn´t bought them, and I don´t stole them, hmm. Did I had a second personality THAT early? Could it be? I really don´t know...

 

note: Hmm, it seems I went far off the 'first computer'-thread, but I wasn´t the first who mentions his first games...

Edited October 11, 2010 by LEGION

[Bikerdude]

• ZX 81
• ZX Spectrum 48k+
• ZX Spectrum 128k
• Amiga A500
• Amiga A1200
• 486 DX4-100, S3 Virge, SB16
• AMD 586 DX, S3 Virge, SB16
• AMD K5/6, Diamond 3D, SB16
• Celeron 300A, Voodoo 3D/2, AWE32
• AMD K6-2, Geforce 256, SBlive
• AMD Athlon/Bart, Geforce 2/3, SBlive
• AMD Athlon64, Geforce Ti4/Radeon 9700, Audigy
• Intel E6300/6600, Geforce 6/7, Audigy2
• Intel E8400/9650, Geforce 8/Radeon 57**, Xfi.

24yrs of computing: 1986 - 2010

Edited October 11, 2010 by Bikerdude

[LEGION]

Wow dude!

 

I once had too an AMD K6-2 that was gone in a puff during playing Need for Speed IV with modded high-poly-cars, it stuttered a lot with 8 cars but I wanted to finish the race, and I even wasn´t in lead...

Sadly, my GPU from that time, a 3dfx Voodoo5, seems to has gone to from that incident.

[demagogue]

Commodore 64. Best computer for its time & place.

 

I learned BASIC and programmed a lot on that thing. I had a subscription to its programming magazine and would meticulously type in the programs in the back.

 

That was back when games were more experimental and pushed envelopes. Also a lot of games were more obscure and it wasn't always clear what you were supposed to be doing, or even what you could do -- which today would get blasted for being bad design -- but it gave them a mystical air, like they were much deeper and more profound than what you saw on the surface. Plus the fact a lot of games came with massive manuals, novellas, trinkets, and were designed to look bigger than they were (a way to get around the minuscule memory allowance). Also they could "break" more easily, but that often added to the mystical quality, like you could catch glimpses of this parallel mystical universe behind the scenes in bizarre bugs and map areas you're not supposed to be in. Maybe it's hard to describe with our modern mindset. I don't know many modern games that can evoke that same feeling.

 

I had a game making program too. Not sure if it's the same one as nbohr mentioned (Edit: nope, it was called Arcade Game Construction Kit), but one of the games I made for it does have a special place in my heart, a sort of scifi top-down adventure on a space-station (Zelda meets Space Quest?)

 

Since I use its emulator some these days, I still find myself remembering why it was such a great system.

 

After that, let's see ... college laptop #1, laptop #2, Dell desktop, Inspiron Laptop #3, now my little Asus netbook.

[nbohr1more]

Yeah, Dark Radiant is a kind of spiritual return to playing with game design software. Just like Gary Kitchen, the TDM team has created a wonderful tool for creativity.

 

But also like Gary Kitchen, you might need to pickup a little coding\scripting to make your output really shine

 

http://www.mts.net/~...maker/info.html

Edited October 11, 2010 by nbohr1more

[lost_soul]

Funniest... bug... ever!

 

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20101011/03194311357/the-history-of-the-fake-free-public-wifi-you-always-see-at-airports.shtml

[sparhawk]

First computer I had was VC20. The predecessor of the C64. At that time the C64 was not even available I think. I was really proud of my 16Kb extension.

 

Soon after I managed to grab a C64 with a VC1541, at a time where most kids only had the tape. I was really lucky because I got it from somebody who got bored of it and virtually threw it away and I happened to catch it for an extremly good price.

 

Since I was already a Commodore fan, later I had the 128D and then the Amiga 1000 after it, but the best days were with the C64 EVER!!!! Learned assembly on it, cracking and played a lot of games. *sigh* the memories...

[7upMan]

My first computer was actually my father's, a 286 machine with 12 MHz (Turbo, 6 MHz without), 640 KB of RAM, a 20 MB harddisk und a Hercules card that drove a monochrome amber monitor. Later, it got a 3.5" disc drive added to the 5.25" disc drive, as well as a Tseng ET4000 graphics card with 1 MB RAM. This was at that time an insanely fast graphics card and a complete overkill for my father's computer. And the best thing is: I still have that thing, complete with DOS 4, a mono soundcard and Wolfenstein 3D!

 

My first own PC was a 386 machine, SX, I think. Bit my bit I upgraded it to a 486 SX, then a 486 DX, then a 486 DX2... then things become a bit foggy, but I think this was when I got the K6-2 400, which was replaced my the mighty Athlon 1400 Thunderbird, then an Athlon XP 3.200 (still have it as a testbed computer), then an Athlon 64 X2 6.400+ (sold on eBay for around 70 Euro) and now the Phenom II X3 720 BE 2.8 GHz, which I don't intend to replace for the next years.

 

All in all, I can safely say that I covered every generation of PC tech, however only after they were out for some time. Only when I got a job I could afford brand new hardware.

Edited October 12, 2010 by 7upMan

[Tels]

http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/D_KC85-4.HTML

 

It has gone always uphill from that point on