What was you're first experience with a computer?

[TetraSky]

A super old PC with a 5.25" floppy drive in it, running some command line OS. There were a few games on it.

That's about all I remember about it, my dad threw it in the trash where it belongs after playing around with it for about a month (it was already way outdated when we got it in... 1998 I think? He likely found it in the trash as well)

[dizmo]

I believe it was an IBM with a 486. I played a game where you'd fly an airplane and try and take down other planes. These were stick planes, that shot stick missiles. There were dots that were meant to be smoke.

[birdhuman]

My experience was when I was 2nd grade when my uncle got a retired 286 rack workstation. It runs a F117 simulation game. Then 3rd grade we had computer lesson at school with 386 system. I still remember the 640kB base memory no matter how much RAM you got in your computer.

[PixelPol]

ZX Spectrum 48K (from Sinclair Research, 1982)  is the first which I owned. Learned BASIC programming there, made my first "graphics" (1985 or so, I was a lad) and created some small games. But really, first thing I gamed on, before all that, were the arcade machines, in pubs, etc. Really low pixels tho. At friends' homes, besides Amstrads and C64s, the previous to the AT (286, 386, etc), the XT computers. Those with green-only or orange-only screens and 5.25 floppy disks. By then we were using a bit all that at a time: the arcade machines, and all those different "computers" at friends/family homes. 

My father did use the punched cards for data, at his job, back then.

 

Someone who used to earn some bucks by adapting (weirdly, but worked, tons of silicon) arcade machines joysticks and buttons (the whole panel) made it for my spectrum, so kind of had an amazing system if wasn't the fact that the Amiga 500 and 2000 were the real thing, ahead of its time with multiple cores, and being quite a station for graphics (and music) creation (sigh) ; that was what I had really dreamed to have. Deluxe Paint II and Deluxe Paint Animator were absolute jewels for pixel art.

 

Then the AT became a reality at homes, and I got my 286. Expanding the RAM and optimizing I made it last so many years (till '91 lol, my father used it even longer with Wordperfect). I was not able to get a 386 (not even SX) neither 486, I jumped directly to a Pentium, then Celeron, then Pentium 4, and so on.  :D :D. Time flies.

[ZePat]

Been lurking on LTT forums for several months now (but have been a Linus follower for years - OG NCIX video days) - felt this topic was a good "first post" occasion.

 

I started messing around on PC's in 1989(I was 10) - back then we had just moved into our new house and my dad never was into tech all that much - but one of his clients gave us a used Amstrad CPC 464(see image in spoilers).  My first ever game played was World Series Baseball (1985) on that Amstrad PC.  We then upgraded to an IBM 386 PC.  That 386 rocked a nice 8mb of RAM and a 100mb~ish HDD.  Afterwards - in 1992 or 93, my father bought a PC for his business, which was a 486(DX)-based PC with the absolutely amazing "TURBO" boost.  Yeah - I felt so cool that my PC had a Turbo.  Played Mortal Kombat on that thing, could never get enough of the gore.

 

After mowing lawns, being a paperboy for a few years, I finally bought my own PC for a little over 1.2k Looneys (yeah, I'm a Canuck from Quebec) - I had just turned 18 back then, and bought it as my own Xmas present ahead of time, late 1997.  The beast: a Pentium MMX 233 PC(P55C chip)!  Played SimCity 2000 and Civilization II like mad on that PC.  Eventually upgraded to a Pentium II, then a PIII and skipped directly to an i7-860 - good ol' Lynnfield CPU.  It's still up and running, used it for gaming up until 2 years ago.  I mostly played Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, Diablo 2 on it, but when ARK:Survival Evolved launched, paired with a GT 330 (it was a stutterfest on Low settings 10-20FPS tops if I recall), so I got myself an r7 265x (re-worked/branded HD7850).  I then built myself a Ryzen 7 2700x, 1660ti, 16GB 3000mhz PC about 2 and a half years ago - which is now upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5800x, 32GB G. Skillz 3600mhz... still with that 1660ti from Gigabyte (Damn you GPU shortage!!!).  I can run ARK in Epic at 30-60 FPS depending on how big I make my base, most other games, I run at Very High 60+ FPS without issues.  I'm a casual gamer now... long gone are my days of intense Quake 2 instagib tourneys, or Quake 3 DM against Fat4l1ty (best I could do against him, was a 10k/25d record - he was darn good) or somewhat "competitive" CTF league on speakeasy ladders - ah the good ol' days.

 

As for OS experiences: Started with MS-DOS 3.0 up to 5.0 (although, yes, up until 8.0 through the wonderful Windows Me ).  Windows 3.1, 95, 98... Me , 2000, XP, I avoided Vista - not because I wanted to - I simply upgraded to Win 7 after XP - skipped Win 8 and now enjoying Win 10.  If we can call that "enjoying" it.  I also lived through the various storage devices/options used in PC's; from the Amstrad's cassettes, to 5 1/4 floppies, to 3 1/2 disquettes(aka the SAVE icon), to CD-ROM to mini-cd's, USB sticks and so on.  There we go, more grey hairs growing now (I'm only 42, I know some of you might be older).  

 

So yeah - I fiddled in each one of those computers once they outlived their purpose.  That i7 of mine is in the - albeit slow - process of eventually becoming our home NAS.  anyways, a lengthy first post - but it feels good to share.  

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

[WhitetailAni]

I'm not sure what my first experience with a computer is. Three candidates:

1. I have a picture of me possibly using my grandpa's Pentium 4 machine, but I'm not interfacing with it - more just staring at the screen being like "woah pretty lights"

2. For my 4th birthday, I helped my dad assemble his Phenom X3 (unlocked to 4) rig, and he let me help set it up (e.g. hit the Continue button for Windows install).

3. My now-dead ASUS V400C laptop. Core i3-2365M, 4GB LPDDR3, iGPU, 500GB HDD, Linux Mint 17.3. Even though the Ethernet port was dead, the back was barely hanging on, the power jack had a dent, and the screen cover was cracked, the thing just kept going. It only died because I dropped it. Ran Minecraft 1.11.2 at 1366x768 at ~50FPS, which was all 8 to 12-year-old me wanted.

[lboolaka_33]

Probably watching YouTube with my dad on his MacBook Pro (he got that around the earliest time period that I can remember back to), and I also remember playing browser games on there.

Independently, it would be on his PowerBook G3 when it got handed down to me. I remember continually trying to update flash player, despite the "your computer is too old" warnings. I gave up on trying to use it, and instead started using my mom's Latitude D630 until I got a crappy ASUS in 2012.

 

A lot of memories with the Dell in particular.

[Vishera]

My first experience was a Pentium II,Windows 98.

I really liked playing Jazz Jackrabbit and Little Fighter 2,Tarzan,Aladdin, and more.

I didn't have internet back in the day,it was expensive.

[whm1974]

On 6/5/2021 at 12:02 PM, birdhuman said:

My experience was when I was 2nd grade when my uncle got a retired 286 rack workstation. It runs a F117 simulation game. Then 3rd grade we had computer lesson at school with 386 system. I still remember the 640kB base memory no matter how much RAM you got in your computer.

Yeah that infamous 640kb Limit. With 286 Based System you could Load some Drivers that into HiMem Area. 386 and later Based ones could a lot better.

[Andreas Lilja]

I was around 5 in 1995.

 

Not many websites back then but lego.com was definitely cool.

[Mark Kaine]

i believe it was an apple macintosh, one of the first ones, looked like an IBM basically and I played a "game" , idr exactly , something "educational" , the game played in a classroom perhaps and i was bored out of my mind after a few minutes and I thought "that'll never catch on…"  and I was right lol, apple and gaming just doesnt go well together…

 

I got into gaming much much later due to a friend who had a even back then very old "Atari" with the original Pong and stuff, but that thing was actually fun to play around with.

 

 

 

[mishmish]

My first pc was a gift from my uncle. It was a Packard Bell, had a cyrix 233mhz cpu, 16mb EDO ram, 3gb HDD, CD ROM drive, and windows 98. 

 

I remember playing Lego Island, it ran like an absolute slideshow, I thought that was normal. 

 

Later when I started learning a bit more about the machine and realizing how terrible it was, I upgraded to 32mb ram and popped in a voodoo 3 3d card. It felt great to go to the options of a game and switch the graphics from software to my 3d card, when previously the option was unavailable. 

[pho3nix_]

When I was 7, we had a windows 95 pc

[LloydLynx]

     It was a Sony VAIO PCV-RX755 tower from 2001. I was born in 2003 and am 18yo now. It was actually a decently powerful computer of the time; 2Ghz Pentium 4, 512Mb RAM, 60Gb HDD, and SiS onboard graphics if anyone's ever heard of that. It came with a 1280x1024 flat glass CRT monitor I think.

 

     Anyway, one of the first things I remember doing when I was really little was me and my dad dialing into the internet to watch the Santa tracker every Christmas eve. Another thing I did is sit with my dad while he was on the hvac-talk forums. The hvac-talk mascot is imprinted in my mind as one of those really weird and surreal early childhood things that you've forgotten for so many years and just recently remembered.

[JohnDeereBro]

It was those random computers in the computer lab at school. In kindergarten, we would go down there and turn on the computers and play little games that were actually kind of fun. The teacher had to teach us that the screen was the monitor, not the computer and hearing that blew our minds.

[da na]

Earliest I remember is playing flash games on my dad's Powerbook G4.

[BotDamian]

Windows 95 and a 16MB GPU

Don't ask me what it was, all I remember was me and the bois talking about GPU memory and mine had 16MB.

[Bitter]

I guess the first PC experience was our Acer with Windows 95. My dad specifically waited for Windows 95 because he read it was a lot easier to use than 3.1 and he was right, it really was (I went back and tried to use 3.1 years later on a 286 system and it was...rough).

Everytime he broke Windows 95 or Windows 95 broke on it's own (which was pretty common) he'd just reinstall. One time trying to install a modem the drivers kept breaking Windows, not knowing enough about how to remove the driver from command prompt (and being very new to PC's and Windows and IT'S THE ONLY COMPUTER YOU CAN'T JUST LOOK IT UP ONLINE BECAUSE YOU'RE INSTALLING THE MODEM) I had to listen to this video like 8 times in one night.

 

[CommanderAlex]

I was really young when I encountered my first computer. Most likely playing a Thomas the Tank Engine game on the PC where you had this keyboard attachment of train controls. Either that or Half Life and I couldn't get off this one level. 

 

EDIT: Found what the attachment looked like on a keyboard online. 

[Mr.Cellkill]

Maybe around 1994. It was a Olivetti PCS 11 I bought from my cousin.

I gave $163 for 1mb ram so i could play Doom. lol..

[freeagent]

Commodore 64 back in 87or 88.. grade 4 or 5.. green or orange monochrome, 5-1/4 floppies.. good times from much simpler days.

[CryingWimp]

I was maybe 5 years old in 1997, I have no idea what PC hardware it was, but it was old and cheap  The only thing I did was play a Helicopter flying game, I think the graphics we're a black(or green) screen with white lines outlining the helicopter and buildings. I vaguely remember needing to swap floppy's a lot, even to just boot the machine, I had to get my brother to help every time 

 

After that would be around 2001-2002 playing browser games at school in the library with my friends. RuneScape Classic was what really got me and my friends into PC gaming.

 

My first personal PC was my Dads old Pentium 3 866 that I got in 2004-2005. WoW would only run at 12 FPS so I learned to overclock, I still remember being blown away how much faster it was, WoW was soo incredibly smooth at 17 FPS instead of 12  After that I started to find "broken" parts for free from friends/family and see if I could get them working.

 

Got a nice upgrade from the P3 866MHz to a P4 2.8GHz for free because someone had changed a bios setting and the PC would no longer boot, they trashed it. LUL

[StDragon]

A:\>

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, CryingWimp said:

My first personal PC was my Dads old Pentium 3 866 that I got in 2004-2005. WoW would only run at 12 FPS so I learned to overclock, I still remember being blown away how much faster it was, WoW was soo incredibly smooth at 17 FPS instead of 12  After that I started to find "broken" parts for free from friends/family and see if I could get them working.

 

Got a nice upgrade from the P3 866MHz to a P4 2.8GHz for free because someone had changed a bios setting and the PC would no longer boot, they trashed it. LUL

Glad you was able to get parts for free from Friends and Family. I had to buy older Systems to have anything usable.

 

So how did you "Fix" the P4 with a changed BIOS Setting? As I recall you could still boot into the BIOS of such Systems or set a Jumper, turn on, then turn off, changed Jumper back. Then the System will boot set Default.

[whm1974]

2 minutes ago, StDragon said:

A:\>

Yes my first IBM Compatible experience was the Tandy 1000 TL/2 w/o HDD. Later Stepfather added a 20 MB one.