What was your first computer?

[KB_TheDireWolf]

If it is any comfort you and I are practically one and the same. I live in a house that looks like a hoarding area. The house itself is infested with mice/rats and if it isn't that it's bees. I am 19 and have yet to succeed at achieving any part-time job. I am somewhat luckier than you in that my mother only has a knee injury and my father, well, we never know if he has early Alzheimer's or not due to his personality.

My father pays the bills by tutoring after he got laid off from his Graphic Design job last year. My parents are barely able to pay for me to go to college for two semesters. I have qualified for no financial aid of any kind, no scholarship, nothing.

I am majoring in Computer Science at my county's college but due to any lack of work I have been forced to turn to online ways of finding a job. This started with the idea to build a computer for it. One that I could do some Youtubing (but no real editing with an i3) on as well as other work. I bought the parts this past Black Friday, http://pcpartpicker.com/p/j2g4cf (prices are with tax and shipping costs, $50 in rebates are not deducted because with my luck they'll get rejected). The CPU is on back order at Superbiiz with no ETA and every single other part has arrived and is sitting on my desk.

My current computer is just a $300 ASUS Transformer Tablet that can do web browsing well but lags just when editing any java file in Eclipse. Might have something to do with Z3775 and 2GB Memory and being a year and a half old...

...I use a flipphone. No smartphone for me. Everyone else I know has one... sigh...

I plan to find work dog sitting, tutoring, in addition to my own blogging and Youtubing to bring in SOMETHING. I have tried numerous giveaways to try to at least win something... no dice.

I live each and everyday wondering if it is a lie. Wondering if everything I'm working towards is going to come crashing down. I may never actually finish my degree if I don't take loans and if I take loans I may take even longer to pay them back...

...and did I mention that I don't have a license, permit, insurance, etc.? I am on Medicaid Health Insurance.

Meanwhile, I'm helping my classmates in various classes with their assignments before I even do my own. I start essays at Midnight the day they are due just to get an A when I hand it in the same day. I like girls and they like me back but I can't have a girlfriend because I don't have financial stability...

My whole life is stable from the outside to others because I basically put on an act of emotional and financial stability. In fact if anything is stable it is only intellectually. My parents try to act like nothing is wrong but then if anything does go wrong all hell breaks loose....

It could all come crashing down like a pile of cards at any second, and I never know when it will happen. I passed a car on the way to school today... it was flipped upside down in the middle of the road blocking traffic. A family of four was watching as police stopped traffic so workers could carefully move it onto a truck to tow it away..

...and a diner in my area burst into flames a couple years ago. What if that happened to my house? With all the hoarding it would spread like crazy and I would lose everything...

it just looks like it was too much stuff for the size of house we have. We don't have any kind of infestation, mice like to sneak in once and a while thanks to my 13yo friend/ neighbor has a bad habit of leaving doors open......

It just sucks seeing my mother in so much pain, wanting more but feeling like you can't go anywhere else.

At least I have a safe place and going to my father's place, he left my mother when I was a baby. Whatever I don't have any hard feelings over it, all I know is you get to live a normal life of a middle class family when I'm with him. Can drive anywhere I please cuz I have my license and he lets me use his truck, I get to play with old cars because he collects them is like 17 of them, he even gave me a 1973 El Camino.

It's not so draining seeing my mother not even beat me up and get up the stairs...

[DebatED Nothing]

Seeing this video on computerphile made me wonder, what are the computers that members of this forum started out on?

Mine wasn't anything interesting really, I first used a PC in roughly late 2003 or early 2004, when my Dad got an Athlon x64 powered pre-built, with 1.5GB of Ram (In 1GB and .5GB sticks) a "creative" soundcard, and a floppy drive.

[EposVox]

Good ol' Windows 3.1/DOS.

 

My first game was "Balloons" at 9 months old. 

[Cythraul]

I remember my PC I got first time was Windows 95 and it was like one of those PC's that the monitor and tower itself were combined. I had amazing times with that PC as I realised it had a built-in mic (no idea how) and it ended up recording my voice. From there, a lot of shenanigans happened ;D I can imagine the specs in it were shocking though... It was a Compaq PC though that's all I know!

[skyress3000]

Some old ass Mac... I don't remember much about it but I'm pretty sure it was from the earlier days of OSX.

[yannickverc]

My first PC was one my parents bought from a co-worker of my dad. It ran windows 95. I had 4 CD's with educational games on it that I played every now and then. That didn't last long and I went without a PC for a few years until I was like 12. Then we bought a shitty laptop from a shitty store and I mainly played miniclip games and runescape.

[MrDynamicMan]

Windows vista *shudder* on a $300 tosh a laptop. Not bad, could run minecraft at 20fps.

[The_Stig]

Some old Windows XP machine with a Pentium of some kind. I exclusively played Trackmania on it

[DebatED Nothing]

Windows vista *shudder* on a $300 tosh a laptop. Not bad, could run minecraft at 20fps.

Vista? Please, you should have tried XP. The log in screen brings back memories though:

inb4 someone comes in this thread and tells me I should try DOS or something

[MrDynamicMan]

Vista? Please, you should have tried XP. The log in screen brings back memories though:

inb4 someone comes in this thread and tells me I should try DOS or something

DOS? Come on now, you should be using the hoop and stick.

[Bean86]

I feel old now. First PC used would be Commodore BASIC, first shared PC with my brother ran DOS (monochrome screen and tape deck) - good old days.

This is excluding Atari as I wouldn't consider it a PC

[DebatED Nothing]

I feel old now. First PC used would be Commodore BASIC, first shared PC with my brother ran DOS (monochrome screen and tape deck) - good old days.

This is excluding Atari as I wouldn't consider it a PC

Pretty sure that's the oldest computer we've had so far tell us Gramps, what was it like in the roaring twenties?

[Nexxus]

some really old apple machines I dont even know the name of in elementary school

[cragger89]

The first computers I ever touched were BBC micro PCs at my Nursery school and the ones my friend Michael at the time had at his house, the one I actually used there being a 486 Apricot machine running Windows 3.1, played Doom on it quite a bit.

 

The first PC I owned was in the year 2000. A DX-2 486 @ 66MHz Apricot XEN-II PC, looked physically the same as my friends one except his had a sound card and speakers built into the case, mine didn't, so when we bought it second hand for £80.00, we bought an ISA sound card and a 48x CD drive to install in it. It had WIndows 95 on it and I basically stole a copy of Office for Win 95 from my primary school at the time. Only had a 500MB hard drive, so beyond a few DOS games and the OS/Office, I had nothing on it.

 

Lasted about a year before it had a fault which meant Windows 95 would no longer install, so we got a K6-2 @ 450MHz with 32MB of RAM & Windows 98. Upgraded the RAM to 64MB when we got ntl:world FREE internet because the dialler would not work with only 32MB of RAM (I later learnt how to add a connection manually using Dial-Up Networking).

 

When that eventually died less than a year into owning it, it went back and Dad got a Pentium III @ 750MHz, 128MB of RAM (plus the 32MB we put in the other machine IIRC), an nVidia TNT Riva 32MB GPU and a 17" monitor, I was in absolute heaven. We stuck with Dial-up internet for a long time because we were ntl customers, so their dial up was free. We added an extra phoneline to our home on this basis so that we could still make and receive calls.

 

I miss those days of computing. Everything was new to me and I loved every second - it was when I learnt a lot about backing up and fault finding.

[Tilaron]

We started with a Gateway 2000 maybe, it was certainly in the late 90s we got it. As my dad is a contractor and spends his working life with computers he didn't really want one at home, but as tech was progressing rapidly and me & my bro kept pushing him, he caved

After that piece of shit that couldn't even run GTA 3, we upgraded to a beautiful Dell somethingsomething with a Pentium 4, and my gaming life took off!! I wish I could remember model names, all I really remember is the Dell being ugly and the Gateway coming in an awesome cow-pattern box, which we still have somewhere

[plsno]

I don't know the name but it was some old mac at my elementry school back in the mid 90s.

[Tilaron]

My first self-built computer had an AMD Athlon 64 X2 somethingthousand+ Black Edition and a 9600GT and that is literally all I remember about it. We used an old Dell case for it, but it was unspectacular to say the least, plus I had help from my brother... so, my first 100% built-by-me PC is probably this computer right now (specs in profile). I think because it's such an open case and I'm way more experienced I just did it without really thinking too hard about it. There would probably be times when I'd forget something important, like the mobo power, and wonder why it isn't working  :rolleyes: 

I've pretty much always had one or two other people with me when building computers; one friend has dainty hands for tight spots and the other has brilliant bodge ideas, just give him some duct tape and little wedges of plastic or wood and he'll make almost anything fit and stay still  :lol:

[typographie]

My elementary school's computer lab had Apple IIe's, I think that was probably the first.

 

Look, here's one in a literal museum exhibit:

 

[mikat]

posted from my very first computer

i borrowed a very old g4 or g5 book thing from my uncle one year b4 the macbook air

so the macbook is still the first computer that i OWNED not had

[DebatED Nothing]

Sorry for duplicate threads Didn't realise there was a thread like this already.

[NinjaJc01]

Family PC: Pentium 4 and integrated ATI graphics

First PC I owned personally: Core 2 Duo @3Ghz, HD 6450, 2GB DDR2, 250GB HDD, a Dell Optiplex 960.

[Ottawa_Brewer]

Macintosh LC III.

 

[DRGSaber]

Bondi Blue iMac G3 running OS 8....let the hate come

same

[guitarboy012001]

Fist PC I technically owned is a chromebook.

[Gikero]

A custom built PC. No idea where my dad bought it. He gave it to me somewhere around 2003.

266Mhz Cyrix II CPU
48MB PC100 SDRAM

4.7GB ATA HDD

Win95, later upgraded to Win98 SE

No idea what kind of GPU it had, =(

Sweet ass 48X CD-R/W that later ate my Command and Conquer: Red Alert disc. It lagged playing Diablo II, tried playing Bualder's Gate II on it and had something like .5 FPS.