What was your first computer?

[Silentprototipe]

While I had one computer before that in the house I wasn't allowed in that room. My first actual encounter with a PC is with my current PC. HP P7 1234, Glorious PC, AMD A6 3650, HD 6530D IGPU, 8 GB of RAM, 1 TB HDD and built in Wifi with a DVD burner that came bundled with a 23" IPS 1080p display with a 5 ms response time. Its a great machine honestly, Though I have upgraded the GPU to a GT 730 ever since 

[Jito463]

My first computer experience was a TRS-80 that my sister got as a graduation gift.  I played Canyon Climber on that so much, I can't count the number of joysticks I broke.  My first personal computer was the Commodore Amiga 2000.  It had 1MB of RAM, 2 x 3.5" floppy drives and a 5.25" floppy drive on an IBM emulator card (though, I never did get that working).  As for my first IBM compatible, it was an Apex system with an AMD 486 DX/2 66MHz, 640KB of RAM (yes, you read that right, less than 1MB) and a 520MB HDD.  I got it as parts, which I then assembled.  I've been building nothing but AMD based systems ever since.

[straight_stewie]

On 4/10/2017 at 11:05 PM, v0nn_toaster said:

So, what was the first ever PC you used?

I can't remember quite what the specs where, but it was old enough that it had not the last generation of Radeon cards that where labelled under ATI and it ran Windows XP.

I remember how I got to start using it "unsupervised" very clearly. My father and I were walking through some store (a Sams Club maybe?) when I was about 9 years old and I saw those tin 4 CD box sets of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. I mentioned to my dad how that was really cool and I wished I could fly an airplane. He said that he would get it, but we didn't have a joystick and we would have to have one. Well, we turned into another aisle and it was full of joysticks and throttles, this would have been in 2004, so HOTAS stuff was probably just hitting the market. I remember him commenting on the HOTAS stuff, saying something about how that's really nice because it's closer to what's in actual aircraft, and how he'd never seen a setup like that before. We didn't buy anything that day.

3 days later, on my 10^th birthday, I only had 3 presents. Normally I had received more than that. The first one I opened, which I thought was a book, was the tin box set of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, the largest box was a HOTAS setup. The third present, a birthday card, had a password to my own account on his computer, which he had moved out of his room and into the living room so I could use it whenever I wanted.

[Ithanul]

A old beige Packard Bell (This before Hewlett bought them) that had Windows 3.1.  (I was like 5 or 6 years old at that time)

 

You had to use small floppy discs to load programs on it and be comfortable with MS-DOS commands.  (And yes, I came close to wiping drive C) 

[crzyces]

38 minutes ago, Ithanul said:

A old beige Packard Bell (This before Hewlett bought them) that had Windows 3.1.  (I was like 5 or 6 years old at that time)

 

You had to use small floppy discs to load programs on it and be comfortable with MS-DOS commands.  (And yes, I came close to wiping drive C) 

Have to love that Windows shell they stole from Apple! And the mouse patent they bought from Xerox for $5000 usd. Have to not love accidentally fdisking your parents pc! Those things were big money back then.

 

I talked ubout my C65 too a C128 upgrade earlier in the thread (I am still proud of that), but my first real PC was my mother's $3250 usd Gateway with Windows 95 or 98, I forget. It came loaded with a Pentium 2 or 3, 128 MB of sdram, some kind of pci sound card, a 12 Gigabyte hard Drive (This was borderline overkill then, like a gamer getting 25 terabytes), a 4x read cd drive!!! again, THIS WAS HUGE. Not a read write, as they were about $300 extra at the time, whereas external usb ones were only about $150, 3 usb ports, a floppy drive (when floppy disks were no longer actually bendable and you could not use a paper hole puncher to make it double sided), and the crown jewel of my gaming rig? (Which I played Baldur's Gate 1 on, Woo7!) was the Voodoo 3 3500 AGP slot version. What a beast card for 1999. Memory and core clock were both 183 MHz, 1 pixel lane, and 16 Megabits of ram, oh how it kicked ass in Quake 3. Oh, and a 15" crt, keyboard and a mouse of course. All that for just over $3250. What a bargain  . 

[B-17rocks]

an old dell laptop from the early 2000's Hah that thing was great. my mom had windows XP loaded on it and was darn near indestructible

[Jito463]

44 minutes ago, crzyces said:

Have to love that Windows shell they stole from Apple!

Which Apple had previously stolen from Xerox.  What's your point?  Neither one had clean hands in that deal, though to be fair, Xerox was rather stupid about the whole issue.

[crzyces]

Apple bought the patent for the mouse, not the windows concept.

[Beef Boss]

18 hours ago, Ithanul said:

A old beige Packard Bell (This before Hewlett bought them) that had Windows 3.1.  (I was like 5 or 6 years old at that time)

 

You had to use small floppy discs to load programs on it and be comfortable with MS-DOS commands.  (And yes, I came close to wiping drive C) 

I'm so glad I was born in the 2000nds computers sounded like a pain back then

[crzyces]

1 minute ago, BadluckBrian said:

I'm so glad I was born in the 2000nds computers sounded like a pain back then

It actually comes in handy to know how to use the command prompt without having to look everything up. In my area they start teaching kids BASIC and Windows in kindergarten and 1rst grade, simple dos in 1rst grade, and progress from there. I think it is fantastic.

 

The floppy disks were a pain. Heh, and flipping disks over after an hour of gaming for more content... 2 minute load times for a 4 bit pixel image... Baud modem speeds. Oh goodness that was awful. $20 usd per megabit sent that took 10 hours to download.

[Beef Boss]

2 minutes ago, crzyces said:

It actually comes in handy to know how to use the command prompt without having to look everything up. In my area they start teaching kids BASIC and Windows in kindergarten and 1rst grade, simple dos in 1rst grade, and progress from there. I think it is fantastic.

 

The floppy disks were a pain. Heh, and flipping disks over after an hour of gaming for more content... 2 minute load times for a 4 bit pixel image... Baud modem speeds. Oh goodness that was awful. $20 usd per megabit sent that took 10 hours to download.

Y-you had to pay for each megabit?!? Bro I go through around 100gigabytes a week just from my Xbox. I have two other laptops and phones I'd be poor before I even knew it! 

[Jito463]

1 hour ago, crzyces said:

It actually comes in handy to know how to use the command prompt without having to look everything up.

Indeed, I still use CLI for many purposes, even today.  I often find it quicker than using the GUI.

[crzyces]

8 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Indeed, I still use CLI for many purposes, even today.  I often find it quicker than using the GUI.

I wonder what the ratio of Linux users compared to Windows GUI users is in Asia as opposed to the US? CLI's are immensely faster, that's for sure.

[Wano97]

This thing, a Macintosh performa 5200, I was about 2 years old. I played all these games on it from "Humongous Entertainment" like Pajama sam, Putt-Putt, ...

 

Not my picture btw

[Ithanul]

2 hours ago, crzyces said:

It actually comes in handy to know how to use the command prompt without having to look everything up. In my area they start teaching kids BASIC and Windows in kindergarten and 1rst grade, simple dos in 1rst grade, and progress from there. I think it is fantastic.

 

The floppy disks were a pain. Heh, and flipping disks over after an hour of gaming for more content... 2 minute load times for a 4 bit pixel image... Baud modem speeds. Oh goodness that was awful. $20 usd per megabit sent that took 10 hours to download.

Yep, command prompt is nice to use.  Probably the reason Linux don't bother me much.

Only DOS I still use on occasions is FreeDOS, comes in handy to flash mobo BIOS.

2 hours ago, BadluckBrian said:

Y-you had to pay for each megabit?!? Bro I go through around 100gigabytes a week just from my Xbox. I have two other laptops and phones I'd be poor before I even knew it! 

Sit down and really think how quick computers have progressed since the early 90s to now.

I still remember cassette players, VHS, tube TVs that weigh a ton, and so forth.  Plus, those brick phones or dial phones (my granma had one of those).

That was the early 90s, now we have digital music, 4K blu-ray or stream movies, super light flat screen TVs, and a computer we carry in our pockets (smartphone).

[EasonIDontKnowAnything]

On 4/11/2017 at 0:05 PM, v0nn_toaster said:

So, what was the first ever PC you used?

Mine was..its a story

One day my dad brought home a old Windows ME gateway when i was only like 4 or so and i would do stuff on it...then we got rid of it

ahhhhhhhhhhhh vivid memories

I had a pc that was ddr2 , no gpu just a cpu but it ran minecraft ok so that was great.

[LakeeZdino]

that pinball game on Windows XP brings back memories

[themctipers]

a imac g3 in school

 

two years later i got my own computer..

sempron 2500+ (~2008/2009? probably was outdated when i got that)

then i got a extreme pentium 4 

then a pentium d

then a i5 760 (~2010)

then a gtx 760 in 2015

then a 3770k in 2015

and then a r9 380 in 2016

and then a gtx 1070 in 2017

[themctipers]

11 minutes ago, Ithanul said:

Yep, command prompt is nice to use.  Probably the reason Linux don't bother me much.

Only DOS I still use on occasions is FreeDOS, comes in handy to flash mobo BIOS.

Sit down and really think how quick computers have progressed since the early 90s to now.

I still remember cassette players, VHS, tube TVs that weigh a ton, and so forth.  Plus, those brick phones or dial phones (my granma had one of those).

That was the early 90s, now we have digital music, 4K blu-ray or stream movies, super light flat screen TVs, and a computer we carry in our pockets (smartphone).

me too, ish

i remember cassette players.. because i fucked around with them

i remember VHS.. becuase my grandpa still used those until ~2014

our main tv was a tube tv

i fucked around with a brick phone, but couldn't get it to charge sadly.

 

 

[TetraSky]

First used a computer in primary school in third grade, they were the very old mac computers, later changed to the first imacs with the colored backs behind the screens.
They bugged all the time and had to be repaired. It wasn't rare that 1/3 of the students couldn't use a computer simply because they were being repaired. One even crashed while I was using it once, it just said "ARG" the screen, nothing else.

[Ithanul]

29 minutes ago, themctipers said:

me too, ish

i remember cassette players.. because i fucked around with them

i remember VHS.. becuase my grandpa still used those until ~2014

our main tv was a tube tv

i fucked around with a brick phone, but couldn't get it to charge sadly.

 

 

Hehe, but you ever messed with one of these.  Dail phones are a rare thing to see now.

 

[crzyces]

3 hours ago, BadluckBrian said:

Y-you had to pay for each megabit?!? Bro I go through around 100gigabytes a week just from my Xbox. I have two other laptops and phones I'd be poor before I even knew it! 

We paid per kilobit (Not byte, bit), but i remember being screamed at for using almost a megabit (not byte, BIT, like 1000 kilobits=1 kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes=1 megabit, 1000 megabits =1 megabyte, 1000 megabytes =1 gigabyte etc) and it came out to about $19.35 + $65 in long distance charges as the server I connected to was about 35 miles from my house, so it was long distance (The further away you were from who you were calling increased the cost. You usually had a 10-20 mile *local* area which was free. My first cell phone was $3.25 per minute for the first 120 minutes and $9 per minute after that and got reception, like nowhere. Lots of things were just not around. You know what was though? Jobs. If you wanted one, you could get one and buy a house pretty easily (If you were in your early 20's in the early 80's and worked hard, you are probably very well off now.) I was too young to reap those benefits, as not many places were hiring toddlers  

[othertomperson]

My family had an Acorn Electron when I was very little, but I don't remember it all that well. I remember playing Monkey Island 2 on a 80386.

[themctipers]

51 minutes ago, Ithanul said:

Hehe, but you ever messed with one of these.  Dail phones are a rare thing to see now.

 

yes

 not fun

[Jito463]

2 hours ago, crzyces said:

We paid per kilobit (Not byte, bit), but i remember being screamed at for using almost a megabit (not byte, BIT, like 1000 kilobits=1 kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes=1 megabit, 1000 megabits =1 megabyte, 1000 megabytes =1 gigabyte etc)

Your math is off.  There's 8 bits in a byte, not 1,000.  So 8 kilobits = 1 kilobyte, 8 megabits = 1 megabyte, etc.