Your First PC

[MasterShrive 2,015]

So after receiving a number of messages from BP showing off his old tech, I thought it could be an interesting endeavour for people to post older specs of PCs they have built or used in the past.

 

Below is the very first PC that Nath and I ever had in our house. It's main purpose was for Dad to complete the farm books on. This lasted two weeks, and he never touched a computer again until the introduction of SuperCoach about 15 years later. But it did provide a great gaming opportunity for the rest of us.

 

It was a Christmas present, and on Christmas morning of 1996 there was a desk sitting in the kitchen area with a sheet over the top of it. I was 10 and Nath was 4. We were told it was new furniture for Nana and Pa, who were joining us for Christmas lunch. So we didn't think twice about it. The adults were expecting us to eventually take a peek under the sheet and thus see the surprise - but we were very well behaved children and none of us even considered looking. Hours later they finally told us we could take the sheet off, and our lives changed forever.

 

This PC served us for five years, until it was finally traded in for $100. In that time it did literally blow up; the PSU (possibly full of dust) crapped itself and there were actual sparks and smoke. Somehow this didn't take out the rest of the hardware. When the computer was repaired and returned, Dad wouldn't let us play the demo disk we'd been using when disaster struck as he figured that was the cause. I remember collecting the machine after it was fixed and there was a giant poster for MechWarrior 2 on the wall - which was very impressive for the time.

 

 

Some highlights from this build include:

• 100Mhz Pentium CPU
• 16MB RAM
• 1.2GB HDD
• 1MB PCI Video Card
• 8 x Speed CD ROM Drive
• 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive

 

Some software included:

• Windows 95
• Webster's Encyclopedia
• Microsoft Dangerous Creatures
• Microsoft Works (which from I can tell was a poor man's Office)

 

Final cost: $2283.95 - which probably isn't too bad for the time.

 

 

 

This machine was never connected to the internet, or any network for that matter. If I remember correctly, it came with a Turbo button and we had no idea what its purpose was. It also met the bare minimum requirements to play Age of Empires, which was promptly put on my birthday list in 1999 after playing it a friends house. And that is how I got into gaming.

[MiniSanders 588]

Ha, remembering what PC's we had is impossible... 

Although I do remember us getting a 286 in about 1991/92 (I think) for mum and dad to use for keeping track of cattle and stuff on the farm. This was promptly promoted to kids gaming machine and I'm not sure any farm work was ever entered onto it. 

 

But we also started with an old Amstrad that had a full green screen, and an Atari 2600. So there was always some type of gaming device in the house

 

Impressive to find the bloody receipt though... who keeps a receipt from 1996, warranty is well and truly void at that point  

[Decroxx 815]

Well, I can't go into quite as much detail as Shrive can, of course - but I can one-up you in one area!

Mine is still running to this day, though it's long since transitioned out as my main machine.

It's now in the optimistically titled 'Server Room', which is actually the cupboard under the stairs. Running as our main media streaming server, along with a bunch of other misc stuff.

This thing has been running solid for YEARS at this point - coming up on 10 or so I think. Fingers crossed for another 10!

 

[MasterShrive 2,015]

1 hour ago, MiniSanders said:

Although I do remember us getting a 286 in about 1991/92 (I think) for mum and dad to use for keeping track of cattle and stuff on the farm. This was promptly promoted to kids gaming machine and I'm not sure any farm work was ever entered onto it. 

There must have been a good salesperson going around convincing all the farmers they needed a fancy computer. I'm not sure why we were targeted - we didn't even get a tractor with a cab until the early 2000s.

 

1 hour ago, MiniSanders said:

Impressive to find the bloody receipt though... who keeps a receipt from 1996, warranty is well and truly void at that point  

I found it probably ten years ago at home and made sure we never threw it out. I've got a couple more I'll put up at a later date as well.

[Penchamus 411]

7 hours ago, MasterShrive said:

So after receiving a number of messages from BP showing off his old tech, I thought it could be an interesting endeavour for people to post older specs of PCs they have built or used in the past.

 

Below is the very first PC that Nath and I ever had in our house. It's main purpose was for Dad to complete the farm books on. This lasted two weeks, and he never touched a computer again until the introduction of SuperCoach about 15 years later. But it did provide a great gaming opportunity for the rest of us.

 

It was a Christmas present, and on Christmas morning of 1996 there was a desk sitting in the kitchen area with a sheet over the top of it. I was 10 and Nath was 4. We were told it was new furniture for Nana and Pa, who were joining us for Christmas lunch. So we didn't think twice about it. The adults were expecting us to eventually take a peek under the sheet and thus see the surprise - but we were very well behaved children and none of us even considered looking. Hours later they finally told us we could take the sheet off, and our lives changed forever.

 

This PC served us for five years, until it was finally traded in for $100. In that time it did literally blow up; the PSU (possibly full of dust) crapped itself and there were actual sparks and smoke. Somehow this didn't take out the rest of the hardware. When the computer was repaired and returned, Dad wouldn't let us play the demo disk we'd been using when disaster struck as he figured that was the cause. I remember collecting the machine after it was fixed and there was a giant poster for MechWarrior 2 on the wall - which was very impressive for the time.

 

 

Some highlights from this build include:

• 100Mhz Pentium CPU
• 16MB RAM
• 1.2GB HDD
• 1MB PCI Video Card
• 8 x Speed CD ROM Drive
• 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive

 

Some software included:

• Windows 95
• Webster's Encyclopedia
• Microsoft Dangerous Creatures
• Microsoft Works (which from I can tell was a poor man's Office)

 

Final cost: $2283.95 - which probably isn't too bad for the time.

 

 

 

This machine was never connected to the internet, or any network for that matter. If I remember correctly, it came with a Turbo button and we had no idea what its purpose was. It also met the bare minimum requirements to play Age of Empires, which was promptly put on my birthday list in 1999 after playing it a friends house. And that is how I got into gaming.

I can quite vividly imagine your parents wondering what they'd paid for 😂

[MasterShrive 2,015]

If it wasn't clear already, it was that day everyone knew I wasn't taking over the farm...

[Noods 290]

No idea what the specs where but first PC was a Commodore 64 (pretty sure they were all the same). Running games off the old 5 1/2 inch floppy drives and the old dot matrix printer. Also remember loading games from cassette tapes and it would take about 45 mins for games to load just to play. It was a blessing when they included a little mini game that would load up halfway through for you to play while you waited. Really wish Id kept it all even if it probably wouldn't work now.

 

But first IBM PC after that we hit the 86 family. think we went 286 then upgraded to 486 a couple of years later. 

[MiniSanders 588]

 

In photos of old tech though, my brother and I did manage to dig this box of old stuff out of a shed at mum and dads about a year ago.

Everything in there still worked, just had a few cockroaches walking out of the side of everything. 

This included the original NES, with light gun (Stupid things don't work with LCD tvs), Atari 2600, and a few joysticks for it. 

[MasterShrive 2,015]

41 minutes ago, MiniSanders said:

This included the original NES, with light gun (Stupid things don't work with LCD tvs)

Oh that's bloody unfortunate! I'd never even considered that could be an issue. Nice haul.

[bprc 1,441]

That's a decent find @MiniSanders!

 

Although I think you confused roaches with possums. They've made some mess!

[NOOBshoes 44]

I was definitely too young to have any idea of what was in my first PC. I do remember smashing out some Duke Nukem on it though

[TheLaw 860]

I believe the first family PC we got was an IBM and it looked very similar to the PC 300PL, came preloaded with Commander Keen 4, Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Lemmings.

My first ever PC I got was an ACER prebuilt.
i5 2400s
12GB DDR3
1TB WD Green

550w PSU
ATI 7570

Compared to what i have now, PC tech has come along way.

[MasterShrive 2,015]

Lemmings was a fantastic game!

[MasterShrive 2,015]

Round 2!

 

Okay, here's the specs for the second computer we ever owned. Now, by this time I had a bit more knowledge. I was already hooked on Age of Empires, and I knew AoEII now existed. So I made sure that at a bare minimum our new computer would meet those specs. Fortunately for us, it was even able to play Age of Mythology when that came out.

 

Highlights include Windows Millenium (come at me, I quite liked it) and a 20GB HDD. For $1,655 it probably wasn't too badly priced for its time.

 

This machine was never connected to a network or the internet, so we were yet to discover multiplayer gaming (unless you count Worms or MicroMachines). Console wise we were running an old Atari at the time, and soon purchased a PSOne to keep us entertained. That said, the demo disks that came with this computer kept us going for a long time; why purchase a game when you could just play the same level over, and over, and over, and over for free? I've still got some of those disks somewhere in my collection.

 

This is the computer where I discovered that Windows formatted floppy disks wouldn't play nice with the Apple Macintoshes at school. That was a bit of a pain in the arse.

 

 

Note we got a whole $100 trade in for the computer in the opening post, which was now five years old.

[MasterShrive 2,015]

Here is the specs of the first computer which was actually mine, accurately named JoshPC1 (I'm currently up to JoshPC6, for the record).

 

This machine was ordered in my first year of uni (2004). I was pretty insistent on getting a 3Ghz Pentium 4, as well as a graphics card with 128MB of RAM (64MB was more common at that stage). The card I received was an ATI Radeon 9200. Two years later it was upgraded to an Nvidia 6800 GTX so the computer could play CoD2 (on low).

 

This computer received a hammering. I had two different LAN crews - one on our uni res, which included Vulcan, and another crew from my uni course which included Mini. Games such as CoDUO, Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology racked a heap of hours. Sometimes we had games of Age with eight players, which was almost a dream come true. In CoDUO I think we got up to 12 one night running over our very ad-hoc LAN set up (we were bridging four Belkin wireless access points across three different buildings to run our own private network because the uni provided nothing - I learnt more from setting this up than I did in my entire course).

 

Once I moved out into a uni owned house we were able to connect to ADSL. By chance, the day we moved in an AAPT rep was doing the rounds and he signed us up for 12GB of data at about $40 a month. Not long after I was playing CoDUO online and found the WARGROUNDS servers. I never really gave any Age games a go online, but a few of us did play some Freelancer for a while. Ultimately this machine spent a LOT of time on clan related gaming.

 

This computer lasted three and a half years (with a RAM and GPU upgrade after 18 months). It eventually died when a lightning strike hit near our uni house, sending a surge down the powerline. This knocked out the PSU and motherboard (as well as my trusty wireless access point that we always used for LANs). I was sad to see it go, but it was in need of an overhaul.

 

The requested specs that I sent to Minit Computers in Bendigo:

 

Hardware:

Pentium 4 3.0 GHz Processor.
512MB RAM.
128MB Graphics Card.
Sound Card.
DVD/CD RW Drive.
Wireless Keyboard and Mouse. (These were pre-bluetooth days and were not very good. Once the batteries went flat in a competitive match online and they wouldn't reconnect until I restarted my whole computer. I had the flag and everyone was just looking at me wondering why I wasn't moving)
17" Screen. (This was a real pain at LANs because it was huge at the back)

Software:

Windows XP Home Edition.
Office 2003 Student Edition.
Windows Media Player.
CD Burning Software.

Price:

$2,500.
 

 

Am I still running my machine off this version of Windows XP? No, only because it was 32bit. But this did get upgraded to Vista when that was released.