My PC past

[Xpirate]

When I started working with computers in 1993, PC motherboards required at least one expansion card in order to display information to your CRT monitor. If you wanted your PC to have sound, you needed a sound card. Connecting to the outside world required a modem. We had floppy drives, optical CD drives, and hard disk drives. The CPU was installed on a motherboard with a pin grid array socket. Those computers had a special toggle switch to activate "turbo" mode. The turbo switch was there to slow the CPU down. Sometimes a slower CPU was required for some games.

In some ways, old computers were simpler. The power connectors were all Molex with yellow, red, and black wires. 3.5 inch floppy drives used a smaller version of the connector. The AT power connectors, P8 and P9, were installed with black next to black wires. The 2013 PC I put together required a lot more power connections. Only one of the case fans used the old Molex.

In other ways, older computers were more complicated. We got to deal with COM port settings and modem initialization strings. We also did more work in the BIOS settings to set the right IRQ for the sound card to work. You had to make sure your serial mouse was not on the same IRQ as the modem. If you wanted to play games, you got to learn how to make multiple settings in your autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

My first used car cost about $600. I got my first PC used from an individual and it set me back $1000. Several months later, because I could not readily afford it, I had to add a multimedia kit to get a CD ROM and a decent sound card. I also had to replace the floppy drive, so the price was actually even higher. Although I could barely afford it at the time, that PC helped me get started with my software engineering career.

I really enjoyed working with that old 486DX2 66 MHz with the turbo switch to knock it down to 33 MHz. I used PC's at school, but it did not compare to owning your own. I liked the way you could customize Windows 3.1's colors, sounds, and background. I thought everyone should get to live in their own pixel produced environment the way that I did.

I liked every upgrade I have had since then, but none of them really compared to that first computer experience. Going from calculators, pencil, paper, and typewriters to the PC world was big. Getting a smart phone and tablet was great, but still not quite the same as my first PC. Those items are just the evolution of personal computers.

A lot of you guys grew up with computers. My first PC was acquired a few years after I graduated high school. Some of you do not even know what the world was like in the Pre-PC era.

I took this trip down memory lane because I am getting rid of some old obsolete computer stuff like parallel IDE ribbon cable, floppy drives, and a serial/PS2 combo mouse. Thank you for reading my long post. Feel free to add your past PC experiences.

[Omega]

My first real PC was a Pentium 4 with a GeForce 4400 card that was about a mile long, and two SCSI hard drives.

[Airbozo]

My first "PC" was an 8088 based system with a HUGE 10MB HDD, and a 5.25" floppy drive.

My first computer was a VIC 20.

My fist PC computer "mod" was installing a Motorola CPU based board into one of the IBM PC models to connect with a Data Acquisition cart used during construction and testing of the MD-11 and C17 in Long Beach. I had to do all sorts of things to the chassis to make it acceptable to the safety group and federal groups. Basically had to cut an opening in the top and then add shielding for EMI signals, then repaint the top (no bare metal in the test area).

[TheMainMan]

My parents had a Pentium 100/133MHz as the first computer I was allowed to use. There were ones before that but that was the first my sister and I were old enough to use. Running good old Win95. The first computer I bought myself was when I moved out to go to university and was a little more capable with it's Pentium D 930, 4GB RAM, and dual 250GB SATA drives in Raid0. In between those, there were countless old systems that I salvaged from various sources to take apart, rebuild, and sometimes damage, all in the pursuit of self-taught knowledge. It did mean that I really appreciated a good machine when I finally bought one.

[Spawn-Inc]

my first pc was a Q6600 and still is lol!

that being said i remember using my dad's 486 with the turbo button and a lock so i couldn't use it when i was grounded :) and playing doom with my brothers was fun accept i got killed to many times... now i can kick his butt with new games.

getting a new computer was so exciting when it happened accept for the part where it took 2 days to install all the drivers and software.

[Xpirate]

a lock so i couldn't use it when i was grounded :)

I remember those old machines had keyboard locks. I salvaged a few of those round keylocks thinking that I would use them in some kind of electronic project. Since I never used them for anything, I let someone else have them who might actually do something with them.

I'm pretty sure that those keyboard locks faded away with the move to ATX. The ATX soft switch was really a nice advancement in PC technology.

[slaveofconvention]

OK, deep breath.....
First ever computer was a Commodore VIC-20, followed by a Sinclair Spectrum 128+2
As for PC's, my dad brought a 486-100 home from work and that got me hooked.
As for my own "PC" computers...

Via PR233+ based machine, bought second hand, never worked properly, got stolen in a burglary, I didn't miss it.....

AMD K6-266 based machine, which I bought brand new, had 32MB of RAM which was, at the time pretty huge because most machines at the time had 8 or if you were lucky, 16. I upgraded the crap outta this thing, over time adding to the RAM until there was a staggering (at the time) 96MB - an ATI Expert@play Video card, with 8MB of ram (again a big deal as the standard card was 4mb lol) and a Soundblaster 5.1 card (which I never got surround speakers for lol), and the CPU ended up as a K6-2 450.

AMD Athlon 800, Nvdia Geforce 3 Ti200, not sure what the RAM was, later upgraded to a 1300

AMD Athlon 1700+, reused the Ti200, pretty sure there was 256MB ram in there but not sure. Shortly after this PC my girlfriend at the time moved in, and I gave her that and built myself something based around an athlon 2500.

Next was a shuttle with an Athlon 64 3000 (754 pin) and a woeful Nvidia 5700 card - graphics were terrible lol, but I think it had 2GB ram.

Then came the first (and only) intel I've ever owned in a desktop - a Q6700, 8GB ram, Radeon 4870 and this was replaced a year or so ago with an AMD 8120 (I think - it's 8-cores at 3.1 I think) which now sits unused for months and months at a time (room it's in is too packed with junk to get to it lol) while I tap away here on my laptop (which contains the only other intel CPU I ever owned, a core2duo).

[Twigsoffury]

I remember when it was owning " a " computer, and not what kind or brand.

I'm not sure what the specs of our first computer was but... I played the crap out of Harrier AV/8B and that was released in 1992 so i'd guess it would be around that time.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV-8B_Harrier_Assault


Man, look at those graphics, its almost real!!

[blueonblack]

The first computer I used was in 7th grade, a TRS-80 that stored things on these tiny little magnetic tapes, that thing fascinated me even though all I ever did with it was play Pac Man.

First computer was a Commodore 16, we couldn't afford the 64. Couldn't run any games on it but we could program music into it note by note and save it on standard (wait for it) cassette tapes. Pretty useless looking back, especially for the price but it got me started.

High School, no PC at home but the computer labs were filled with Apple IIe systems and one lone Macintosh. Everyone wanted to play with that one because it had a mouse. I remember playing a game called Aztec off a 5 1/4" floppy on the Apple IIe at the library. That game was the bleeding damned edge.

Flash forward many years without one and I financed $2500 at Best Buy for a Packard Bell with an Intel Pentium 133MHz CPU and 4MB of RAM. Awesome machine. (I still have the monitor and attached speakers from that system.) What it DID have was a modem. That machine introduced me to the Internet. Or at least AOL, which to me at the time was the same thing.

My girlfriend (now my wife) and I got into AOL while they were still charging by the minute. Our first two months added up to over $400. Just as we were trying to figure out how we were going to cut back on the Internet cocaine AOL dropped their by-the-minute pricing and went unlimited. Freedom!!

That was the point in time when that 5-note Intel sound was being played approximately every seven seconds on every form of media that included audio. They lost me as a customer for life because of that. My therapist and I still talk about it.

From there to a Compaq with an AMD K6-2 450. As soon as I upgraded the RAM in that one I knew it was my last factory PC. I've built... lots of them since then, all with AMD CPUs and I've been more than happy with all of them.

My latest is a Phenom II 1100T, 16GB of RAM, blah blah blah, all absolute voodoo back when I started.

Hell, most of it is voodoo to me now. When I think of how many novels I can fit on this microSD card laying on my desk I'm in awe.

It's a great time to be alive.

[Twigsoffury]

That was the point in time when that 5-note Intel sound was being played approximately every seven seconds on every form of media that included audio. They lost me as a customer for life because of that. My therapist and I still talk about it.




bahahahhahahaha

=)

[blueonblack]

You know the one I'm talking about! $&*(#@&*(!!!!

[slaveofconvention]

Over the years, I've had both AMD and Intel CPUs die on me, and both companies have had the same "all we can do is sell you another one" attitude - so I now show them the same level of loyalty they showed to me and buy whatever is best for ME when I need to get a CPU.

Funny Shane mentioned the ram upgrade - the AMD 266 system I bought was a real lemon. Tech support kept offering to send me parts and have me fit them instead of sending someone out (on site warranty) claiming "It's easy and we can get the part to you tomorrow but it'll be next week before we can get a technician out" - CD Rom first, then memory, then a graphics card. Finally they gave up and decided the problem was the motherboard - when they said they'd send one out, I said "No, send the technician this time - I think that's too much for me to do" - they did, I watched and thought "Hell that was easy" and while I'm stuck with laptops and the wife's touchscreen all in one desktop - every machine I've owned since has been self-built

[Twigsoffury]

You know the one I'm talking about! $&*(#@&*(!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRLyMjvug1M

[blueonblack]

Thanks for that. I think I'll go strangle some kittens now.

[d_stilgar]

My earliest computer memories were from the 80s. I was just a few years old and could put 5.25" floppy disks in the drive and launch games in MS-DOS.

My family got the first Intel Pentium processor approved for home use in the early 90s. We had Windows 3.1 on the computer and got windows 95 a couple years later. It was also our first computer to have a CD drive, and would be the first computer we would use to go on the internet.

Most of my early computer memories were from that machine. My family kept it alive for almost a decade (probably because it cost $3000+ in 1990s dollars) with lots of reading and math games played at low resolutions, but those experiences were seminal in my childhood to who I would grow up to be.

My family got other computers through the years. I remember specifically when we got a new computer for Christmas that had a DVD drive in it. DVD players were still hundreds of dollars and it was difficult to find any movies on DVD, but DVD looked amazing.

After that things got pretty boring . . . and still mostly are to this day. It's probably due in part to the fact that things keep getting better, but there have been no huge fundamental shifts in the past few years. We aren't seeing the first sound card, or video card, or first 3D games. In the computer hardware side, and user-interface side we haven't seen anything really new in nearly 15 years. That or I'm just getting older and jaded.

In late 2003 though, my mom saw something on TechTV and made me run into the room to see it. A guy had built a computer into an NES. I was a huge Nintendo fan, especially of the NES and collected accessories and games from that early period of gaming (probably because I remember being really young and getting those games for Christmas). I thought, "I could do that" and decided I would build an NES PC myself.

I eventually did build an NES PC. It was the first PC I built and I really had no clue what I was doing. It was really fun, though, and I learned a lot. I'm not sure if there's a surviving build log of that machine, but here's a finished post of it at HardForum: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=774517&highlight=

Later I would build a 2nd version, which was much better, and while I know that ship has sort of sailed, I'd still like to do another. It's really fun to do. Here's a build log of that machine, which I still can't seem to leave alone: http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?2937-Project-NES-PC-(By-D_Stilgar)&highlight=

In the mean time I would build my own machines as I went off to college and got married. I still almost exclusively build my own machines. Every now and then I'll be in the market for a whole new machine and I'll find a really killer deal that's cheaper than building, but I like to build myself, and I think I get a better product when I do.