Be Excellent To Each Other

After many happy years of Amiga gaming, I decided in 1996 to bug my dad to buy me a PC so I could do some proper computing.

It was a beautiful Packard Bell in brilliant beige. It looked a lot like this one...



It was a Pentium 100 with 8 meg of RAM and, if memory serves, a massive 6GB hard drive with windows 95 installed. It took me about a week to break it by fucking up the config.sys by installing a moody copy of Fifa 96 and I had to run the recovery CDs.

I spent hours and hours using Encarta. It seemed to have the entire world's knowledge on that one little CD

386 33mhz of pure power. Tiny hard drive, minimal memory.

OS: DOS

Hours and hours of fun and study.

Y'know, thinking on, it might have been a 1GB hard drive.

12Mhz 286 bitches! 640k memory.

First hard disk was 40mb. I remember reading a review of Strike Commander and marvelling at the fact that it needed 1mb of memory and 16mb of hard disk space to run!

Ah, the first PC!

It was 1996 and at the time I had an Amiga 500 and a SNES at my disposal. A mate had a PC in his bedroom(!) and I was insanely jealous. I was absolutely chuffed when my dad announced that we were getting one. We drove up to the only PC World in the area at the time, which was up near Newcastle. A good hour's driving. We got there and I excitedly messed about with the display PCs whilst my dad talked to a sales assistant.

After about 10 minutes, my dad came to find me and announced that we were getting a certain model of PC. I went to have a look at it and it looked great. However, my dad intended to buy it on credit and his application was rejected. I don't think I've ever been more disappointed in my entire life. We drove home miserable, my dad's pride presumably a little dented.

A couple of months later, my dad announced again that we'd be getting a PC, but this time he'd be getting a guy from work to build it for us (paying cash this time, I assume). Sure enough, it arrived. A Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. I can't remember the size of the hard drive, but I think it was less than 6GB! The guy who built the thing had also installed some yarred games. Tomb Raider, Quake, Doom (which I'd specifically requested and was really excited about - moreso than Quake) and Command and Conquer Red Alert.

It was fucking AWESOME. Tomb Raider was absolutely incredible. Red Alert made me an instant RTS fan, and Quake and Doom cemented my love of FPSes forever. Unfortunately, being an inquisitive, smart-arsed 11 year old, I'd made what I thought were shortcuts to the games on the desktop for convenience. A few weeks later I deleted them for some reason or another. They weren't shortcuts. I'd deleted the .EXEs. My games were gone!

I had to settle for that shite "FPS" quiz game that was on Encarta 97 for a while.

I managed to convince my dad to buy me Red Alert and Tomb Raider from Toys R Us, and I eventually got Quake again for my birthday. I loved that machine.

386 33 SX with, I think, a 40Meg HDD. Fuck knows how much RAM. Didn't have a CD player, IIRC it cost me about £1200!!! I have no idea where I got that sort of cash back then, I certainly don't have it now!

286, 640k RAM, CGA monitor. Fucking awesome. Happy times with POP and such.

It was weird - it was a step down in terms of graphics from the BBC Micro, but was still better.

The first PC 'we' had was a 386 DX40, although that was actually my brother's.

Things I remember: arcade conversion of stuff like Double Dragon being no better than the Amiga/ST versions (in retrospect they were actually worse).

Proper smooth mouse controlled flight simulators. I *think* this was F16 Strike Eagle. Probably rubbish, but it was just novel to be able to move so freely in 3D without any jerkiness. Similar, I suppose to the first time I played Mercenary although that was more to do with gameplay I reckon.

Then one of my Dad's friends bought rounda whole load of games to erm, install for free! (shhh)

Dune 1 (aces), Super Space Invaders, Elite (not as good as the Archimedes version, but still excellent), Civilisation ...and my jaw hitting the floor when he showed us Wolfenstein 3D. Looked fantastic and achieved by good programming rather than just demanding stupid processing power.

When I got my first PC it was a P100 to run stuff like Dark Forces, Doom and Quake. It had a 1 Gig HD (which I called 'fat bloke' due to it's enormous capacity) I thought it was a bit of a milestone when I got my first 1TB HD a couple of years ago. Not that there's any point in having 1000* space because the games are shit now.

EGA here, IN YOUR FACE!

Dude, that's like having stabilisers on your bike. Mine was a raw, unadulterated computing experience, not filtered through 12 additional colours.

I also bought a Soundblaster card for it, after sending off for an audio tape of what it could do and after listening to it I had to have it.

Yes, you may touch me.

Heh.

I started off with a Roland MP-12 (I think?), if I recall correctly, when we upgraded to a 386SX. It was like the time Dad suggested buying a Betamax, the wanker.

I finally got a decent SB card when we upgraded to a 386DX with more RAM (the difference between extended and expanded haunts me to this day. As does the requirement of some games for specific amounts available out of the base 640k - Falcon 3.0, I'm looking at you).

Mine was a Cyrix 166MX (that helpfully ran at 133mhz), and cost me £650 of hard-saved cash.

I can't think how much of my youth was spent pissing about taking components in and out of PCs trying to make them fractionally better. Mind you, the difference between 8mb and 32mb RAM in those days was extreme.

An ICL 486SX25 with 4mb RAM and a 130MB hard drive running Windows 3.1 was our first family PC.
I remember having to pay for an extra 4mb so I could play Doom 2 on it.

The first one I bought out of my own money was a self built AMD K6-II 233

think mine was a dx66/2 or something like that I think it was. The thing could have powered a rocket to the moon in the 1990s but now couldn't even run windows. Strange how things move on!

Oh, I also remember my first issue of PC ZONE. It had Resident Evil on the cover. Can't remember if it was February 1996 or February 1997. Best magazine ever!

Was that in the Charlie Brooker period? He was ace.

Yep! He was!

Amstrad PC 1512! MS-DOS 4.0 ( on a red floppy, so possibly a copy ). 5 1/4 inch drives! No hard drive! Monochrome CGA graphics! "Dambusters" and "Psi-5 Trading Company" games, which were all-but incomprehensible!

PC stuff I had a 286 piece of rubbish that I jumped from to a Packard Bell 486sx running at 25mhz (very similar to Davpaz's picture) , it came with a 120mb hard drive and 2mb of memory - oh and a 5 1/4" drive instead of the CD.
I upgraded it with an extra hard drive (250mb) for £120
Then another 4mb of memory (single 1mb simms) for another £100
Then an upgraded CPU (the motherboard had an extra socket which you could plug in a 486DX/50 chip into - wooo !) for who knows what.

OS was of course DOS and i never bothered with Windows (since it would be 3.1) although I did get very good at playing around with Config.sys / Autoexec.Bat to free up memory to play difficult titles which although the memory requirements said 8MB I could get to work on my 6MB machine - also all the fun of drivespace / doublespace and stacker to squeeze as much stuff onto the drives that i could.

I also remember buying my first CD writer which cost something like £300 , burned CD's at 2x speed , and the first blank CD's which i got costing around £6 a pop (a vast majority of which were used to burn copies of music cd's or playstation 1 disks)



The Amstrad's used to come with 3 disks and they were red / green / yellow (i think) , when I worked as tech support in a college we had a room of them and the original disks were red so it was probably a real disk

**edit** found a picture of the set

Mine was a Pentium 90 with 16MB RAM and a 1GB hdd... pretty high spec at the time as I recall.

I remember a friend of mine buying a a Cyrix 200MMX PC and it cost him two grand.

My first PC was built by a colleague of mine and it still cost me £900, for a Cyrix 133. I can't remember any of the specs though. I remember the first game that I played though - Screamer, as it ran on pretty much anything.

I remember Dad bringing a 286 home from work one day and promptly demoting the Amiga 500 to the damp basement. On the plus side, it meant that I could waste away my life playing Civilisation in glittering EGA graphics.

First 'proper' PC was a 486SX running at the giddy heights of 25 MHz (then 33MHz when we found the 'turbo' button) which came with Windows 3.1 and a CD-Rom drive. How thrilled we were to look at videos of animals in a postage stamp sized window. Real cutting edge stuff. And about a week later the hard drive went all funny and we were advised by tech support to reinstall the whole lot. The clip of lions playing in the veldt never ran as smoothly afterwards.

Oh, and I cried my eyes out because 'Theme Park' wouldn't work despite our machine matching or beating the specs. A crushing lesson in boot disks followed, but we never could get the sound effects to work.

Winner.

I had Psi-5 on the speccy. Seems fantastic but crashed all the time. It was probably rubbish.

I had a C64 5 1/4 drive, but that's not the same thing. Althugh the drive on it's own was the size of a PC.

First PC I ever used in anger was a mate's 286, one of those dodgy Amstrad jobs with a 20MB hard drive and general poverty specs but it did have VGA graphics - probably around 1989. I tried to be all sniffy about it but there was denying it ran Colonization a fuck load faster than my Amiga 500 did.

First PC I ever owned was a 386SX-25 with 2MB RAM, never really did a great deal with it as I was still an Amiga nut (A1200 by then), we'd be looking at 1992 or so I would think, and it was far from a cutting edge machine.

First PC I ever owned and really got serious use out of was a 486 DX2-66 with 4MB RAM and some kind of amazing 512KB Cirrus Logic graphics card, SoundBlaster 16, CD-ROM drive - my Amiga was finally relegated to the back bench at this point. 1994 or thereabouts.

Been PC ever since.

Colonization in 1989? Hmmmm...

Good point, must have been Civilization then, although Wiki says even that wasn't released until 1991.

It must have been a game that was out in 1990 as that was when I moved back to Manchester to live with my dad, and I played this game on my mate's PC down in Chelmsford when I was living with my mum.

Unless I'm getting properly fucking confused and I played it when I was down in Chelmsford on a visit after I'd moved back to Manchester, as I did go back a few times over the years.

Dunno TBH

My first PC was a Fujitsu Celeron 400Mhz machine. I got it from Cash Converters. Where I worked. I can't find any pictures of it though.

First PC, 1996. Surprise purchase by my dad for the family. Was some Escom PC, Pentium 100, 8 Megabytes of RAM, 1GB hard disk drive. But with Windows 3.11. Played Colonization, and used dial-up Internet, which we couldn't get working on the Amiga 1200 because of the RAM requirements. Stuck to Amiga and games consoles as my main games machines. Come to think of it, that PC was the first computer I had at home that wasn't used primarily for games.

Been PC free since 2003. Hi to fellow Cult of Jobs members.

You might be thinking of 7 cities of gold which had a lot of similar themes (i used to play it on my Atari in the late 80's)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_ ... eo_game%29

P150 bought from Special Reserve. 32Mb of RAM, I think. I think it had a fairly good spec Soundblaster card, too. Oh, and a Matrox Mystique graphics card.

Heh, I remember those, came in 2MB or 4MB flavours, if you bought the 2MB one you could upgrade it later with a 2MB RAM chip that fitted into an empty socket on the card.

Had one myself at one point, they were before the proper 3DFX cards came out IIRC?

Hi5 Escom buddy. Ours was around Easter 1995. Pentium 60 with 8MB ram and 540 MB hard drive. It was pretty much a disaster and had regular trips back to Escom until we eventually got them to replace the entire tower, although bits still kept breaking. I still have a load of late 90s PC Zones before it became really boring.

I think our first dedicated graphics chip was a Savage S3 or something. I'm pissed so that might be wrong.

Our P90 was from Special Reserve! I used to get loads of stuff from them, the HDD for my A1200 came from those guys too.

I'd gone down the Mac route by 2000, but my youngest brother was still using the P90. It's the only computer I ever saw that was genuinely affected by the Millenium Bug - the system clock became effectively useless on January 1st 2000.

First PC was a hopeless Olivetti 386SX 25Mhz, back in 1993. It had 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. It was completely unupgradeable - you couldn't even get a second hard drive to work with it because of the useless, non-standard ROM. It cost me about 1200 quid if I remember rightly, and I binned it after 18 months and bought a 486DX2 66Mhz instead, for about half the price I paid for the Olivetti.

First one I tried:



which was at my Brother's house. He had Starglider, Elite and Star Wars arcade on his monochrome screen. Also Hitchiker's text adventure.


The first one in a house I lived in was my mate at Uni - it was some sort of Pentium. Viglen iirc, and it had Rebel Assault, Championship Manager and Tomb Raider which he tried to play with an analogue flight stick. For a spliff a day I would bribe him to let me play CM as much as I liked... his room was barely wide enough for a single bed, the computer desk and a chair between them, but I'd come home after morning lectures, play until he got home, then he'd go to sleep with me sat there taking Forest to the Champion's League and I'd still be sat there when he woke up in the morning if I didn't have lectures the enxt day.

My personal first was a donated 486 with fuck all that I could do my essays on at University. Hateful thing it was.

The first one I bought was an Evesham Axis, top of the range, phoned to order it and they'd just got in the new 1.3 Athlon processors. I bought it, new release Black & White and played my way through a decade's epic stuff like Homeworld, Half Life, etc. It lasted me a decade and I loved it like a brother. Caught fire eventually. God, it was gorgeous.

I didn't get a PC until 2003. No idea what it was, I want to say a Pentium II-233 but that could be way off base. I don't remember it being top of the range or anything, anyway.

486 DX/2-66 for me. From Gateway in 1994, I believe. Upgraded it later to a P133.

Yeah, mine was the 4Mb one. For a time, Matrox cards were considered among the best you could get - Mystique and Millenium, I think were the names. Then the Voodoo cards came out and we ended up in the graphics version of the CPU wars with new cards coming out every other week.

Having Wiki'd, I'm pretty sure the Soundblaster was an AWE32. The PC was pretty good spec at the time, I remember going for a P150 rather than a Cyrix P166, because the Cyrix ran slower (133, rather than 150). It was a dev machine though, didn't do that much gaming on it as I was totally out of love with gaming at the time.

I'm a proper come-lately with PCs - mine was a Dell Optiplex with a Pentium II 400, which would have looked like this:



I put a Voodoo 2 graphics accelerator in it - whoo!

Aha, found an actual photo:



There it is with Mrs Grim..., being young. My PS1 is next to it, playing Bloody Roar 2.

We had a 386 (I think) that my dad bought home from work to use for a bit. It had a 40MB hard drive I think, and was running windows 3.1. It didn't hang around long, but we did buy a printer for it and I used it for some school work and dad play Mah-Jong on it.

The first PC we ever bought was from Tiny. A P133, 16meg 'EDO' ram and a 'pipeline burst cache'. It had a CD rom drive and a 1.3 gig HDD. The CD drive was shit and would often lose grip of the discs and just spin wildly making a horrible grinding noise and making the whole computer lock up.

I used it for school work, and Encarta was a wonderfully neat thing to have at home at the time. I mostly used it to play Championship Manager though, I could sit there for hours and hours. It was even better when the expansion pack allowing managing in foreign leagues came out

When I started with my current employer in 2003, they still had several of those in use!

My CNC robot still uses exactly one of those! It was the only machine I could find with a real parallel port. It's running XP. Slowly.

If you do want to upgrade into the past decade, have a look for a Dell Dimension D2400 or D3000. They have proper parallel ports and you can get dual core P4 processors and a couple of GB of RAM. I've got a whole pile of them sat here cluttering up my desk at the moment.

I am thinking my first one was an Amstrad 3286 but that was a long time ago. I think it was the late 80's early 90's when I had it.

You people sicken me, with your Pentiums and 486s as your first PCs.

We had a 4.77Mhz XT "IBM clone", CGA graphics, MS-DOS 3.2, two 5.25 drives, no hard drive, deafening dot matrix printer. You held Ctrl-Alt-+ or - to switch the Turbo on and off. This was 1985/86. Early version of Norton Utilities and Lotus 123, first games were Pinball Construction Set, Solo Flight and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure (which forced me to learn to spell "analgesic")

My first PC was a Umax Pulsar Mac Clone. http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/s900.shtml

I loved it. Can't remember the exact spec but I know it ran StarCraft well and it was the computer I learned how to use Illustrator and Photoshop on.

You're pretty much me, I think. We had a 386 that my dad brought home from work, although it was running 3.11.

Our first proper PC was a Pentium MMX 200MHz! It was prpper booyah at the time, and would play Little Big Adventure and Doom with no problems. I think it had a 250MB HDD, but can't really remember now.