# What was your first computer?



## alex_theman (Oct 20, 2016)

Was it an Amiga or C64? Was it a PC or Mac? Was it a Sinclair with a "rubber keyboard" ? As something like that can be done in a poll, I want autistic levels of detail like:

Why did you get it?
What brand was the PC? (If it isn't a C64/Amiga/Mac/Sinclair (unless you had a Mac clone)
What software did you get with it?
What are some of your tales of this machine and its community (if you remember any)?
Do you still have it? If not, when did you sell it?
And more!


----------



## CatParty (Oct 20, 2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_4


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 20, 2016)

CatParty said:


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_4
> 
> View attachment 145870


I want more detail than that, because :autism:


----------



## CatParty (Oct 20, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> I want more detail than that, because :autism:




it was soooooo long ago lol i just remember learning how  to program it to count on its own and make the screen flash different colours


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 20, 2016)

CatParty said:


> it was soooooo long ago lol i just remember learning how  to program it to count on its own and make the screen flash different colours


I assume you didn't own it, and it was your school's/parents' computer?


----------



## WEEDle (Oct 20, 2016)

Spoiler: Apple Macintosh











My grandparents got this beast for free from a friend that no longer wanted it. Got it around 1997? Was ridiculously outdated by then of course, but better than nothing. I was 5 years old at the time so all I remember doing with it was using the paint program and printing out my drawings and stories I would make using that. It was in black and white. I remember looking through some of the file directories and stuff like that but it was so long ago I can't remember much.

About a year or so later the same friend gave them another computer, more up-to-date but still behind the times. I can't remember much about it other than it run Windows 95 and I played some games on it like Sonic 3D Blast, Broken Sword, GTA 1 and some Tetris clones with a USB game pad. It was one of those huge, fat monitors typical in the 90s and it was already starting to yellow. It had internet capabilities but sadly we had no modem and they never got around to getting one until a few years later and with a new computer running Windows XP.

I remember being jealous of the kid across the street because his family had a computer with Windows 98 and the internet, and he had better games etc and made fun of me for my outdated technology and just about everything else.

I still messed around in paint and enjoyed using color.

Why we got rid of them? Well the Apple Macintosh, although a novelty for collectors and such, was admittedly pretty useless for anything we would use it for. The other computer was fine but I think they eventually realized just how shitty these old computers were and it wasn't until about 2004/5 until they got a new, up-to-date PC with internet capabilities. We still have that one, and it still runs okay, but it never gets used.

I got my own laptop in early 2005 with internet connection and that was the beginning of my internet days. I was 13 at the time, and felt pretty late to the party so to speak, but I knew other people who didn't have computers or internet until much later even, so I didn't feel that bad. Where I live we didn't even have broadband connection until 2005 so I thankfully never had to deal with dial-up, and I did get to use computers/the internet at other people's houses in the years leading up to this.

I wish I had been introduced to the internet earlier but hey, what can you do?


----------



## Bogs (Oct 20, 2016)

This bad boy, mom got it a year after it came out. I mostly used it to make meaningless graphs in the office program, and rename all my mom's documents (not knowing how computers work, she kept having to go to the computer store). Then one day Dark Castle II came into the house and the rest was (terribly uninteresting) history.
Still have it, still works.


----------



## CatParty (Oct 20, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> parents' computer?


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 20, 2016)

CatParty said:


> blank text



You got a NUF for the bad pun. I eat those and use them to summon the old one of puns, Punthlu.


----------



## Ravenor (Oct 20, 2016)

BBC Microcomputer with a dedicated colour screen, 5in floppy reader an a lythodisk drive > Packard Bell Spectria> HP Internet enabled lapto> Many Many self builds since around 99.... today 27in iMac, 15in MBP and iPad.


----------



## AnOminous (Oct 20, 2016)

I always had computers around and don't think I actually owned one personally until the late '90s, even when I was repairing them as a job.  That first computer, in fact, was actually built out of parts of other junked computers and was originally a Pentium 166 in a case without a cover.

The first computer I used regularly was a TI-99/4a at a friend's house, and the first computers I did anything remotely interesting with were the TRS-80 Model IIIs at school.  Those were really great, solid machines.  I think they were the first "all in one" model of the TRS-80.  They didn't have floppy drives of their own, but a Model 4 did, and was connected to the others through the cassette ports, which all plugged into a switchbox so the machine with the drive could broadcast data to all the others, or you could upload data to it, like programs you'd typed in.  So that was also my first (primitive) network too.  And it was nice not having to deal with the insanely shitty cassette tape drive, although the "network" used the port for it.


----------



## temeluchus (Oct 20, 2016)

I was bought a c64 at age 8. It came with a bunch of movie and tv game show themed games. Tape drive, the disc drive was expensive and rare over here.

Notable memory was having the shit scared out of me by a jaggi in rescue on fractalus. 

I don,t have my original c64 which was consigned to the skip years ago. I have bought a replacement which i fire up now and again.


----------



## c-no (Oct 20, 2016)

As far as owning my own computer goes, I had my first computer, a Think Pad from IBM back at the end of 2005. I didn't know much about computers from back then but owning a laptop was the first thing to give me interest in computers. Owning it also taught a valuable lesson in being very careful with what you download. I won't forget how I accidentally got spyware and adware thanks to some toolbar I installed.


----------



## DumbCWCQuote (Oct 20, 2016)

The first computer in the house was for my dads work it was some old dinosaur IBM that I barely remember we had a string of others over the years but the first that I could call my own was an HP pavilion a6403w I got through the dead relative inheritance program she served me well swapped out a lot of parts over the years still use the monitor on my junker PC and the tower's more or less my night stand now.


----------



## Maiden-TieJuan (Oct 20, 2016)

Commodore 64.  We also had the little printer for the older version, with the tiny ink pens in it.

I remember coding for hours just to make a christmas tree.


----------



## SakuraRose (Oct 20, 2016)

Commie 64, got through several of those as they kept blowing up, which necessitated repeat trips back to Rumbelows for replacements.

Then it was the Spectrum rubber keyed model, complete with wobbly RAM pack, progressing on to the 48k+ hard plastic keyed model, then finally the +2A, which was notorious for refusing to load approximately half the games.

Moved on to the Amiga 500 in the early 90s, then the 1200, and then built my first PC somewhere around 1995.

All apart from the exploding C64s and the PC still live proudly in my cellar.


----------



## Dunsparce (Oct 20, 2016)

Tandy 5000 MC. 

Apparently it's pretty rare, shame it was thrown away years ago.


----------



## XYZpdq (Oct 20, 2016)

First computer I used was the TI 99 4As. My preschool had a ton of them. They were great machines for little kids. Cartidge-run, keyboard, joystick, speech synth, a huge educational library.

First one I had was an Atari 800xl, got it as a hand-me-down from somebody. It was my video game machine until I pointed out to my parents that those indian kids in that news story about abject poverty on reservations even had an NES.

But thanks to the Atari I never knew of a Donkey Kong without the cement factory level.


----------



## Trilby (Oct 20, 2016)

Having grown up in a modest-sized family, naturally I ended up the middle child and had to wait my turn to use the Commodore 64 my older brother hogged for his projects.  Never really did much on it besides games and Koala Painter.  When the Amiga 500 came out, I wanted that one SO BAD, yet my mom gave me an 8-bit Atari computer instead (one of those XE models).  Not much I got out of that besides playing Pac-Man.


----------



## crunchysalty (Oct 20, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> Was it an Amiga or C64? Was it a PC or Mac? Was it a Sinclair with a "rubber keyboard" ? As something like that can be done in a poll, I want autistic levels of detail like:
> 
> Why did you get it?
> What brand was the PC? (If it isn't a C64/Amiga/Mac/Sinclair (unless you had a Mac clone)
> ...


The first one I played with was the ti-99, when radio shack was still cool:


----------



## talk talk talk (Oct 20, 2016)

Some sort of 8080 breadboard kit my dad picked up. Programmed it in machine language in octal with a numeric keypad. It had three banks of display LED's linked to some registers.

While I don't work in IT, I have no fear of computers because of  my early exposure to how they work deep down.

The first recognizable modern computer I had was a Sanyo clone of an IBM Portable, which was IBM's answer to the Compaq. It was an 8088 beast in a luggable case with a built-in CRT. By the time I replaced it, I had installed a memory upgrade on an ISA card, a processor upgrade (80286, baby!) with a sketchy vampire clamp to the original processor, and a 20 meg hard disk in one of the floppy bays.


----------



## Doc Cassidy (Oct 21, 2016)

I was kind of young but I remember that it ran Norton Commander on top of DOS. I'm pretty sure it had a 386 in it, but I couldn't tell you who made the computer itself.


----------



## Curt Sibling (Oct 21, 2016)

The BBC Micro...Basic is the word!


----------



## Mason Verger (Oct 21, 2016)

My parents got this around 176BCE. Pretty basic, but we never missed a sacrifice to an eclipse. Wouldn't run Windows since we lived in a cave.


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 21, 2016)

Curt Sibling said:


> The BBC Micro...Basic is the word!


Did you play Elite?


----------



## Curt Sibling (Oct 21, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> Did you play Elite?


Hell, yis! And also the spitfire game...Not to mention all the arcade rip off clones!


----------



## polonium (Oct 21, 2016)

First computer in the house was my parents' 16KB specrum with the rubber keyboard.
I used it when I was very small to play shape sorting games and shit like that.

When I was at primary school they had the old BBC micro B and we played with LOGO and we had a turtle that went along the ground with a pen to draw on massive sheets of paper. Shit was crackers I tell you. We also had a game where you could type in commands and the creature on the screen called "Pod" would do them. We used to try to type in swear words.

After that, I was given an Amstrad CPC464+ in the 90s, it was probably the last legit computer that used audio cassette tape as a storage medium. Someone else at school had one and we used to swap games. Being able to pirate games by using a tape deck was pretty fucking cool, and I used to get an Amstrad magazine with a tape full of useless shit on the cover every month. There's something theraputic about having to wait several minutes for games to load.

Then when I was a teenager, I bought myself an Amstrad PC1512 which was desperately outdated but good enough to do word processing so that was how I got my homework done. I had a dot matrix printer as a Christmas present one year, it was noisy as fuck. When I went to college I had saved up a lot and got myself a Pentium 60 that ran Windows 95. It was the first computer I had with a colour screen.


----------



## Trilby (Oct 21, 2016)

crunchysalty said:


> The first one I played with was the ti-99, when radio shack was still cool:


That's the Radio Shack I miss everyday!



polonium said:


> When I was at primary school they had the old BBC micro B and we played with LOGO and we had a turtle that went along the ground with a pen to draw on massive sheets of paper. Shit was crackers I tell you. We also had a game where you could type in commands and the creature on the screen called "Pod" would do them. We used to try to type in swear words.


Here in the states, most schools fell for Apple's incentive and always had their IIe's in the computer room, this lasted into the 90's.



> After that, I was given an Amstrad CPC464+ in the 90s, it was probably the last legit computer that used audio cassette tape as a storage medium. Someone else at school had one and we used to swap games. Being able to pirate games by using a tape deck was pretty fucking cool, and I used to get an Amstrad magazine with a tape full of useless shit on the cover every month. There's something theraputic about having to wait several minutes for games to load.


Unlike my brother who got copied floppies of game ports like Elite's Paperboy to run on his C64, but I do recall the loading times being pretty long!



Curt Sibling said:


> The BBC Micro...Basic is the word!


I think they tried to bring that over here and it just didn't happen!


----------



## DangerousGas (Oct 21, 2016)

Commodore 64. My old man was a programmer at the time, and sank a lot of money into it - we had the thermal printer, the disk drive, even a digitiser (graphics tablet, these days) for it. I still have it (with the accessories), as well as a bunch of games. Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, @telemuchus avatar is a fuzzy from the commodore 64 game 'Creatures', or its sequel.


----------



## Trilby (Oct 21, 2016)

DangerousGas said:


> Commodore 64. My old man was a programmer at the time, and sank a lot of money into it - we had the thermal printer, the disk drive, even a digitiser (graphics tablet, these days) for it. I still have it (with the accessories), as well as a bunch of games. Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, telemechus' avatar is a fuzzy from the commodore 64 game 'Creatures', or its sequel.


Sounds like just what we had for our C64, though we had a dot matrix printer, some VicModem that didn't seem to work for our computer (though perhaps my brother didn't know he had to connect to a BBS) and even this fancy ass monitor that is STILL in my possession!  These things do come in handy for any composite video device!


----------



## Some JERK (Oct 21, 2016)

CatParty said:


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_4
> 
> View attachment 145870


+1 for the Trash-80, followed by the Vic-20


----------



## CatParty (Oct 21, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> You got a NUF for the bad pun. I eat those and use them to summon the old one of puns, Punthlu.




we also had the intellivision computer





it was kinda like


----------



## sysctl --system (Oct 21, 2016)

This thing had a touch screen and everything, shit was sick.

I guess these were pretty rare, so I have no clue where we got one.


----------



## Trilby (Oct 21, 2016)

CatParty said:


> we also had the intellivision computer
> 
> View attachment 146393
> 
> it was kinda like


Lucky you, that's like the first 16-bit machine of its kind!


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 21, 2016)

CatParty said:


> we also had the intellivision computer
> 
> View attachment 146393
> 
> it was kinda like


Did it look like this?


----------



## CatParty (Oct 21, 2016)

Trilby said:


> Lucky you, that's like the first 16-bit machine of its kind!




i'm old 




alex_theman said:


> Did it look like this?



it matched the image i posted closer. i didn't have the fancy metal cassette player


----------



## Trilby (Oct 21, 2016)

CatParty said:


> i'm old


Me too (I'll be 40 next year).


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 21, 2016)

CatParty said:


> it matched the image i posted closer. i didn't have the fancy metal cassette player


So like this?


----------



## DangerousGas (Oct 21, 2016)

BadHabits said:


> This thing had a touch screen and everything, shit was sick.
> 
> I guess these were pretty rare, so I have no clue where we got one.


Apple didn't make one with a touch screen. Source/slight powerlevel: used to service Apple computers for a living.


----------



## AnOminous (Oct 21, 2016)

BadHabits said:


> This thing had a touch screen and everything, shit was sick.
> 
> I guess these were pretty rare, so I have no clue where we got one.



They weren't that rare.  Apple just made the perverse decision only to sell through a very few outlets, fucking over many small independent retailers who had sold their products since they fucking started out.  Mild powerlevel, still pissed about that as I worked for one of those at the time.


----------



## bacterium (Oct 21, 2016)

I believe it was this:

 
Commodore 64C

But it also may have been a version of the C-128. Either way, it was about as old as me, possibly older. Got it when I was probably 10 or 11 because I had been begging for a computer and we were poor.


----------



## Piss Clam (Oct 21, 2016)

I use to use stones to program my first computer, but then they moved me to Cambridge and that's where I really took off.


----------



## bacterium (Oct 21, 2016)

Trilby said:


> Sounds like just what we had for our C64, though we had a dot matrix printer, some VicModem that didn't seem to work for our computer (though perhaps my brother didn't know he had to connect to a BBS) and even this fancy ass monitor that is STILL in my possession!  These things do come in handy for any composite video device!



Shit yeah!  That is the monitor I had. Used that thing for everything for years.


----------



## Trilby (Oct 21, 2016)

AnOminous said:


> They weren't that rare.  Apple just made the perverse decision only to sell through a very few outlets, fucking over many small independent retailers who had sold their products since they fucking started out.  Mild powerlevel, still pissed about that as I worked for one of those at the time.


I feel your pain, sucks to be an indie/franchisee/affiliate/authorized dealer competing next to the big boys but not with the same things.



bacterium said:


> Shit yeah!  That is the monitor I had. Used that thing for everything for years.


I'm sure mine still works too, though I haven't turned it on for years.  Had I had an Amiga, I would've had this as part of a makeshift production suite! Perhaps as a preview or output monitor for my videos.

This was the tape that convinced me that this was what I wanted when I went into a Software Etc. back in the late 80's....


----------



## Silvana (Oct 21, 2016)

I was hoping my parents would buy me an Atari Games Console so I could play Pac Man. I was so disappointed.

@Curt Sibling - Learned to code using one of the many BBC Bs in my school's computer room!

@BadHabits - @AnOminous is right - they're weren't that rare! I hooked up to the internet in 2006 with a green iMac G3 a friend sold me - it broke down after three months, never to work again. I later discovered he'd found it lying in the street...


----------



## sysctl --system (Oct 21, 2016)

DangerousGas said:


> Apple didn't make one with a touch screen. Source/slight powerlevel: used to service Apple computers for a living.



Oh is that something that was retrofitted? Can that even be done? I know for certain it had a touchscreen because that was the hottest shit as a kid.


----------



## Positron (Oct 21, 2016)

An Apple II+ compatible, a used one Dad bought from his coworker.  It runs DOS 3.3, had a whooping 64 kilobytes of memory, and could play_ Ultima IV_!


----------



## Trilby (Oct 21, 2016)

Silvana said:


> I was hoping my parents would buy me an Atari Games Console so I could play Pac Man. I was so disappointed.


Didn't help that the advertising during the time often dissuaded parents from getting a game console for a system that would be superseded by the C64 soon enough.



Spoiler: extolling the virtues of a dead-end machine











































This guy and his mom look familiar!







BadHabits said:


> Oh is that something that was retrofitted? Can that even be done? I know for certain it had a touchscreen because that was the hottest shit as a kid.


I remember a time in the 80's when touchscreens were the shit if you saw one in person!  For me it was the lottery ticket machine thingy at a convenient store!


----------



## cypocraphy (Oct 21, 2016)

OK Computer. I got it at Sam Goody.


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 21, 2016)

Jack Tramiel was a cold, cruel man.

EDIT:



Silvana said:


> I was hoping my parents would buy me an Atari Games Console so I could play Pac Man. I was so disappointed.


Also, there was a VIC-20 port of Pacman, and at least you got Gridrunner.


----------



## Trilby (Oct 22, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> Jack Tramiel was a cold, cruel man.


Thank you.


----------



## Ravenor (Oct 22, 2016)

Curt Sibling said:


> The BBC Micro...Basic is the word!



God I miss that, I also loved the fireworks command in basic that was the wordart of it's day....

I think mine is still in my folks attic (aka the family craphole) and the nostalgia is getting to me.


----------



## nad7155 (Oct 22, 2016)

My first computer used vacuum tubes, so I win.


----------



## alex_theman (Oct 22, 2016)

nad7155 said:


> My first computer used vacuum tubes, so I win.


Which one was it?


----------



## Damocles_Sword (Oct 23, 2016)

If you go by first computer the family had, it was a Tandy 1000 my dad bought for his home office, if you're talking about first computer paid for out of my own pocket, I bought a SNES by mowing lawns one summer. If you mean PC, I bought a Dell Dimension 8300 to replace the gateway my dad bought me that crapped out.


----------



## Pina Colada (Dec 11, 2016)

I got a Windows 95 from my parents on my 5th birthday (around 2000)! It was a hand-me-down from the Windows 98 my dad got a year prior. No Internet, but it didn't stop me from having oodles of fun with Paint, KidPix (that was the shit during my elementary school days) and the other computer games (mostly Disney and Barbie/Bratz/whatever girl's toy was popular at the time) I got as extra presents or from the library.

A few years later, I gave it away and replaced it with the 98 after my dad switched to a Mac. When it finally conked out around 2008(!), my mom let me use her laptop (with Vista) to mess around with games and discover YouTube for the first time.

Last but not least, I got a tablet PC for my 16th birthday that's now running slow as molasses with age; I'm currently saving up for another PC laptop.


----------



## Army Burger (Dec 11, 2016)

Windows 95. Spent a lot of time dicking around in WordPerfect and Paint.


----------



## Ravenor (Dec 11, 2016)

ShiningPokeStar said:


> I got a Windows 95 from my parents on my 5th birthday (around 2000)! It was a hand-me-down from the Windows 98 my dad got a year prior. No Internet, but it didn't stop me from having oodles of fun with Paint, KidPix (that was the shit during my days of elementary school) and the other computer games I got as extra presents or from the library.
> 
> A few years later, I gave it away and replaced it with the 98 after my dad switched to a Mac. When it finally conked out around 2008(!), my mom let me use her laptop (with Vista) to mess around with games and discover YouTube for the first time.
> 
> Last but not least, I got a tablet PC for my 16th birthday that's now running slow as molasses with age; I'm currently saving up for another PC laptop.



What tablet is it? maybe myself or some other friendly kiwi can help you clean it up a bit to get some better performance out of it before you get your new computer.



Army Burger said:


> Windows 95. Spent a lot of time dicking around in WordPerfect and Paint.



Yep MS paint was awesome back in the day I used to love trying to draw building layouts in it so much so my mum and dad got me this really basic CAD application for kid's / teenagers and you could send off for update disk's to some PO box in London with a postal order and 3 weeks later you got a bunch of new art and software updates (_ah precommercial day's of the internet, and yep at one point you couldn't use money online, it was technically illegal_) and for another couple of quid you could get yourself exercise books on how to design things like houses, bridges, shops etc, and if you had a compatible game you could export them as a map, I think DooM wad files were supported as where one or two other games, but my god it was fun.


----------



## Pina Colada (Dec 11, 2016)

Ravenor said:


> What tablet is it? maybe myself or some other friendly kiwi can help you clean it up a bit to get some better performance out of it before you get your new computer.


It's a Fujitsu Lifebook that runs Windows 7. Last time I was on it, it booted up for about 5-7 minutes (no viruses, at least after I stopped using it). Thanks for the advice!


----------



## Ravenor (Dec 11, 2016)

ShiningPokeStar said:


> It's a Fujitsu Lifebook that runs Windows 7. Last time I was on it, it booted up for about 5-7 minutes (no viruses, at least after I stopped using it). Thanks for the advice!



So is it just boot time that's a issue or does it run like a tard through treacle when you're using it normally? Also what's the model?


----------



## Pina Colada (Dec 11, 2016)

Ravenor said:


> So is it just boot time that's a issue or does it run like a tard through treacle when you're using it normally? Also what's the model?


T2010; runs like a tard through treacle while in slow-mo, but only when you click on programs, the Internet, and such.


----------



## Brit Crust (Dec 11, 2016)

My first family computer was a Mac, back when Apple computers were less expensive than PCs. I can't remember the exact model, but I know it ran OS 8 at one point.

My first _own_ computer was a PC than ran Windows 95.  All I did was play some games and occasionally logged into AOL's Kids Only section. As a kid, I wasn't very much of a computer person.


----------



## Ravenor (Dec 11, 2016)

ShiningPokeStar said:


> T2010; runs like a tard through treacle while in slow-mo, but only when you click on programs, the Internet, and such.



Right my first point of call would be to make sure I disabled anything option at boot that you don't use - if you download something like CCleaner you can turn off things without risking disabling anything essential for the OS to boot, after that I'd also check Windows Update for new drivers - If your not comfertable doing this I can do it for you with something like Team Viewer.

Looking at the spec's though your kinda shit out of luck, from what I can see it shipped originally late in the XP Vista handover period so it's only got a C2 duo processor and 2gb of 2gb of DDR2 533 - lower spec DDR2 is kind becoming difficult to come by as most of the fab shops have moved on so while you can upgrade it to the max supported 4gb you are probably running a X86 version of Win7 that can only really address 3.5GB, the good news is it's a SATA HDD in your system so you can buy a cheap SSD and boost your performance a fair bit but this will either require you to make a fresh install of Win7 of use something like Ghost or a Linux live CD using DD to copy your current OS from one disk to the other then you'll need install the SSD into your laptop, the best an easiest option in this case would be for you to just install a fresh copy of Win7 onto the SSD then copy your data of the older disk.


----------



## Mozzarella Dicks (Dec 11, 2016)

My  first experiences using a home computer were with Windows 3.0 or 3.5 or somesuch, first time one was replaced but still in good enough condition to be passed down to me for my personal use was a Windows 98 eMachine with a 3GB hard drive.

I used it mostly to dick around in MSPaint, write fanfiction in Notepad, and make games using ZZT or the OHRRPGCE. Since I didn't have Internet access in the home, most of my abominations from that era are lost to history.


----------



## DumbDosh (Dec 12, 2016)

My first family computer was some shitty desktop that ran windows 95, I mainly just played neopets on it and used it for encarta for homework.

My first computer that I personally owned was a used iMac G3 I got from a thrift shop, but I just called it an apple blueberry. I mainly just played Bugdom on it and used it for school.


----------



## Tootsie Bear (Dec 12, 2016)

Years back my mother order this $1000 plus computer off the Home Shopping Network. Yes, you read that right. Took a good while to arrive and was pre-built with all these programs like AOL internet, etc. 

I remember how despite the faults it was an okay computer. Unfortunately something happened to it, where we had to send it in to get repaired. I don't remember what. But whatever it was, the "computer repair" fucked up the computer. I haven't seen another computer do this, what they did is made it where my old computer would randomly reset. Like say shut down, then turn back on. Was horrible when I not only had AOL; which is slow as hell, but I wanted to get both movies and songs.  The lesson here is never ever order your computers from the Home Shopping Network!


----------



## Ti-99/4A (Dec 12, 2016)

My family got a TI-99 4/A in 1981. We had gotten most of the common add ons for it by the time it was killed off in 1983. After that the things were so cheap that I was given my own. Mine didn't have the expansion box with 32K and a disk drive, but I thought it was really cool to have a computer of my own when I was 6. But by 1985 all the neighbor kids had their own personal Commodore 64s.


----------



## Broken Pussy (Dec 12, 2016)

I was given a computer as a reward for getting the highest score on the SAT.  I don't remember what the local organization was that did the computers, but there was also a local bank that gave you money for every hundred points you were over 1000, so seventeen year old me was given a check for a large sum of money on senior honors night.  It wasn't a scholarship, it was just free money.  Anyway, the computer was an HP Pavilion.   That computer and 56k dialup.  Changed my whole life.


----------



## SpessCaptain (Dec 12, 2016)

IBM APTIVA PENTIUM 2 MMX. 



Spoiler: it was black though











This beast right here. Had it for nearly a decade. Worked forever.


----------



## Lurkman (Dec 15, 2016)

iMac G3. Yes, I will admit that I was a macfag. It served me well back in the early 2000s. I do remember it had Mac OS 8 and I got one of those fucking "hockey puck" mouse for it ulllghhhhh.


----------



## The 25th Cyberman (Dec 15, 2016)

some 1999-vintage Toshiba laptop

I remember trying to play Minecraft on it one time. It actually ran at a playable framerate.


----------



## Varg Did Nothing Wrong (Dec 19, 2016)

Packard Bell PC that came with Win 3.1 was my family's first computer, I guess you could say it was "mine". Came with all the hot shit at the time, lots of DOS games, Warcraft 2, Civ 2. I believe this was around 1995 or 1996 or so. Couldn't play many of the newer games coming out because no Win 95 or 3dfx card, but it would run Doom, various Build engine games, I believe it also ran Quake 1 but I might be mistaken on that.

My dad and I put a 266 MHz Pentium MMX into it at some point because it came with something horrendously slow in stock trim. I remember once wiping it accidentally while fucking about, prompting a visit from the local tech guy and an undeletion of the C: (I have no idea how I did it but I did it somehow).


----------



## alex_theman (Dec 19, 2016)

Varg Did Nothing Wrong said:


> Packard Bell PC that came with Win 3.1 was my family's first computer, I guess you could say it was "mine". Came with all the hot shit at the time, lots of DOS games, Warcraft 2, Civ 2. I believe this was around 1995 or 1996 or so. Couldn't play many of the newer games coming out because no Win 95 or 3dfx card, but it would run Doom, various Build engine games, I believe it also ran Quake 1 but I might be mistaken on that.
> 
> My dad and I put a 266 MHz Pentium MMX into it at some point because it came with something horrendously slow in stock trim. I remember once wiping it accidentally while fucking about, prompting a visit from the local tech guy and an undeletion of the C: (I have no idea how I did it but I did it somehow).


Guessing that you somehow put in a Pentium 2 in there? Or did you just put in an AMD K6?


----------



## GS 281 (Dec 20, 2016)

Leading Technologies 286


----------



## RI 360 (Dec 20, 2016)

Some Acer desktop from the late 90's.


----------



## Varg Did Nothing Wrong (Dec 20, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> Guessing that you somehow put in a Pentium 2 in there? Or did you just put in an AMD K6?



Memory is super hazy. I think I might be misremembering and it was actually some other "MMX" CPU. I seem to remember "MMXtreme" as part of the branding (Googling gives me several results of Geocities and other pages wherein people say it's an upgrade for Packard Bells, so that might be right track).


----------



## alex_theman (Dec 20, 2016)

Varg Did Nothing Wrong said:


> Memory is super hazy. I think I might be misremembering and it was actually some other "MMX" CPU. I seem to remember "MMXtreme" as part of the branding (Googling gives me several results of Geocities and other pages wherein people say it's an upgrade for Packard Bells, so that might be right track).


Apparently its some kind of IDT Winchip based upgrade solution.


----------



## Varg Did Nothing Wrong (Dec 20, 2016)

alex_theman said:


> Apparently its some kind of IDT Winchip based upgrade solution.



Yeah, which based on what people are saying wasn't much of an upgrade at all. 

I do remember the PC itself having a 50mhz CPU stock, the MMX add-on supposedly bumped it to 200+ but IDK if it was really all that effective. 

I was like 6-8 years old when all this was taking place, so again, rose colored glasses and decades of blunt force trauma to the head have affected my memory on this.


----------



## hambeerlyingnreed (Jul 7, 2018)

First computer I used was the C64. My dad got it since he does taxes as a side job for fun, and he was able to write off part of the cost because he used it for work. I used it to play games. I don't remember much, since I was super young at the time.

The first computer that was just mine was a PC Junior. By the time I acquired it, it was the early/mid 90s. I used it mostly for writing stories and playing Sierra games.


----------



## Thiletonomics (Jul 7, 2018)

My first computer was a Librex laptop (I don't remember the model name), which had a 386 processor. I think my dad originally had it for business purposes. Being a 386, I used it for MS Paint and Notepad. Sadly, the hard drive on it seemingly went kaput after only a year, or not even a year, and I generally have good luck when it comes to hard drive longevity with computers that I use.


----------



## OneMillionRPM (Jul 7, 2018)

It was some old Compaq all-in-one that ran Windows 3.1, got it secondhand from my grandmother when I was like 6. Wasn't much to do besides play a few games, make stuff in Paintbrush, and mess around with this print-shop program that someone else had installed on there previously. I was going to see about putting more games on there, but the floppy drive broke not long after I got the idea to do so, and neither I nor anyone I knew had any idea how to fix it.


----------



## ForgedBlades (Jul 7, 2018)

First computer my family had was an Acer desktop that we bought in '95 or '96 from Best Buy. I remember that it was expensive as fuck, something like $4,000, and that it had a metric fuckton of bloatware, even by modern standards. We bought a Gateway desktop a couple years after that, and then my uncle who is a big computer guy built us a desktop a short while after that. 

The Gateway was weird, only because I remember we bought it at a Gateway store in our town, which as I remember, was basically like a modern day Apple or Microsoft store except with shitty Gateways. 

Over the last fifteen years I got pretty interested in computer hardware, and have been through probably two dozen laptops and desktops, including a few Macs, during that time. 

One cool thing is we had broadband back in like '99. We had a DSL line installed at our business to run credit cards and shit, and I remember how in awe I was not having to log in to AOL in order to access the internet. It's crazy to think about, as a lot of my friends were still on dial up well into the 2000s.


----------



## Carmilla (Jul 7, 2018)

Unfortunately, I don't really remember much.  All I know is that it was a Windows 3.1 desktop.  I only really used it to play some games.


----------



## Love And Terror (Jul 7, 2018)

A pizza oven that I thought to yell Ronald Reagan quotes at me.


----------



## DumbDosh (Jul 7, 2018)

It was this big fat blueberry bitch.


----------



## Kiwi Lime Pie (Jul 8, 2018)

Spoiler: First family computer



The first family computer was a Tandy Color Computer III with both an external floppy disk drive and a cassette drive. That Christmas, my uncle gave us a dot matrix printer as a gift.

I was starting high school at the time and my dad wanted something that would do word processing as opposed to using a typewriter. I used it for high school papers and the basketball team's statistics. He used it to make it easier to print and update the family genealogy.

The software I remember having was:

Deskmate: A crude Office-like program with word processing, databases, and spreadsheets (if not other stuff we never used). There was also a music program on it. I never created my own music, but I did play the included Christmas Music medley during Decembers.

VIP Writer: A more WYSIWYG-type word processor.
Having had brief units of BASIC programming in junior high, I also tinkered around with some of the BASIC on this system. The only major thing I did was take a program out of the manual that had the computer play _When the Saints go Marching in_ through the speaker.

Also, my dad not being computer literate at the time meant he thought all he had to do was buy the computer and it would do anything you wanted. He had no idea you had to buy software.

We eventually sold it to someone else and upgraded to something that was "IBM Compatable."





Spoiler: My first computer



The first computer I remember having was a 386 that my neighbor sold. I don't know what his day job was, but he built and repaired computers on the side. He did good work and we missed him once he stopped his side business, retired and moved away.

This was during my college years, so I needed my own dedicated computer for class papers and programming assignments.

At the time, most computers ran DOS 5 or 6 and Windows 3.x. This was no exception. I had a menu program that loaded at startup to allow me to choose between Windows or the number of DOS programs I still had and used. The software I can still recall having was:

PFS:First Choice (Office-like suite) followed by a then-current version of Office.
DOS Fax & Win Fax for sending and receiving basketball statistics.
Turbo Pascal and public domain versions of LISP and/or PROLOG for class assignments over the years.
PK Zip/Unzip
A shareware image viewer whose name escapes me.

COMit (for connecting to the relatively-new internet with my 9600 baud fax modem which was fast for the time).
Various shareware games, some of which I purchased because I enjoyed them that much. I'm half tempted to try running them under DOS Box to see if they can be played again.
F-PROT Antivirus, because it was free at the time (and I think one of my CS professors recommended it).
The only real story I have is why I had to get rid of it. One day, I decided to run a defrag on my hard drive while I was out for the day. I put a note on my desk 'Do not turn off'. Somehow, it fell on the floor and my mom didn't see it, saw my CPU lit up and turned it off thinking I left it on for no reason. Unfortunately, that trashed the hard drive bad enough, I had to get a new computer. Not having our neighbor's side business to turn to any more, I got a new HP desktop from Office Depot that I had to take back the next day because the internal modem was defective.



Edited to add links to some of the older software for which I could find information online.


----------



## Jet Fuel Johnny (Jul 8, 2018)

My first computer was a Vic-20 with a tape drive and 3 cartridge text adventures.

My dad won it in a poker game, told me that by the time I was his age, computers would be everywhere, so I might as well learn to use it.


----------



## Francis E. Dec Esc. (Jul 8, 2018)

Mine was a 25mhz 386SX, I think I got it in either 1990 or 1991. It was custom built by one of my dad's co-workers, and he cloned his hard drive onto it, giving me a bunch of games like Civilization, Red Baron, and Chuck Yeager's Air Combat for free. The first two games I bought for it were Wing Commander II and The Colonel's Bequest, both on 5" floppies. I kept the same massive tower case and upgraded it to a 486DX2/66 in 1994, added a SoundBlaster 16 and a CD-ROM drive in 1995, a Pentium 166 and 16mb memory in 1996, then added a 3DFX Voodoo 2 in 1997 for GLQuake. I finally got rid of it in 1999 when I started college and replaced it with a Pentium III PC and a shitty 450mhz Celeron laptop. I really wish I had kept it.


----------



## Van Darkholme (Jul 8, 2018)

(not counting the Amiga 500)
A Pentium 2 400 MHz with 64 MB RAM and an onboard Riva TNT we bought from Aldi (with monitor included) in 1999. Sold it to my school in 2001 or so.
I used that monitor till 2010 or so.


----------



## Coldgrip (Jul 8, 2018)

Spoiler: This


----------



## ArnoldPalmer (Jul 11, 2018)

Amiga a1200. Got it from me pops.


----------



## Hickbitch (Jul 11, 2018)

TRS-80 with Oregon Trail ofc


----------



## Guardian G.I. (Jul 11, 2018)

The first computer we had was a second-hand PC my dad got somewhere in late 1990s. I can't recall the specs, but it had a low-spec Pentium CPU, if I'm not mistaken, which was replaced by a cheap Celeron later. Also, it had a giant protective screen on its monitor and Russian key layout scratched on the keyboard with a pen.
It had MS-DOS with a local Norton Commander clone on top of it, then briefly Windows 3.1 and finally, Russian version of Windows 98 (pirated, of course).
I used it to play various DOS shit. The fact that we actually had a PC (!) hid from younger me the fact that we were actually very piss-poor back then.

Unlike you first worlders, we only got Internet in mid 2000s, when dial-up became less astronomically expensive. It was quickly replaced by basic ADSL around 2008-09.


----------



## Dysnomia (Jul 11, 2018)

It was a second hand computer from a charity. We qualified because my brother had open heart surgery. This was in 2000. At the time more people were starting to get computers and internet. Before that I only knew like two people that had internet in the 90s. It as a pretty amazing thing to have at the time given our income bracket. It was also pretty old but I didn't care.

It was a 1993 computer running Windows 95. It used to be used in a doctor's office. When they replaced it an employee was allowed to take it home and give it to her son, who put a porn dialer on there. We found it when we started the computer up.

It had a lot of storage space for the time. I can't remember how much. But it was more than you'd expect for something that old. Probably because it had been used for medical stuff. I think it was an HP.

It was the type with the horizontal tower with the reset button. And a neighbor told us to be careful with the button because they were prone to breaking. Well my sister broke it and I had to open everything up and pop it out. That was the first time I saw inside a computer.

We had AOL.

*dialup noises*

In 2003 I got a Compaq Presario. People would say "It's awful" but it was fine. I never had any issues with it. Plus it was a nicely discounted floor model since Sears was closing its electronics department. That Sears just closed up in the winter. Sears is dead. The final nail will be pounded into that coffin sooner than later.

In 2009 I replaced it with this computer I have now, an HP. Which needs to be replaced badly but that ain't happening any time soon. I do have a tablet. But I can't get used to mobile even though it has a mini bluetooth keyboard. So I don't use it a lot.


----------



## Dolphin Lundgren (Jul 11, 2018)

Are you really expecting me to remember what type of computer I had in 1998? It had dial-up. That's all I remember.
I'm not including the second hand piece of shit we got in 1996. It was useless.


----------



## LordofTendons (Jul 11, 2018)

Mine were all made from scratch until I got a Commodore 64. I grew up in a systems analyst's home so it's been a long strange trip.


----------



## John Titor (Jul 11, 2018)

I don't remember specifics but it was an old Compaq desktop from around the mid-90s I got from a relative. Barely had 300 MB of harddrive space and at one point I had it compressed not wondering if it was a bad idea or not.


----------



## DrJonesHat (Jul 11, 2018)

My very first computer was an Apple IIc. My dad wouldn't let us get a modem because he thought it would cost money to call BBSes (he insisted that calling people on his cell phone cost extra too, until I made him go to the AT&T and ask). When I was a freshman in high school, a family friend gave me his Commodore 64 with modem, and explained to my dad it wouldn't cost anything. He introduced me to BBSes and it was great. Then my first actual PC was a 386/25. My parents were delighted that computers were causing me to make to make friends (it was mostly to trade hardware and tips) because I was the weird loner kid up until that point. I scrounged up the parts to build another PC and ran a BBS on it from my sophomore year till graduation. I wrote about in another thread, but basically it was a "fuck the adults" thing where we could bitch about our teachers and how awful being a teenager was. I never got found out despite the adults at my school trying to find out who owned the phone number. Oh those were the days. I consider my 386 my first computer because that was the one I actually learned how they work on. 
I saved up and got a Soundblaster Pro, and even connected to packet BBSes (like regular BBSes but you used radio to connect instead of phone lines). Yeah, I had a ham radio license. Also, thanks to keeping questionable company, I learned how to make long distance calls that weren't charged to my number (I am aware now of how dumb that was, but I was 15). With that knowledge, I would call the big porn BBSes and the major warez sites and get all the 256 color dirty pictures I could download along with the latest games. Since it was risky to do what I did, I would usually do it once-twice a month, then upload my ill-gotten gains to local boards, which made me very popular among the horny teenaged male demographic, along with the dirty old man crowd. The games were also fun, but I just uploaded those.


----------



## CWCchange (Jul 12, 2018)

I don't remember the specs, but it was a custom-built white box hand-me-down from my dad running Windows 95, and in an InWin V-500 computer case, which was the Cadillac of cases back in the mid-1990s to early 2000s, when everything else was plastic shit with ugly curves.  The panel was a single three-sided piece which wrapped around and cut my hands many times as an elementary school little shit, especially upgrading it with a motherboard and that fucking cartridge Pentium II, all to run Windows ME...


----------



## EH 110 (Jul 12, 2018)

I don't remember, but it might have been a Packard Bell. I do remember I bought it at Montgomery Ward in 1997. I got it so I could sign up for AOL.


----------



## thejackal (Jul 12, 2018)

First computer was a 386, cannot remember the brand.  Might have been a packard bell.  It was running dos and I remember playing this corvette game on it and lemmings and also using the absolutely awful word perfect.

First "real" computer, aka not one dad brought home from the "free" pile at the office, was a Quantex Microsystems (an epic fail of a company in every single way with a funny wiki page) P-75 with 4mb ram and a 40mb hard drive.  It was a pretty nice computer until the hard drive failed about a week after we got it.  I had no idea it was the hard drive at the time, and nobody else did in my family either but it wouldn't start up and after my pops spent hours on the phone with them they finally agreed to have us ship it back and figure out what was wrong with it.

About a painful month later for us kids, they finally shipped it back, new hard drive, all our stuff gone.  That one failed within a month as well and they pretty much refused to do anything so my dad just called up Amex and finally when Amex threatened a chargeback they sent us a P-100 (!) system with a voodoo card and this one kept working for a few years.  Played Descent and Doom and Wolfenstein a lot on this machine and an awesome early 4x game called "Ascendancy" and of course C&C and Starcraft.

Interesting little aside, the first computer I built I spent like 1.5k on around 2000, it had a P4 1.7ghz, 256 mb RDRAM (whoops) and a 160gb hard drive with a GEFORCE 3 BOIZ, and I installed the absolutely amazing Windows Pro 2000 on it.   What an OS.  Played so much 1.6 on that thing in college.

I was interning as a techie at my school's computer lab and I built it and I went to turn it on and absolutely nothing happened.  My instructor looked at it with me and we put in another PSU and still nothing and things looked dire until one day, in what must have been one of the earliest tech forums out there, I googled (dogpiled?) my build specs, and a random user on some forum posted that using the exact same case combo and mobo I had chosen, that you had to physically bend one of the posts on the case as it was shorting that particular board.

So I go grab a pair of plyers, bend the case, and BOOM it fires on.  Dude I was so happy.  Great moment.  

Ok, that's enough autism for today.


----------



## James Howlett (Jul 12, 2018)

Cool thread.

I can't remeber if it was a C64 or a Jaguar (that was an early gaming console, right?)

After that, we got some 2 ton IBM tower in like 92 or 93. It was cool, my Dad brought home floppy disks (the big ones that were actually floppy) that had games on them and he taught me how to load my own games. This was DOS era, and I'm really grateful because I love computer games to this day, but also because I went into kindergarten and grade school with some skills that gave me a huge advantage (reading, writing, typing, computers, etc.)

My favorite early computer was an Acer Aspire, in emerald green with Windows 95 on it. Windows 95 was so fucking cool, and the games that it came preloaded with really shaped me. (I have a tattoo from Tyrian, or Tyrian2000 as it is now. Good game on GOG if you're interested)

Commander keen, Jane of the jungle, pitfall...good shit. Thanks OP for the nostalgia trip.


----------



## Pepito The Cat (Jul 12, 2018)

IBM XT 8086 clone with 1Mb of RAM, Hercules Monochrome videocard on a yellow tint monitor. One floppy disk (low density) and no hard drive.

Those weren't the days.


----------



## Trilby (Jul 12, 2018)

I guess for me, at least on a family level, it was the C64, which my older brother simply had dominated the whole time on, so I barely got more than a few times on a game or program we had.  Since we had Print Shop, my brother constantly made stuff with it, letterheads, banners, everything!  At one point, I wanted an Amiga (the 500) but ended up with an Atari XE I didn't do much on besides games.  It just wasn't what I asked for anyway.  It was a long while until we finally got a Windows PC sometime in the late 90's/early 2000's.  At first it was a small form-factor Gateway with Windows ME but then I got a custom-built model with a cracked version of XP on it my brother put together.  That became my PC for a good number of years until that blew out, then I used a laptop with Win 7 on it until a few years back when I finally got my current set-up, an Asus middle-of-the-road model with a nice GTX-1050ti graphics card installed.


----------



## AlmightyMagichan (Jul 13, 2018)

When I was younger my parents got our first computer. I don't remember what it was, only that the thing ran MS DOS. It pissed me off because pretty much every computer game at the time needed windows 95. 

Eventually they upgraded, but refused to get rid of the old one. By the time it was over 20 years old they told me to donate it to the good will shop. I tried to explain to them that nobody wants old computers, not even dirt poor people. Then they told me to give it to my friend who liked building computers so he could salvage it for parts. I tried to explain that computers don't exactly work that way, but they could not comprehend. 

I ended up throwing it in a ditch somewhere. Good bye first computer.


----------



## FierceBrosnan (Jul 13, 2018)

I fondly remember our first PC. An old ass Packard Bell 486 DX2. Had no real storage space or RAM to speak of, couldn't run Duke Nukem at lowest settings, and Windows 3.1 was a bigger mess than 98, ME, and Vista could have ever hoped to be. But lord know I loved that machine and my cataloged stack of 1.44mb floppies filled to the brim with porn.


----------



## Crunchy Leaf (Jul 13, 2018)

Windows 95...actually my parents' computer, but it was in my room, so it became mine. The CRT monitor it came with still works. Computer is probably in the attic. My dad is bad at throwing things out, which is why we still have an HP-150 and a TI-99 in our house. 

The first computer that was really mine was an awful eMachine running Windows XP. There's a reason they went out of business.


----------



## SadClownMan (Jul 13, 2018)

The first computer that my family got, was the Sony vaio pcv 90. I remember it being fairly easy to use but not much else from that. The first personal computer I owned was a Panasonic cf 25 that my uncle handed me down, I think the damn thing still works, albeit a lot slower compared to today's computers


----------



## Some JERK (Jul 13, 2018)

Mason Verger said:


> View attachment 146327  My parents got this around 176BCE. Pretty basic, but we never missed a sacrifice to an eclipse. Wouldn't run Windows since we lived in a cave.


The real question is, did you have the model with the dovetailed B1 gear, or the upgraded crossed-out model?


----------



## Trilby (Jul 13, 2018)

AlmightyMagichan said:


> When I was younger my parents got our first computer. I don't remember what it was, only that the thing ran MS DOS. It pissed me off because pretty much every computer game at the time needed windows 95.
> 
> Eventually they upgraded, but refused to get rid of the old one. By the time it was over 20 years old they told me to donate it to the good will shop. I tried to explain to them that nobody wants old computers, not even dirt poor people. Then they told me to give it to my friend who liked building computers so he could salvage it for parts. I tried to explain that computers don't exactly work that way, but they could not comprehend.
> 
> I ended up throwing it in a ditch somewhere. Good bye first computer.


Damn.  They sound almost like my folks when it comes to technology.  My dad still asks me to pay his bills online for him since he still can't quite figure it out.


----------



## DrJonesHat (Jul 13, 2018)

FierceBrosnan said:


> I fondly remember our first PC. An old ass Packard Bell 486 DX2. Had no real storage space or RAM to speak of, couldn't run Duke Nukem at lowest settings, and Windows 3.1 was a bigger mess than 98, ME, and Vista could have ever hoped to be. But lord know I loved that machine and my cataloged stack of 1.44mb floppies filled to the brim with porn.


I had an entire 40MB hard drive filled with porn. Since you said it was a 486 I'm guessing this was around the early to mid-nineties? If so, did you call BBSes for your porn where you could only download one image at a time and had no idea what you were getting until it was done, which took like 30 minutes? Or did you miss that?


----------



## FierceBrosnan (Jul 13, 2018)

DrJonesHat said:


> I had an entire 40MB hard drive filled with porn. Since you said it was a 486 I'm guessing this was around the early to mid-nineties? If so, did you call BBSes for your porn where you could only download one image at a time and had no idea what you were getting until it was done, which took like 30 minutes? Or did you miss that?


BBSs and lots of Attilavista searches back in 93/94. There was nothing more enraging than getting a phone call right before the page loaded a full tiddy and then having to clear the cache and try to load the image again. The early AOL days were truly an experience.


----------



## DrJonesHat (Jul 13, 2018)

FierceBrosnan said:


> BBSs and lots of Attilavista searches back in 93/94. There was nothing more enraging than getting a phone call right before the page loaded a full tiddy and then having to clear the cache and try to load the image again. The early AOL days were truly an experience.


Remember having to download your messages on BBS echos because you'd time out and get disconnected if you read them online?


----------



## FierceBrosnan (Jul 13, 2018)

DrJonesHat said:


> Remember having to download your messages on BBS echos because you'd time out and get disconnected if you read them online?


Right? FFS I was 13 and had the attention span of a gnat no way I was going to wait all day for that shit to finally download.


----------



## DrJonesHat (Jul 13, 2018)

I was 17 and had a similar attention span. And the idea that you could do more than one thing on a computer at a time was seriously weird. When Windows 95 came out, I was amazed.


----------



## Very Clever Nickname (Jul 13, 2018)

Think mine was a windows 98 Dell that my Dad gave me after he got a new PC. We had a windows ME computer at one point too, piece of shit.


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Jul 13, 2018)

A TI-83 graphing calculator.

It was needed for school.



Spoiler



It still works.


----------



## Elysian (Jul 14, 2018)

My first computer was an MSi Wind U100 netbook I got when I was 11. It ran Windows XP and blue screened when I tried to run Portal on it at the lowest graphics settings - the only PC game I had that would run on it besides a few shitty built in ones was The Sims 1. It had K9 Web Protection, a parental web filter so strict it at one point started filtering Google for being a search engine and only let me on Youtube and the weeb forums I liked because I whined about it to my dad for like 6 months. This was a dark, dark time where the only porn I could access came from the technological powerhouse that was the Nintendo DSi web browser. I eventually gave up on that first netbook after a few years when the battery died of old age and one of the hinges broke after it fell off my bed.


----------



## toilet_rainbow (Jul 14, 2018)

Dude, we got a Dell!

I don't remember much else about it save that it was a desktop, ran XP, and it lasted us five or six years before one too many Limewire downloads killed it for good.

My first laptop was a Gateway that ran on Vista and lasted four or five years. Just found it the other day. Great memories on that thing.


----------



## Dial M for Misgender (Jul 14, 2018)

First computers I used were 386/486s, first computer I owned was a mac plus.


----------



## laoyang (Jul 15, 2018)

I think the very first computer I had at home was a Macintosh from the 90's, it was meant to be shared by me and my older sister but I didn't care for computers back then (I was only like 7) so my sister ended up using it most of the time. I think the very first computer that I got that was meant for me and me alone was a Dell laptop from like 2001 which I mostly used to do schoolwork, browse NewGrounds and message boards, and look at porn.

When I got into PC Gaming I found it didn't work really well with the games I installed on it (Half-Life 1, Quake 2, etc) but the desktop PC my parents used for work incidentally had good specs for those games, so my parents and I traded, and ever since then I've never had a laptop as my main computer.


----------



## DrJonesHat (Jul 17, 2018)

I am shocked, SHOCKED I say, to discover a bastion of fine upstanding people like all of you look at porn. Get me a tumbler of gin and a fainting couch post haste!


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jul 17, 2018)

I had a C64, an Amstrad MegaPC and a massive windows 3.1 Amstrad beast. Both were scrapped as the c64 quit working and the Amstrad never got used. As a collector nowadays I kickyself every time I'm made to remember that I sacrificed those machines to the bin men. The MegaPC is a rare thing these days. Long story short it's a DOS PC with a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) built in.


----------



## Derped223 (Jul 18, 2018)

An HP pavilion desktop desktop similar to this photo that my grandma gave me.


----------



## KemChy (Jul 18, 2018)

not sure about the brand, i think it was something in german but i don't know german so it could be anything. it was bought in 1998 and had windows 98 on it. it had a 128mb graphics card and 256mb of ram. don't remember the processor. i used it until 2011. when it died i put it in the basement and it's standing there to this day. however i used the desktop (fat white desktop like in the picture above me) for a couple more months before it died too.


----------



## OG 666 (Jul 18, 2018)

Some shitty Gateway PC that I had to share with my siblings. We had many, many fights over whose turn it was to use the computer. I mainly remember that I really loved playing the Encarta Encyclopedia trivia game.


----------



## KemChy (Jul 19, 2018)

i played a few small kids minigames but the first game i remember playing for real was max payne.


----------



## AF 802 (Jul 19, 2018)

First computer I used was a piece of shit Hewlett-Packard with Windows 3.1. Broke about a year after I started using it, went to a Windows 98 PC after that.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jul 19, 2018)

While we're all jizzing about how good computers were back in the day I'm just going to leave this picture of my desk as of 9.00AM this morning right here:




I realize my mouse pad is gross.


----------



## Derp Potato (Jul 19, 2018)

First computer? Shit, son.

I'm not that old, but it was either a basic bitch P3 or very very early P4 that I used to play the first Call of Duty on the PC with. Literally did every little thing I could to ilk out the slightest bit of an improvement. I'd delete every single file and folder I could find that was empty or useless. I'd do my best to BIOS OC the CPU. I even would take the side panel off and have a desk fan blowing in to it.

Just to get some sort of  an edge during multiplayer, I'd lower the graphics to barely something decent just for max FPS.

I was stuck with that PC for years. From the time I first started playing CoD to when I graduated. Always dreamt of building my own PC.

Didn't build it until maybe 6 years ago. FX-6300 and other crazy cheap shit, but I had no knowledge about the newest PC market. Only recently have I actually built a decent enough rig, but last gen Intel with the newest AMD GPU. I mainly did everything just for a black and white build with no LEDs.


----------



## Monsieur Guillotine (Jul 19, 2018)

My first computer ever was a Compaq Presario CDS510 that we got from Radio Shack (remember Radio Shack?).






It had Windows 3.1 with a Compaq program called "TabWorks". I got the computer for the purpose of playing games, but I ended up poking through all the system files more often than not, which led to my interest in programming and IT.

The only games I really played in the actual Windows environment were Gizmos and Gadgets, The Incredible Machine, and SimTower. All of my other games were DOS games, and this computer had the benefit(?) of not needing a "turbo" button in order to play them. It was just that fast!

The only story I can really think of was when I got Sim City 2000. I was so excited to play it. I got it home, installed it, and... I didn't have enough RAM. I didn't know what RAM was at age 7 or 8, and ended up trying to delete files in order to "make more RAM". Finally we called a tech company and they gave us a RAM upgrade. 16 MB for like $106 or something. My grandpa spent over 100 dollars so I could play Sim City 2000. 

It's still somewhere in my grandma's basement, probably collecting dust.


----------



## The Captain (Jul 19, 2018)

Some no name POS that barely ran Windows 98, Pentium 1, 32mb RAM, 28.8k modem and 500mb HDD. My mother bought it severely overpriced from a family "friend" who told her it was state of the art despite me at 12 telling her it was a complete ripoff and if she was going to blow $500 on a computer I could find something much better.

I basically used it to play Command and Conquer Red Alert and go on AIM.

Kept it (barely) running until 2002 when a family member bought some IBM with a Celeron for me.


----------



## Capsaicin Addict (Jul 19, 2018)

Here's one for you. This was my father's work computer, but it was really the first one I ever did regular work or play on:

http://oldcomputers.net/zenith-z-171.html

This thing came with an integrated 1200-baud modem, which was JUST enough to access local BBSes. I downloaded a number of games (no pr0n though) through them. Also played a lot of the old BBS 'door' games (including a couple pornographic ones; yeah, I'm just as degenerate as the rest of you lot).

God, so many memories of Starflight, Moria, or dialing up BBSes at night...


----------



## cornucopia (Jul 20, 2018)

i think the first computer i went on was this clunky, slow laptop that my family shared, i'd sit on there and play cool math games and shit like that all day when i was little


----------



## Webby's Boyfriend (Aug 18, 2018)

It was a notebook from the late 90s that I got in 2003 from my parents when I was eight years old.


----------



## Ebonic Tutor (Aug 18, 2018)

A 60MHz Pentium 1 Packard Bell computer that could barely run Quake at the lowest resolution.


----------



## Sir Auroras (Aug 18, 2018)

Derped223 said:


> View attachment 498785
> An HP pavilion desktop desktop similar to this photo that my grandma gave me.


Well fuck, I think I had the same one for my first too.


----------



## Super Collie (Aug 19, 2018)

I financed a 386 Packard Bell desktop computer with the help of my parents when I was a senior in high school. It ran Windows 3.1 and I vaguely remember having a hard time getting dial-up internet to work with it. I paid for it with money I had made working summer jobs. Kept it until around 1996 or 1997 or something, I just remember the second computer I purchased was Windows 98. The 386 went into the garage for a few years and around the turn of the millennium I sold it off to someone. Sorta wish I didn't, but I wouldn't have had the room for it anyways. Not with all the moving around I did after college.


----------

