What was your first computer? - And why did you get it? (and more autistic details that almost no one would care about)

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 (wow!) 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.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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
 
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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.
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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.
 
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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.
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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?
 
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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?
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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.
 
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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.
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Remember having to download your messages on BBS echos because you'd time out and get disconnected if you read them online?
 
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DrJonesHat said:
Remember having to download your messages on BBS echos because you'd time out and get disconnected if you read them online?
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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.
 
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.
 
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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.
 
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.
 
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