Did you build it yourself? What OS did you use? Did you have internet access?

Feel free to outline the component brand names and model (if you remember them) and let us know if you still have access to the computer.

This was in Jan 1997. It was running Windows 95 (Windows 98 wasn’t released yet). No internet (we got dialup later in the year; maybe in the late summer). It was built by my parent’s colleague (company system admin), I was too young to build my own PC.

*Pentium I 133 MHz *1.5 GB HDD *CD-ROM Drive *FDD *Sound Blaster 32 (remember getting Sound Blaster Live! In the next build). *32 MB RAM *S3 ViRGE 325 (4 MB RAM if I remember correctly).

I think the colleague who built it sold it off when we got a new build.

  • coaxil@lemm.ee
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    1 hour ago

    First few proper ones I knew what what going on with where this

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC472

    And a bunch of Atari st machines!! God the Atari stuff was glorious for the time!!!

    But before that had the older amstrad and a Hitachi peach iirc, but I was too young to really know what was what with those.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      58 minutes ago

      640×200 pixels with 2 colours

      Did you ever use this mode?

      By the time I got into computing (96), I think 800x600 with at least 16K colours was relatively common.

      I am not even sure what you would use 640x200 with two colours.

  • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 hours ago

    Commodore VIC20 first, with the cassette deck and memory expansion card. I can’t remember now what size the expansion was, but we couldn’t play some games without it.

    My first proper PC was an Advent 486 SX25, with either one or two megabytes of memory on board. My brother convinced our parents that it would be good for school work, but I added a single speed CD reader and a generic sound card to it and got Doom for my birthday.

    That became my PC, so I upgraded the RAM to 4MB and the CD drive to a blisteringly fast quad speed! Crazy, I know :o

    I’ve actually got it at home at the moment, but don’t know if it works. It was in my parent’s attic when there was a leak near it, so I’ve brought it here to let it dry for a while before I risk doing anything with it :)

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    7 hours ago

    Good question, I don’t know! This was around 1985-ish

    It was a 30 kg (60 odd pounds) beast, white, with built in 4-6 inch black /green monitor and keyboard and it used round small (about 2 inch diameter) cassettes to load data from, hidden under a black panel. It had 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, and I played games with it…there was chess, racing, and some more.

    I remember having to put in the cassettes in a certain way, then press a thumb switch to make it load the boot program which would give me a menu from which I could select games to play.

    My dad brought it home one day, some insurance company dumped them en-masse.

    Anybody who might know from that description what machine it was?

  • billwashere@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Let’s see if you can guess what this was….

    Operating system EOS, OS-7, CP/M, TDOS

    CPU Zilog Z80A @ 3.58 MHz

    Memory 64 KB RAM 16 KB VRAM

    This was in early 1984

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      3 hours ago

      A Tandy device (guessing without doing a web search)?

      I started using computers around 95/96. Our consulting professor did show us an example of Tandy laptop back when I was doing a masters degree in the 2010s.

  • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    So long ago. I think the first was an Apple 11e with an external 256K floppy drive that loaded Basic OS every time computer was turned on? 1984 or 1985?

  • Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    486 dx2 66

    Worked for a year doing odd jobs to afford it (was a teenager). Bought it at a computer show. Never booted, so I had to learn how to fix it.

    This was a theme. First car was a POS, so I had to learn how to fix it, too.

  • infinitevalence@discuss.online
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    2 days ago
    • MOS Tech 6510
    • 64KB RAM
    • MSD SD-1 5.25" floppy drive

    It is sitting in my office, and still works though I need to replace the Power Supply as the OG one is known for killing C64’s.

      • infinitevalence@discuss.online
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        2 days ago

        I wish I still had my old computers. I am glad this one survived. I miss my Mac plus and my gateway2000 486. I also wish I still had my Athlon 2500 xp-m or my old DFI lanparty setup.

        So much computer history and overclocking.

  • Majorllama@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    First computer I ever used was probably some crusty old gateway with windows 95.

    I pretty much only had access to my parents old desktop computers until I hit highschool when they bought me some dell POS that could barely run cs 1.6 in windowed mode.

    First PC I built myself was a 770 and some first or second gen i7 that my buddy sold me for 20 bucks lol.

    Been building my own computer every few years since. I am currently on a 3080 and i7 10700k that I have overclocked on all cores to 5.2ghz.

    I’ll probably build a new system in a year or two when the 6000 series cards drop. I am foolishly hoping that Nvidia has some change of heart about pricing by then lol

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      CS 1.6 in windowed mode sounds awful.

      Jensen and Co are not going to have a change of heart about anything. Willing to bet good money on this. :)

      • Majorllama@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I do not miss my barely 30fps windowed mode laptop gaming life haha

        Yeah it’s really disappointing honestly. AMD cards just don’t have the raw performance and the it seems even though Intel’s second gen cards were doing alright they don’t want to keep going down that path which sucks. Nvidia needs proper competition and amd hasn’t been giving them a run for performance in a long time now.

        • Rekall Incorporated@lemm.eeM
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          1 day ago

          At one point I was also reliant on a gaming laptop, (thankfully 17 inch and with a dGPU), but desktops (with nice ~30 inch monitors) are just so much better.

          Both AMD and Intel want to be in the position Nvidia is in right now. ~3 players is not enough for a true free market.

  • TheRagingGeek@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Atari 800 so 6502 1.8 mhz 8k ram cartridge and 5 1/4 floppy. That was my first family computer, the first computer I bought with my own money was a dell T450 Pentium 3 450mhz and an ATI dedicated 3d accelerator card and a 19" Trinitron monitor that I loved to degauss for that satisfying bong noise

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      What year was this for the Atari 800?

      The Pentium 1 build I described was on the parents money of course since I was a pre-teen. 🤣

  • dwindling7373@feddit.it
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    2 days ago

    Macintosh 512k.

    One day my dad just came home with one of those because the company was swapping them out. I couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7 years old.

    Fun fact: I grew up to be a huge Apple hater. Despite being at the PC constantly ever since I’ve never got in the habit of typing with all my fingers.

    So:

    a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor at clock speed 7.8336 MHz

    512 KB of RAM

    512 × 342 pixels

    The Hard Disk was a whopping: 0 Tbyte. It had none, instead you had a system floppy. 400kb.

    But I had a plugin to ad an additional floppy that stored multiple softwares (and a incredibly huge library of videogames).

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      Never got a chance to use systems without an HDD. Parents office had older 486 computers with Win 3.11 (circa 96), but they definitely had HDD.

      I would play around on they while waiting for mom to finish work.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    I don’t actually remember the models, just the story. This was around 2010.

    My first job, I saved every penny I’d made working with my dad over the summer installing wood-pellet and solar heating systems in Australia.

    Took that to my local computer shop and picked out a laptop I’d had my eye on for the whole year (I don’t even remember the brand on this one tbh, too long ago for my crap memory). It was the last one they had of that model; so they had to take the display unit, format it, and give me that. Halfway through that process they shut it down and handed it to me; said I could turn it on at home and it would finish re-installing windows and all would be good. (spoiler, no it was not)

    When I got it home, it refused to start at all. After a bunch of screwing around (pretty new to computers, didn’t really know what I was doing and had no one with tech experience around me) I took it back to the store and was told it had corrupted the recovery partition it was re-installing windows from and would have to be sent to the manufacturer to be fixed.

    From there we decided to trade it with a slightly cheaper HP laptop (HP Pavilion I think? One of their models with a fingerprint scanner and dual graphics) that became my gaming machine for the next like 7 years. Plus because of this being the shops screwup: they gave me a 1tb usb drive, a laptop bag, and a random wifi router all for free. That drive saved me soo many times holding important data while I screwed up the OS and reinstalled crap while I experimented and learned. Then the router got DDWRT flashed to it and became a wifi client bridge for connecting wired clients to wifi during LAN parties. That poor laptop went through hell; being the testbed and primary machine for my teenage shenanigans, but it held up pretty well considering. Stripping it apart once a year or so to clean all the dust out and refresh the factory thermal paste helped quite a bit.

    A fond memories. It all works out in the end.

    Eventually I replaced that laptop with a custom built rig housing an i7-8700k and an RTX3080 that now hosts 30ish docker services and serves media to friends+family ~12 solid hours a day on average.

    Thanks for comming on my walk down nostalgia lane.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      Sounds pretty painful for your first purchase with your own money (that’s a special kind of experience), but it sounds like you got a good deal on the trade-in. 😄

  • Dem Bosain@midwest.social
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    2 days ago

    8088, 10Mhz. But if I pushed the button it would slow down to 8Mhz. That made Red Baron easier to control.

    640kb RAM. Because nobody should ever need more than that.

    2x 360kb floppy drives (5 1/4"). Eventually upgraded with a 40 Mb hard drive. The salesman said that was so big we’d never fill it up.

    CGA graphics. I eventually upgraded this to a used ATI Wonder EGA card. That let me use my RGB monitor in interlaced 640x350 graphics mode. The flickering just proved I wasn’t epileptic.

    MS-DOS 3.3. It also had a board called Trackstar, that was an Apple IIe. I was taking classes at school at the time, and the school used Apple.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      2x 360kb floppy drives (5 1/4"). Eventually upgraded with a 40 Mb hard drive. The salesman said that was so big we’d never fill it up.

      This was before my time (FDDs were on their last legs by 1997), but I am guessing at one point dual FDDs was a good thing to have.

      The salesman’s pitch sounds so quaint in retrospective.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Store bought, 6510 1.023 MHz CPU, 64KB RAM, VIC2 video with shared memory, SID 3 voice sound, Single 160KB Floppy, BASIC 2.0 OS

    and let us know if you still have access to the computer.

    I do! I used it for about an hour just two weeks ago.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      Nice! I wish I had my second PC for a retro Win98 rig. The first one I described was cool, but I think the second one would be a better fit for real world retro use).

      64 KB RAM sounds comically low even though I am aware of computing in the 80s/70s.