QOTW: What sparked your interest in PCs?

[Phage]

Then This



Inevitably

[Ferral]

For me it's not the fact that I love the old Commodore 64 which essentially was an all in one PC back in the day.

I remember the guy I was working for was well into PC Games like Baldurs Gate and I had played Doom on LAN at University. Then Unreal Tournament, American McGees Alice, Nocturne and loads of other games came out that weren't available on N64 or PS1 so I bought some second hand bits and cobbled a basic machine with S3 Graphics and an Intel Celeron and went from there

[DanceswithUnix]

In a word, "Linux"

I was forced to use PCs as a work tool with 8086 and 286 machines running DOS 3.x and they were beyond awful. I wouldn't have one in the house, and then I found out that if I had a 386 I could run a Unix clone, and I had to have one. Running Doom later was a clincher, and for years ID games drove my upgrade cycle.

I credit the TI-59, which introduced me to the idea that you can program stuff and save it.

Many similarities there to me, I went TI59 -> TRS80 -> Dragon 32 -> Atari ST -> Atari TT -> PC

Never had an Amiga, really should get one one day

[peterb]

Then This

XTREE Gold - I'd forgotten about that - I had that on a Compaq laptop with a huge 10 Mb disc and a whopping 2Mb of ram - it was DOS6.2 and I ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it - and had XTREE gold! (I splashed out and had. 1200 baud modem built in too )

[Cr@ig]

From my Grandfather, amazing man he was.

He worked for IBM and GCHQ as a spy on the Russians, during the Cold War.

He built my first computer, rebuilt the zx80 into a full qwerty keyboard, and upgraded the ram to 16KB. I was the coolest kid on the street, with screeching sound of the tape deck loading my games.

Oh the joy of watching that single pixel make its way down that old black and white CRT monitor, i will never forget.

Happy days

[mojothejester]

I played Doom 95 and GTA on my dad's old pentium p5 or p6 pc. Pretty sure it was a p6, I remember seeing 266mhz on bootup... Think I was about 11 or 12

[elites2012]

any company that is cheaper than intel that can do the same thing as intel. they are price gouging on the entire "lake" line. charging idiots $100 to $more than what it is really worth, for a 15% difference?

[FromUSA]

Played Wold of Warcraft for years on my 27" iMacs. But over time Apple gave up caring about performance and ran on looks and how thin they could make products. So I watched Youtube channels like Paul's Hardware and Jayz2Cents and started planning a build. Now I just use Apple products for fun and game with a Windows 10 machine.

[Rubarb]

Built my forst pc peice by peice payday by payday and remember having to wait 2 weeks to buy 4mb of ram
This was a dx66 486 machine that ran doom like a boss, it was doom that made me build and get into pc's at firs well that and shareware .

Never gone back to a console since

[QuorTek]

The ability to put something together as well as being able to upgrade whichever over time and replace items my firs actual PC was a 386SX 16Mhz with a whole 1mb of ram and oddly enough 256kb GFX and VGA monitor it had 90MB HDD, before that the classic C64, I still have that one as well.

The old days of joy and fun and actual quality games I do miss, a lot of garbage today that more or less is trying to sell us another skin or make us broke in micro transistions.

[trillo_del_diavolo]

Mostly games. Building PCs was fun, too, so much that I thought it would be my bread and butter, but over the years I became increasingly disillusioned with IT in general. I still like to read HEXUS and other technology sites, learned a few programming languages to fend for myself when needed, learned Linux/UNIX, but I would never do any of that for a living. Trying to get into gaming again, I played a few times, then left them in a corner, like a toy I've outgrown. I guess I don't need to be entertained anymore.

[pcolvin00]

Mine started with BBCs and I was the only person in primary school (including the teachers) who could change the toners in the apple laser printer!

[sYs]

Games.
Games.
Games.

and when things broke down - there was no one to help me out - so i had to figure stuff out myself. Which was pretty neat - as it was the basis of how i learned reading and writing in English. Still remember how nervous i was once i opened my first pc. Smell helped me diagnose that the cpu was totally cooked.

[cheesemp]

Tie fighter. I broke my parents PC trying to optimise DOS to run it (640K fun!). Learn a lot fixing that and was hooked. Had exposure prior to this (z81, c64 etc) but this opened my eyes.

[Scooshie]

Airwolf on the Amstrad, nothing like waiting 5 mins for a game to load off of a tape... ah, those were the days

[big_hairy_rob]

Clearly games. Despite many previous consoles, A combination of Civilization and Red Alert took my curiosity to a dangerous obsession...