QOTW: What was the first PC you built/purchased?

[Century22]

First computer was a TRS-80 From Radio Shack ! 5k memory. It used a cassette tape player to load programs. First built PC had a Tyan Tomcat motherboard. Eventually added 2 processors. 3.2GB hard drive , 3MB video card.

[Century22]

Quantum Fireball hard drive. The computer still runs !

[Homey]

My first attempt kinda shocked myself - after being left disabled losing big business and charity work funds in riot covered up by police I found relying on the ole piece of garbage dell was asking too much. After all I'd only gone to it once every other or few days.
So I got hold of a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 and a Phenom II x6 1050 chippy
other than intermittently upgrading it to FX8350 CPU, swapping to a bigger chassis and so on
it's STILL performing exceptionally well and as I don't do gaming the functionality and performance are very acceptable rocking out 128TB of storage drives
Even compared to my follow up prime build of AsRock Z87 Extreme11/ac with 17 4960 160TB n rising

my third attempt, which I refer to as my money down the drain or TURD attempt was a total piece of poop ASUS X99 Deluxe given endless run around by ASUS as they KNEW theyd forced it to market early with known faults then chose to deny and refuse to repair or replace... long delays and price fixing on ram modules by ebuyer and overconners, where I was one of the first to reserve only for them to take the money then refund the next day stating no stock and relisting the GSkills they had at a 50% mark up..adding more months to the build - money down the drain Asus NEVER again

so my next build will most assuredly NOT be ASUS and likely to replace the X99 garbage with AM4 3950 and as I'm drooling at the thought of the gigglybite TRX40 Aorus Xtreme to go with it ...well got a long way to go funds-wise

[tygrus]

Osborne XT (4.77MHz with 8MHz turbo), 640KB RAM, 20MB Connor 5.25" HDD (size of 2 slots), maybe CGA graphics (4bit color), 360KB 5.25" floppy. Borland Sprint 1.0 (better than early MS Word for DOS), Printmaster ?something? (eg. 128x64 pixel monochrome images), 9pin dotmatrix printer, monotone sound (like beeps). Atleast two of the programs we added by typing what was in a magazine/book. No network, no internet. It had a menu system based on DOS batch programs (*.BAT) witch could be customised and added to. Just 1 PC to share between 2 adults and 4 children (eg. writing text for school assignments, title pages for exercise books, posters, cards).

[Aardvark]

Sinclair ZX81, closely followed by a BBC Micro - moved over to Windows pcs in the early 90s. I built my first pc in 2005 using an AMD Athlon 64 CPU

[Bagpuss]

July '98

Pentium II 333Mhz
12Gb HD
64Mb RAM
ATI Rage Pro (4Mb)
3dFX Voodoo 1 (6Mb)

£1500 'ish

[QuorTek]

Very very first PC I could pay with my own money as a kid.... it was a custom build 486 DX100MHz, it had 1mb VGA card, and 8mb ram 500mb HDD I had a remarkable soundcard though I bought a Sound Blaster AWE32 with it, I never regretted that as it followed into my later on AMD-K6-2 350MHz PC, which I had a Matrox G200 + Voodoo2 card in and 2GB HDD.

If rolling back with first actual PCs then it was an old 386SX 16mhz, it had 4mb ram, which was whooping alot and 90mb HDD, the GFX was a 512kb something I dunno... it had a turbo button too.. so could switch from 8mhz and 16mhz.. I had a Disney Soundsource sound to it, which really had no use other than 2 games ever.... it ran VGA colors

Going further back... inherited an C64, and actually still got it, its the first model too and in mint condition still... it had 1MHz CPU and 64kb ram, I never got to play with the tape drive though, but had an actual 5.25 disk station to it.... it gave me some of my best and most iconic memories ever that thing, and depending on gametype, then it is always gameplay over looks, it is what it taught me and it is what I brought with me to the future.... also is why I dislike so many of them AAA titles.. as they are not well built solid games... serial produced... poorly optimized as having used to many shortcuts creating them... most games today could probably run 4K well in a decent GFX card, if the developers actually had spendt the time actually programming their game and optimizing it, a problem to it, is no standards is set... and if we went back to that again... that is what probably could make games great again.

[Avernus]

A massive 386 system round about 89. Can't remember the make but had a sparkle graphics card, 20mb scsi drive and 16mb of ram. spent the next few years collecting and piecing bits together from other systems until I got my first 486 in the early 90's. Using Dos 22 with X-tree gold was a time I'll never forget. Fun times.

[malcmacq]

Went through 4 computers in the first half of the eighties. Lead off with an IBM PC with 8086 processor, 64K RAM, 2 - 5-1/4" Floppy Drives. Followed that up with an IBM PC XT with 128K RAM & a 10MB HDD, then an IBM PC AT with a 20MB HDD, and a Compaq 80286 'Portable'. Things settled down somewhat towards the end of the eighties and since then have been on about a 3-year acquisition cycle.

[Quartz]

It was a Tiny (remember them?) 80286 PC.

However, my first computer was a ZX81.

[nar53]

T was definitely a 286, With huge (physically) ram cards but with almost no ram & it was running win 3.1 This was 25yrs + ago & thats pretty much all I can remember. Oh and a 5.1/4 Floppy drive.

[dtomsen]

Olivetti Modulo PC with i486DX2 66/33 Mhz, 4 MB Ram, 40 MB Hard Disk and Olivetti 14” CRT color monitor.
Bought new in 1992 and in use until 1999 (!)
Cost: (PC) 7,999 DKK ~ 1,200 USD, (Monitor) 2,999 DKK ~ 450 USD
The thing was fanless and ran Windoes 3.1 up to Win 95.

I had Commodore VIC-20 (really barebone) -> Amstrad CPC464 (bloody awful) -> Commodore Amiga 500 (bloody brilliant) before that

[dtomsen]

Sinclair ZX81, closely followed by a BBC Micro - moved over to Windows pcs in the early 90s. I built my first pc in 2005 using an AMD Athlon 64 CPU

I remember playing the original Elite game on that BBC Micro. It was very impressive at that time.

[SHSPVR]

My first PC was a PCjr

[zaph0d]

386 SX 20 (oc to 33), 4mb (1mb 30 pin simms), 200mb hdd, 1.44 3.5", 1.2mb 5.25", 2 game ports (no sound), external 2x cdrom on parallel port

[micles5]

386sx 25hz.