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

[pumpkin]

First PC was an Evesham Micros, I think it was a "Vale", sometime around 1992. It was 486 DX2/66, with 8Mb of memory, and 15" display, and Soundblaster card. Can't remember the drive capacity or graphics card.
Before that I'd had a ZX Spectrum, Atari 400, C64, Amiga and Atari ST

[big_hairy_rob]

a very early Pentium 133mhz box (and monitor) from Aldi or netto...

[Phrontis]

An Amstrad PC-1640 in around 1987/8. They were selling them off cheap in Dixons at the main Oxford Street branch in London, I worked down there for 12 months. They seemed to be bringing them back from all over the UK. I joined a huge queue down the road before the store opened, I had gone for a Toshiba but by the time I got to the front of the queue they had all gone. In the end they couldn't deliver the 1640 I had paid for and waited for weeks, they kept making offers and I kept declining them and I ended up getting an upgrade to the 10 MB HD and a better monitor (EGA I think). I ended up with a PC that had been £1Kish and only paid about £290 for it. One of the few people to stuff Dixons.
My first computer was the family Sinclair ZX80, upgrade later to the ZX81, then had a Commodore C64 from about 1983/4. Never been without at least a couple of PC's laptops or tablets since.

[NightshadowUK]

I dabbled for a few years before but my first build from scratch was an overclocked AMD Athlon 64 3700+ on an Abit AN8 Ultra. What a beaut!

[slef2003]

Pentium P75Htz (upgraded to P100 as they had run out of P75's)
8Mb Ram
soundblaster compatible sound card
2mb graphics
beige case
crap PSU
cannot remember HD
Win 95
Cd Drive and Floppy
Epson Colour Printer (that was £300)

[Korrorra]

Asus P4C800 Deluxe / I switched between the P4C800 over to a Abit IC7 Max3 down the road. I switched back to the P4C800 after the IC7 Max3 northbridge fan failed. Really miss Abit. Made some really great boards.
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz version E / Also had a P4 2.4GHz version C that ran cooler.
I had a whopping 256MB corsair valueram I believe. Upgraded to 512MB or 1GB later
PNY something videocard
Coolermaster Wave Master case (loved the removable mobo tray. So handy. Need to remove something?. Disconnect and slide out and work on whatever needs replacment or adjustment.
Creative Fatal1ty X-Fi... Grrrr (64MB XRAM was the future my ass). The soundcard was really wonky also. Pretty defective in general. When it worked it was amazing. Just a pain in the ass to get to work right. XFi was picky about placement in the PCI slot.
Windows XP (the transition from windows 98 to windows XP was like night and day) Still had crashing issues, though not as bad as the previous oses. Beautiful installer and desktop). Windows XP was the first MS OS I really liked. Then the transition to Windows 7 was even better.

[HW90]

TIL Hexus' user base is full of dinosaurs.

i7 920 OC'd to 4.2GHz, ATI 4850, 6GB 1600MHz DDR3 memory, 500GB WD Blue HDD

[evs]

386SX16 with 2mb memory, a Matrox graphics card and a swish CGA monitor. Lemmings in purple and cyan - swish. Traded in my Japanese MegaDrive and £100 and not looked back since.

[OwP]

ZX81
C64 (had a floppy drive!!) still works.
Amiga A500
Amiga 1200
AST Cyrix Cx486
Dell P3-550
Self builds mainly AMD up until 2019
Currently Ryzen 2600, 16Gb DDR, Powecolor 580,480Gb SSD and other stuff. Made by AWD-IT and very happy with it. Got it without an OS and shoved Win10 Pro on it.

[deepblue08]

First purchase: Intel Celery 500mhz, 64MB RAM, 10Gig HDD, Integrated GPU, Win98
First Build: AMD Athlon 1700XP, 128MB RAM, 40Gig HDD, Geforce 4 MX, Win XP

[dannyboy75]

First PC was an Escom 486 DX2-66, with 4MB RAM, a 1MB Cirrus graphics card, MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.11. At the time I knew virtually nothing about PC's, and couldn't understand why my friend's Intel DX2-66 was getting better framerates in games than my Cyrix CPU. That was the only pre-built system I bought - started building my own once I'd gained a bit of knowledge and confidence.

[Saracen999]

It depends on how "PC" and "built" are defined.

If PC just means personal computer, then it was an Apple IIe (as in Europlus, not the much later "enhanced") in 1979.

As for "built", it depends how far you take it. If "built" includes buying a basic machine that works out of the box, then "building" the final spec with hardware changes, then we're back to that Apple II Euro, but adapted by taking memory from (IIRC) 48k to 64k with a 16k card, and from that 64k to 192k with a 128k card. I also added a Z80 card (for CP/M), a printer card and after a while, an upgraded video board rather than the initial TV modulator board. Oh, and a parallel board to drive a printer. And Disk II floppy drives.

Bearing in mind that the basic machine was about £1000 for which the current equivalent is about £4k, and that some of those add-ons were very pricey, it was actually a very expensive machine .... before we get to software, additional languages like Apple Pascal and even COBOL (Z80 board, remember).

If "PC" means IBM compatible, as in more modern usage, then a Dell 8086 to which I again added 3rd party boards. That was about 1984.

And for "build" meaning buy mobo, cpu etc and a component level build, that was later still.

[Jaffo]

Would have been late '97 or early '98. It was definitely a Dell, P2 300MHz with a 19 inch monitor, Win95 and Altec Lansing speakers (that I still use) but the rest of the specs are hazy now. Think it was 64MB RAM, 8GB HD and can't remember the video card but it changed from the magazine listing and I remember having lots of panicked calls to the Dell sales centre because of that (and them billing for the wrong system entirely at first!). I was worried that the new card wouldn't play Quake 2 but it all turned out ok. Best 2 grand (!) I ever spent.

[Fogoldgaming]

Armstrad word processor where I learned Supercalc spreadsheets!

[Akrita]

AMD DX486 speed 40mhz and the extreme 80mhz turbo.
Memory: 12MB.
Hard drive 512MB.
My expensive Matrox Mystique with 2+2 MB ram.
NEC 17 monitor (weight 1TON plus).
It was my first graphic station running CorelDraw v1 and Photoshop Version 2.
What a joke.

Way before that:
Dragon 32
Sinclair Spectrum 128 (my Mom didn't let me get Commodore 64, I will always remember that)
Atari ST.

[matts-uk]

Vic-20, C64, Atari 520 STFM and then my first PC.

386DX 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, 80MB Seagate IDE, 512K Trident VGA. It was a no name clone that I picked up from a farm in Stevenage, where they were running a mail order business from an old barn. The monitor was a refurb 256 colour 800x600 from an electronics surplus store in Croydon. Had to make up my own VGA to BNC cable. Work donated some old copies of Borland compilers, so I taught myself C++.