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

[ddg3595]

I built my first PC in the summer of 1997. It included an Abit AX5 motherboard, Pentium 233MHz MMX processor, ATI All-in-Wonder graphics card. Orchid Technology's Righteous 3D video accelerator, SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold sound card, two Western Digital 5.1 GB hard drives, A Mitsumi CD-ROM drive, Sony's 17-inch Trinitron monitor, and 64MB of RAM. All packaged in an Enlight case with a 300-watt power supply.

The good old days; there's nothing like 'em.

[MJR1973]

I could be wrong on a few specs.
Swan XT 4.77mhz to 10mhz Intel 8088 with turbo button
64k of ram? maybe 128k
CGA 4 color video card
101 Keyboard
Dual 5 1/4 floppy

oh wait, that was the first Dos machine, the first computer was

Atari 800XL, cartridge only at first, then tape deck.

those were the days boys and girls.. go to the store, get your Computing magazine, come home, type in 3 pages of basic and get to play breakout until your mom turned off the power.

Ahh but then the tape deck came along.. saving those precious beeps and boops.. 30 minute saves, 30 minute loads.. but it gave you plenty of time to go outside and play in the sun

btw at the time, that Swan was over $800.. and I'm not sure that included the monitor

[pvtbanner]

My 1st PC was had a celeron 333 no idea what the other specs were, 2nd was an Athlon 1400 which I remember had 2 20GB HDD's in RAID 0, which seemed rapid at the time, both of these were purchased as prebuilt.
My first built pc was a Q6600 which lasted me about 7 years, and is still going strong in my brothers garage as a freenas server.

[Bishi]

Owned? 386SX25
Built? The very first Athlon chip

[John_Amstrad]

It couldn't be something else: the Amstrad CPC 6128, Zilog Z80A @ 4MHz, RAM 128kb, AMSDOS, 1985

[SamanthaCarter]

Was in my early teenage years I think. Oldest brother had moved out so began learning a lot myself. Lets see:

CPU: Pentium 4 Northwood 2.53GHz (later upgraded to a Pentium 4 2.6C (800fsb) stepping for fun overclocks)
Motherboard: ABIT IT7 Max2 v2 (loved reading through the manual)
Ram: 256mb Crucial (was over £50 per stick back then)
Graphics Card: Nvidia 6600GT??
Power Supply: God awful death trap that blew up when my mum turned it off at the mains, was gold colored and very very cheap. Ahh i remember, a Q-tec 500/550W.
Hard drive: 40GB Seagate Barracuda???
Monitor: I think we re-used some 17 inch CRT from my brother's Gateway computer but I ended up with a Samsung 226BW at some point later.
CD(DVD?)-Rom: Liteon?
Keyboard: Inherited a Microsoft classic ergonomic keyboard
Mouse: Remember using a laggy Microsoft Wireless Mouse then upgrading to a Razer Diamondback Plasma Edition

[Tattysnuc]

my first foray into the X86 world was my 486 dx2 66 from Tiny, which I bought with my student loan to replace my A1200.
I think it must have been around 1995 as it came with Windows 95 which was shiny and new at the time and much friendlier to use than MS DOS or Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, which had rubbish multimedia support - no sound!

I seem to recall upgrading it when I graduated to an Escom system and I've been building/upgrading my own bits ever since then.

[greypuma]

First PC was a 286 12mhz goldstar.
first PC bought with my own money was a dell P90 with a handheld scanner.
first PC i built was an athlon processor(can't remember which), 256mb crucial memory
sound blaster and 3d power geforce card. Still currently used as a side table in my office.
I only bought the Dell P90 off the shelf. The rest were all built.

[fail_quail]

First PC the family had was an 8mhz Amstrad 286.

My first PC, for uni:
I forget the company name now (smallish prebuilt systems), but bits of the PC i do remember:

333mhz AMD K6-2
64MB RAM
A spectacuarly terrible PC-CHIPS motherboard (which included an 8MB onboard SIS GPU so bad i could run games much faster in software rendering than GPU-acceleraed mode)
A 4GB Seagate HDD (which failed, then the warrenty replacement failed, then that replacement of the replacement drive failed all in the space of a few months)
Floppy drive and CD-ROM
15" AOC monitor (probably the best part of the system, kept this for many years)
Win95*.

Pretty terrible system really, mostly due to the mobo (though great for learning IT tech support )
I fairly quickly got a 32MB PCI (no AGP slot on said mobo) S3 savage 4 GPU and a better HDD which helped a great deal.

*supplied as an un-bootable CD-ROM with an incorrectly configured boot-floppy disk, turned out to be a great crash course in learning DOS the hard way

[Salazaar]

An old 386 (SX, I think) about the size of a shoebox. I seem to remember I added a Soundblaster clone card and that was it for physical expansion in the case, so my Dad helped me jerry-rig a CD drive with an IDE cable trailing out the back and looping back in to a separate enclosure (from an old BBC, I think) which provided power, and somewhere to physically mount it.

(I'm taking PC to be an 'IBM Compatible', there was an Atari ST (fm) and a BBC before that)

[jm101]

Commodore Amiga 1000 was my very first - and it held it's own against the competition for years. It was a superb gaming unit and there were a lot of military flight sim games available for it.
I kept that for decades along side Intel based computers.
Now who remembers CompuServe ? The (initially) 300 baud phone modem based service to connect to various club based computers for file sharing and messaging.
Or how about the first 100mb hard drives? Big - and loud.
The 5 1/4 diskettes that held 360KB followed by the 3 1/2 inch in various formats.
and on and on.

[3dcandy]

Commodore Amiga 1000 was my very first - and it held it's own against the competition for years. It was a superb gaming unit and there were a lot of military flight sim games available for it.
I kept that for decades along side Intel based computers.
Now who remembers CompuServe ? The (initially) 300 baud phone modem based service to connect to various club based computers for file sharing and messaging.
Or how about the first 100mb hard drives? Big - and loud.
The 5 1/4 diskettes that held 360KB followed by the 3 1/2 inch in various formats.
and on and on.

We ran a very successful BBS on an Amiga A4000. Had 6 phone lines, 6 x USR courier modems and over 1 tb of file storage in the 90's....

[loccothan]

PC -> Some 486DX (Played Wolfenstein & DOOM on it)
Earlier was some Atari 800XL, then Commodore 64 and then AMIGA 500 (i have also some consoles in that time).

[cheesemp]

Tiny PC (Remember them?) Pentium 200MMX with 32Mb of RAM I think? It came with a monitor and printer as a bundle deal. Spent most of my child savings on it. Paid off though - got a job as a software dev.

My next PC was self built (on my own with no Youtube videos to help) Pentium 2 350!

[Ademi]

486 DX2 66MHz, 4MB RAM, 540MB HDD, VGA VESA 512KB, 5.25" FDD, no optical drive, no sound card, no modem

[squirrelz]

With the money I made on my sandwich year from Uni, I bought a Dan Technology system - specs:
486DX33
4Mb RAM (4x 1Mb SIMMs remember them?)
210Mb Hard disk
Paid extra for the higher spec 14" monitor that ran to a higher refresh rate

Soon upgraded with another 4Mb RAM, an Orchid Soundcard, and a 2x speed CDROM drive.