What was your first PC build?

Oh man I had this old 286 in 1988 that was "portable" back before they really had lap tops. It had a small amber screen that was built into the body, and the key board snapped into that screen area and it had a suitcase type handle, and fold out legs to elevate the screen. But it was pretty heavy like 35 pounds etc. Even with it being called "portable" I had some fun lugging it to the various student and short term parking lots. I sometimes even parked illegally risking a ticket to make things easier when I was studying at UC Santa Cruz because it was such a chore to move to my car when I wanted to go away for the weekend but also work on my school work.

It looked sort of like this, but with a luggage handle, and amber screen. I remember it only having one floppy drive at small 3.5 diskette. But maybe it did, my friend reminded me it was a Compaq.

When I was 7 I had my family's old 486 to screw around on running Windows 3.11. Then I got various handmedowns that I don't remember (one was an AMD K6) - the first one I built was when I was 13 which was some AM2 Sempron, which got upgrade to an Athlon 64 when I was like 14 or 15.

Apart from freebies from my brother and brother-in-law, the first thing I actually built for fully for myself with new parts was what I'm using now (which I built 4 years ago).

Pavel Mosko said:

Oh man I had this old 286 in 1988 that was "portable" back before they really had lap tops. It had a small amber screen that was built into the body, and the key board snapped into that screen area and it had a suitcase type handle, and fold out legs to elevate the screen. But it was pretty heavy like 35 pounds etc. Even with it being called "portable" I had some fun lugging it to the various student and short term parking lots. I sometimes even parked illegally risking a ticket to make things easier when I was studying at UC Santa Cruz because it was such a chore to move to my car when I wanted to go away for the weekend but also work on my school work.

It looked sort of like this, but with a luggage handle, and amber screen. I remember it only having one floppy drive at small 3.5 diskette. But maybe it did, my friend reminded me it was a Compaq.

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I wanted one of those so bad.

I was a computer geek back when commodore 64's were king. As I grew up, was always a scavenger, building and repairing other people's cast offs. I remember the first brand new computer part I bought. A 1gb hard drive. That was huge for the time, didn't think I'd ever run out of room.

I was seven when my parents bought our first computer it was in 1993. I remember my parents were trying to figure out how to put it together and I ended up doing most of the work for them so in a way that was my first computer build. I've been working on computers since. But my first build that i actually paid for was a HP desktop that I customly modified over several years. I was so proud because the computer cost me $500 and I stuck lots of money in it.

Now today with computer parts being so expensive one of my builds I usually stick about 3 to 4 grand into. Now with covid it's even more than that.

Dreams65 said:

What kind of hardware did you have in your first PC build?

My first PC Build was in 1995. Here are the specs:

• CPU: Intel Pentium 133 (Socket 7 at 133 MHz with 16 KB cache)
• RAM: 16 MB EDO
• Motherboard: probably from Abit...can't remember the model
• Graphics Card: ATI Mach 64 4 MB (PCI)
• Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 (ISA)
• Hard Drive: Seagate 1.2 GB
• Drives: NEC 6x CD-ROM & NEC 3.5" floppy
• Case: no name tower
• Speakers: no name 2.0
• Mouse: Microsoft basic mouse
• Keyboard: Microsoft Natural keyboard
• Monitor: NEC Multi Sync 17"
• Modem: USRobotics
• Printer: HP DeskJet 660C (bundled with Microsoft Arcade and Myst)
• OS: Windows 95/Windows 95 Plus (I still have those CDs)

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Cost: around $4,500

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Apple II
State of the art everything.
Cost: insanely ridiculous
I remember paying $600 for a card to put in the motherboard for a clock.
I bought a printer that used a roll, yes, a roll, of silver paper.
It used floppy, yes, floppy, discs.
What did it do? Very little.
But it did tell time, after I plugged in that $600 card.

i had an 8088 or 8086 i don't remember, in the 80'.
640kb of memory i think.
CGA graphics. 4 colors.
MS-DOS
I don't remember disk space but was like if you had 40 mb you were lucky.
I remember buying games in the capital, and a game of 15 mb (flight simulator or something), i rememeber saying 'wow this game almost occupies a whole hard disk'... lol.
Lots of fun.

I became fascinated with computers in the early-to-mid 80's, thanks to the video game craze. My friend had a Color Computer and we had Apple II's and Tandy 1000's in the library of my high school, which I took a keen interest to in my freshman year. I used to stare at the Radio Shack catalog for hours because I could afford my own.

I took a computer class my freshman year. At that time, they were using TRS-80's to teach the class. I couldn't wait to get to that class to play with those computers. I would beg teachers for passes to skip study hall so I could go to the library and use the computers.

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 EX, purchased in 1987 with summer job money. It was an 8086 with 256k RAM, upgraded to 640k and a 720k 3 1/2" floppy drive (from a 360k 5 1/4"). It didn't have a hard drive.

My next computer, purchased in 1991, was a custom built 386-33 with an 80mb HD, an IBM M-style keyboard. I used it for running a BBS over landline, programming, gaming, music and more. I upgraded the 386 computer as much as I could, then built a 486-66. I added a Gravis Ultrasound sound card, which I'm still kicking myself for getting rid of.

Right about that time my friends and I started having LAN parties and playing games like Doom and Duke Nukem. We used ancient network cards that used coax cable and terminators. We upgraded with the technology, adding the first Voodoo 3D graphics cards. Many years later, we outgrew LAN gaming and eventually just got together on the internet instead.

Computers have been my hobby since 1984 and I continue to upgrade and build as the need arises, but I also purchase systems here and there to save myself the effort of building it myself.

Most recent, I upgraded all of my systems to SSD, even the older ones, and upgraded RAM on the ones that needed it. If you count the computers in this room, I have 9 PC's and 4 laptops. Overkill, I know, but I won't need a PC for the foreseeable future. lol

Dreams65 said:

The first time I had seen and worked on a TRS-80 was in high school back in 1979. There were only two of them for the entire school. Not too many students interested in computers at the time. I also remember the printer hooked up to those TRS-80s was the size of a desk.

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By the time I hit high school in 1985, they had one classroom full of them. I think there were something like ten, around the perimeter of the classroom. The text book we used to learn about computers was extremely corny, with digital font and basic concepts. For a class trip we went to a Bank 1 data center and they still had card reading machines, but they had been decommissioned by that time; they were so big and heavy, they just left them where they sat. One program I remember from the TRS-80 had a dancing character that you could choreograph.

Oh boy...the first pc I owned was an old apple macintosh which had a flight simulator game on it. I loved that game and when my mom got rid of the computer I was mad. It also had a weird strategy game called MYST on it too. I miss that macintosh