Discussion What Were the CPU and Specs of Your First PC?

[King_V]

I worked with some earlier systems that were tape drive only models as well. I think I was in like 4th or 5th grade at the time and only kids in the GATE program had access to them. I think it was like the next year that the first 5.25" drives started coming out.

Oh, yeah, similar situation - the Commodore 64 was my first computer, but the first I had access to, because I was in the TAG program, 4th-5th grade, was at school, a TRS-80.

We had a Model I and a Model II, as I recall. That's where I first learned BASIC, and, of course, being a kid, attempted to write a game or two outside of the stuff I was supposed to do with the system.

The tape drives didn't even have to be specific to those computers like the Commodore required. They were standard tape recorders, and just plugged in through an audio jack.

Loading and saving sizeable (for the time) programs sure gave you a lot of time to sit and think. 😆

 

[Colif]

A new telephone exchange was built near a school I was attending and by time they finished building it, tech had shrunk to point they didn't need all the space.
One school I went to had the mainframe for the entire regions schools in it. So I knew about computers before 1982 but before then they took up entire floors of the school, and students weren't given access to it... for some reason.
It wasn't until I went to another school in 1982 that I found micro computers. What we call PC now. they had TRS-80 and Apple and BBC Micro... it was fun but I was supposed to be learning things apart from computing... oh well.

 

[falcon291]

My first PC was a Commodore 64 (C=64) with a tape driver. I didn't have many accessories, no disk drive or printer. 4 years later I my parents bought an Amiga 500. I did some programming with my C=64, but not with Amiga.

If you are asking about my first IBM compatible PC, it was 1992, and my first PC was an Intel DX2-66 with a whopping 4 MB of RAM, and 209 MB harddisk. I wrote whopping because at the time in general, 2 GB of RAM, and 50-60 MB harddisk was thought more than enough. My friends asked me how I thought to fill that harddisk.

 

[Tac 25]

If adding in the first computer I used....it was a Rockwell AIM-65, based on an R6502 processor. 1Mhz, 4K of RAM. We got it in the lab mainly to experiment with...we were told to "try to come up with something we could do with it".

Mostly, all we did was write silly BASIC programs...I remember we had a contest for the most efficient program to extract square roots. The only way to save them was to an audio tape. Someone brought in a mini-cassette recorder and we'd save off a program to the tape through the 1/4" headphone jack. Read it in the same way.

At least it had it's own printer that used adding machine paper rolls.

Then someone designed an interface to access the lab's minicomputer (DEC-PDP 11) through it and they took it away. LOL...we were hackers before hacking was cool!

this got me curious, how do programs get saved to a casette recorder?

also how your group got access to the lab computer is badass, did the school authorities get angry? lol

and 50-60 MB harddisk was thought more than enough. My friends asked me how I thought to fill that harddisk.

was wondering the same on my dad's pc back then, could not remember the exacta mount, but it had a HDD space of around 300mb. I kept thinking how 300mb can be filled up when most games during that time fit into a single microfloppy.

 

[Colif]

this got me curious, how do programs get saved to a casette recorder?

 

[Tac 25]

nice, thanks for the info. I feel amazed how people can invent such things. Sure it's outdated tech by today, but many years ago.. it must have looked amazing when the technology of casette drives was introduced.

 

[logainofhades]

Celeron 466, integrated graphics, 64mb ram, 8gb hdd. Upgraded it to 256mb, and a 40gb hdd.

 

[falcon291]

nice, thanks for the info. I feel amazed how people can invent such things. Sure it's outdated tech by today, but many years ago.. it must have looked amazing when the technology of casette drives was introduced.

These tape drives were slow, really slow. Now I install the games I play most to my M2 SSD, and hate hard disks, hard disks at the time was not even something we dream of.

 

[Tac 25]

yeah, I saw on the video that they're slow. And I do have SSD on all my pc's today, which are of course fast. But what I mean is, I appreciate the people who started all these tech stuff about casette recorders into data, the first hard drives etc. I'm an enthusiast on retro stuffs. Even today, I'm busy putting together a Windows XP pc from old parts.

 

[Colif]

nice, thanks for the info. I feel amazed how people can invent such things. Sure it's outdated tech by today, but many years ago.. it must have looked amazing when the technology of casette drives was introduced.

I think we used cassette as floppy drives were silly expensive back then. That would have been the reason. Dad saw it as a TV game, not a computer. And well, all we did do on it was play games so I guess he was right. I remember typing some in from magazines.

I suspect the method of saving the games to cassette varies based on the computers since they all ran different OS. I can't remeber how the Tandy Colour did it. Most of time we were loading from drive, not writing to.

having to rerun the cassette to reload the game isn't something I miss.
One thing the old computers had that people want now... instant boot times. Sure, 15 seconds is close but not as fast as instant. I wouldn't give up anything for faster boot though,

 

[Tac 25]

this thread is actually the first time for me to hear that the casettes were being used to store games. Which is a big surprise, and cause for a bit of excitement.

I heard sometime ago that certain old pc had place to put casette, but I did not know that they were being used to store the game. Thought those people with really old computers listened to music using their casattes.

 

[King_V]

My first PC was a Commodore 64 (C=64) with a tape driver. I didn't have many accessories, no disk drive or printer. 4 years later I my parents bought an Amiga 500. I did some programming with my C=64, but not with Amiga.

If you are asking about my first IBM compatible PC, it was 1992, and my first PC was an Intel DX2-66 with a whopping 4 MB of RAM, and 209 MB harddisk. I wrote whopping because at the time in general, 2 GB of RAM, and 50-60 MB harddisk was thought more than enough. My friends asked me how I thought to fill that harddisk.

I know that feeling - that first PC I mentioned, the Dell with the Pentium 133 - the 2MB GPU, the AWE32 board, and the 2.5GB drive, were all considered "excessive" by friends.

The PC earned the nickname "Ah-nuld" for a while... This was back in those heady days of 1996.

 

[Colif]

i remember hearing about a 30mb hdd at work and wondering how many documents it would take to fill it, thinking we would never need much more.
Most of the work PC back then were running 3.1 for workgroups and if servers went down, were totally useless.
I remember having one of the 1st Win 95 PC and actually being able to do things when network was down.
Some of the people in the office didn't understand why I could and they couldn't. Not like I could do much.
That was around same time we discovered the internet and the IT section showed me how to get onto it without the required access. It was pretty boring back then.

the 2MB GPU,

2mb gpu, was it 2d or 3d?

 

[King_V]

i remember hearing about a 30mb hdd at work and wondering how many documents it would take to fill it, thinking we would never need much more.
Most of the work PC back then were running 3.1 for workgroups and if servers went down, were totally useless.
I remember having one of the 1st Win 95 PC and actually being able to do things when network was down.
Some of the people in the office didn't understand why I could and they couldn't. Not like I could do much.
That was around same time we discovered the internet and the IT section showed me how to get onto it without the required access. It was pretty boring back then.

2mb gpu, was it 2d or 3d?

2d... an S3 based chip, if I recall correctly.

My first real 3D card, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing at the time, I got in 1997 or 1998, as I recall. It was a 4MB PCI card, the STB Velocity 128, featuring the Riva 128 chip from this new company called Nvidia.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

this thread is actually the first time for me to hear that the casettes were being used to store games. Which is a big surprise, and cause for a bit of excitement.

I heard sometime ago that certain old pc had place to put casette, but I did not know that they were being used to store the game. Thought those people with really old computers listened to music using their casattes.

The original IBM Personal Computer ("PC" didn't become a thing until much later) had a cassette port. Not until the IBM XT did hard drives make an appearance (at considerable cost).

 

[Tac 25]

@ex_bubblehead

thanks for that additional info. Never saw a pc with a casette port, I guess they got phased out already by the time I got to school.

anyway, a question... do these IBM pc's have green letters? Because I remember the earliest computers in our grade school computer room had green letters. The ones we used in high school had larger grey letters. These pc's used diskettes, they have no HDD installed, I guess it's our school have low budget.

There was one funny story I could not forget.. our computer teacher said a student in his other class happily announced that he "reached the hard disk" of the pc. But of course, the pc does not have a hard disk. When the teacher checked the pc whose "hard disk was reached" the pc was messed up (lol). The teacher then told the now nervous student that he will try to fix the pc, but if the teacher can't fix the pc.. then the student better start saving money to pay for the damages.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

@ex_bubblehead
....anyway, a question... do these IBM pc's have green letters? Because I remember the earliest computers in our grade school computer room had green letters. The ones we used in high school had larger grey letters. These pc's used diskettes, they have no HDD installed, I guess it's our school have low budget....

To the best of my recollection IBM never used a green logo, only blue, the occasional grey, or, in the case of Thinkpads a Red, Green, Blue logo (remember, IBM has for decades been known as "Big Blue") Likely one of the early clones you saw.

 

[Eximo]

I believe he is referring to the displays. Green and Orange phosphor displays were pretty common in schools for things like Apple IIs, and they were really common in Libraries of the time as early card catalog replacements. Grey monochrome was just a variation of the same thing. A cheap way to get display without paying for an RGB display, or using a TV with composite input. VGA wasn't super common in schools until the mid-90s I would say. Basically Windows 3.1 adoption.

I should add that one reason for using monochrome displays is that the the reading of text was much sharper. A Color TV using composite often had a rainbow effect when producing white letters and it made everything a little blurry. True RGB displays, and there were many standards back in the day, were a lot sharper, but a lot more expensive. Keep in mind this was back when a good computer would cost you like $2000-4000 and monitors were like $500-800. With inflation that would be closer to $10,000. (I don't think people really realize how good computer pricing was in the 2000s up through the mid 2010s.)

 

[ohio_buckeye]

First computer…Commodore 64 at 5 years old back in about 1985/1986 I suppose?

First PC was an amd k6 with 32mb ram and maybe 80gb drive? Been a while. I remember when we upgraded dad didn’t want to pay 400 for a 400 MHz Pentium 2 which was towards top performance in those days and Best Buy had the amd k6-2 450mhz for 100 bucks. Suffice to say we put together a whole pc for almost the price of just the Intel cpu.

 

[Colif]

thanks for that additional info. Never saw a pc with a casette port, I guess they got phased out already by the time I got to school.

it seems its possible to still do it now. You just need the right software, which could be the problem - https://www.instructables.com/Storing-files-on-an-audio-cassette/ but you use the audio jacks to get the sound out...

 

[Koekieezz]

Specs of my first computer (year 2001):

• CPU: Intel Celeron Tualatin @ 1.3 GHz (overclockable to 1.5 GHz)
• GPU: GeForce2 MX 400 w/ 64 MB memory
• RAM: 256 MB
• HDD: 40 GB
• Operating Systems: Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 and RedHat Linux 7.3

You may write about your current system specs and CPU, the components you would like to buy in the future and those of the first PC you've ever owned. I would be glad to hear about it.

My First PC ever being used? i dont really remember but here's a glimpse:

Intel Pentium 4
Idk what mobo
ATi HD 3000 series i forgor
50gb of hdd
generic case
generic psu 300w but it always shut off whenever i play gta and gta 2
windows 98 then windows xp sp3

My First own built pc:
E3 1240 V2
B75M HD3
2x8GB HyperX 1600 c9
MSi GTX 1050 2G OC
Klevv Neo N400 240GB
wd blue 1tb hdd
Corsair CV550
local brand pc case that i use till now.

 

[Tac 25]

it seems its possible to still do it now. You just need the right software, which could be the problem - https://www.instructables.com/Storing-files-on-an-audio-cassette/ but you use the audio jacks to get the sound out...

nice info. It's interesting to read the comments of the people who tried doing it. Will just be reading comments for now.. but I might try this as another fun project after my Windows XP pc is complete.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I believe he is referring to the displays. Green and Orange phosphor displays were pretty common in schools for things like Apple IIs, and they were really common in Libraries of the time as early card catalog replacements. Grey monochrome was just a variation of the same thing. A cheap way to get display without paying for an RGB display, or using a TV with composite input. VGA wasn't super common in schools until the mid-90s I would say. Basically Windows 3.1 adoption.

I should add that one reason for using monochrome displays is that the the reading of text was much sharper. A Color TV using composite often had a rainbow effect when producing white letters and it made everything a little blurry. True RGB displays, and there were many standards back in the day, were a lot sharper, but a lot more expensive. Keep in mind this was back when a good computer would cost you like $2000-4000 and monitors were like $500-800. With inflation that would be closer to $10,000. (I don't think people really realize how good computer pricing was in the 2000s up through the mid 2010s.)

Yeah, everything I had used up until the time we got Apple II GS in my art class were green screens except maybe one or two in the computer lab that were white text on a black screen but those were reserved for the systems being used by older, more advanced students, at that time. Which was fine, because once we got the Apple II GS there was nothing appealing about using those basic and clone machines anymore. I mean, color graphics, laser printing and a mouse, why do I want to use those lame old boxes? Apple II GS made creating silkscreens a jump that was magnitudes easier than having to do the old style cutting out of the emulsion to now being able to print designs directly on clear sheets for burning screens using photo emulsion processes. That was the moment it truly dawned on me that computers were going to be a lot more than just something used by accountants, writers or just a curiosity.

 

[KyaraM]

Oh lol, I don't even know, haha! It was literally an IBM office surplus (my dad worked there back then) and it was given to me for school work. Early 2000's. I remember the "Intel inside" sticker, though, so probably an old pentium or Celleron I guess. The second is equally tricky, an laptop with integrated graphics and a Pentium dual core processor.

 

[shady28]

Atari 400 with 16kb of RAM, a cassette tape drive, BASIC cartridge, and Star Raiders game cartridge.