Question Which CPU was your very first one?

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Krotow said:
At 1997 386SX-12 was already completely obsolete in userland, at least here where I live. Too slow even for still popular DOS/text mode software eq. accounting systems.



It was not mainstream thinking. CDs still required specific and quite expensive hardware. Price for internal IDE CD reader alone was like 200$ at 1994. And they was read-only. New software suites at that time took more space on drive too and development environments - 3...5 times more. Hard drive miniaturization and capacity surge around that same time to 250 MB and above came very timely.
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Yeah data CDs players used to be expensive, I think I payed some $300 CDN for first one at some computer show in Toronto but capacity wise it was much cheaper than HDDs. Shortly after, a friend of mine bought SCSI writer for 2000 bucks. What's amazing how fast it all developed a short time after.
 
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My new workstation in my job at 1995 had internal SCSI NEC MultiSpin 6x CD reader with 450$ price tag. With manual playback controls and caddy :) Awesome for that time. As you said, CD writers did cost above 1000$ then. After a decade internal IDE CD+DVD reader price was already like 70$. 5 years later SATA CD/DVD writer price dropped to 25$ and remained there for a decade - till now, Seems 15-18$ is the real manufacturer price for such device.
 
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Pentium 90. That means, nearly 30 years ago.
I remember, that I tried FSB from 30 to 33 Mhz to get 100 Mhz (like pentium 100). But crashed and did not work, therefore undoing it. It was my 1. PC, and I did not have any knowledge about hardware at that time( or drivers, io-ports , himem.sys etc.).

Before I had a c64 and an amiga 2000.
 
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Always like listing out my first PC.

Pentium 83Mhz overdrive 486, 4x4MB 70ns EDO memory 72-pin. Paradise Pipeline 64 graphics 1MB, Voodoo2 12MB. 6.4GB hard drive, was also a 2GB drive as well, I think. Original chassis/system was a Zeos desktop. Used 13" monitor picked up from a local corporate sale, also floppy drives.

First CPU I used was either my dad's 386 tower (that is a build in and of itself, was like $4k in 1991) or a TI-99 4a, not quite sure. I can remember using paint in Windows 3.1 in his bedroom at the old house, but certainly played Kings Quest on an older IBM, but that might have been later. Memory as a six year old can get fuzzy.

My first build was an AMD K6 166Mhz (overclocked by jumper to 233Mhz) with a single 32MB DIMM and a Voodoo 3 16mb (Though I may have used the Paradise Pipeline an Voodoo 2 for a bit)
 
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USAFRet said:
Around '93 or so, I had a roving enclyopedia salesman trying to sell me the stack of books, and telling me that the CD thing will never catch on.
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Many an elementary and middle school report made with Encarta 97, good stuff. Practically the only pre-internet computer resource for making quick reports on any subject. Though pretty much my entire schooling was during the days of going to the actual library for reference materials. Internet didn't really catch on until the last year or two of high school when they started integrating MLA and APA internet references into teaching materials. I recall a lot of teachers having rules about only using one internet reference per paper.
 
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Mine was a Pentium 133, I was young and I remember playing some old games on it, of course I didn't really get into the details of PC components until late windows 98 SE and "cough" ME when I was in middle and high school.

My first PC I ever built was an AMD Athlon XP 1200+, I remember playing countless hours of Diablo and Diablo 2 on that thing as I had some 64mb graphics card and couldn't play Need For Speed for some reason and doing a ton of research on how to fix it, Though I did learn a lot about that computer, and learned how to optimize the thing for gaming and reinstalled windows on so many times lol.
 
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Eximo said:
Many an elementary and middle school report made with Encarta 97, good stuff. Practically the only pre-internet computer resource for making quick reports on any subject. Though pretty much my entire schooling was during the days of going to the actual library for reference materials. Internet didn't really catch on until the last year or two of high school when they started integrating MLA and APA internet references into teaching materials. I recall a lot of teachers having rules about only using one internet reference per paper.
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Yeah.
There were 3 major encyclopedias back then:
Encarta, Compton’s, and Britannica.
Encarta was the best!
 
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mine was a 8 bit Motorola M6800 (800 Khz) I built the computer back in the 70s.when you got the computer it was all blank non populated cards, and all the parts came intubes and the other parts were in plastic bags. big machine had 8K of memory, 2 4K memory cards with STATIC memory chips
 
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coxbw said:
mine was a 8 bit Motorola M6800 (800 Khz) I built the computer back in the 70s.when you got the computer it was all blank non populated cards, and all the parts came intubes and the other parts were in plastic bags. big machine had 8K of memory, 2 4K memory cards with STATIC memory chips
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Wow!
You mean this one?

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/motorola-m6800-microprocessor

Memory size in kB!
That’s history!
 
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yes, my computer was a South West Techinal Products 6800 instead of a bunch of toggle switchs like the computer in War games, It only had two buttons on/off and reset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWTPC . I had the audio tape backup system also. my first IO was a TTY with paper tape punch and reader. It was the fun old days, NO viruses, sometimes full source code, used assembly and a lot of wild projects, I remember one where you could add a chip from a calculator and it gave you a "math co-processor"
 
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