What we were talking about 11 years ago! Amazing

I know and i love how he says "But put a REALLY huge HD array in there, something along the lines of 200GB". It's like science fiction to even mention 200GB of storage This blows my mind

the sad thing is, that doesnt seem like all that long ago or me. if you were to pull up a thread on 386/486 hardware, that is about where i started with pc's.

Athlon 64, socket 754/939, that's when I began building.

200gb for the time was a lot for a home or office user but the ram what a joke. I got more ram sitting in a socket 7 rig than that. As for the rest rolf. XD

The socket 7 K6III 450 was a proper CPU, OC and melted via DIP switches! Them's were the days.

8086 in the hizzay! Used to have to use chip pullers to remove RAM (almost always a risk of removing the socket and cracking a motherboard). Did you know hard drives once plugged into ISA expansion slots (similar to Revo drives in the PCIe of today). Anyone else have a PC running in PC DOS 1.0 using different boot disks so different programs would work? 5 1/4" disks anyone? Zork?

Anyone learn to program on a Timex Sinclair 1000 (expansion memory module used to always pop out the back while you were typing and you'd lose all your code) or Commodore 64 (programs saved to cassette tape?)? Let me tell you, the cassette tape is one speedy form of media!

Try older, the oldest thing I have seen was from the 70s and had 8 inch floppies. The largest hard drive by physical bulk was the IBM Ramac 305 with its massive 26in platters.

My first computer was also a 8086. It ran at 12mhz with a turbo button to run at 16mhz (or it might have been 8 and 12, it's been a long time). It has 640KB of ram and 20MB hard drive. The salesman told my dad he would never be able to use all that 20MB's of hd space. I also used MS and PC DOS. I found PC DOS was faster and more stable, despite it being less popular to MS. The last DOS version I remember was 5.1 (I might have used it up to 7). I never did like Windows 3.0 or 3.1. I jumped onto Windows with 95.

We got that computer originally to run Peach Tree for the family business. Of course I like to play with it too. To run a report could take up to 4 hours. Talk about state of the art technology

Nice!

Funny. I think mine started with 2K and I expanded it to 16K. I just remember that expansion module popping out on me all the time. The way it connected to the back was terrible. I learned a lot, but it was very frustrating.

No please keep on going. It is often the old stuff that teaches the most that there is to learn.

Win 95 machines and Mac LC2 era :s even for my age I am ancient.

Started with Windows 98 2nd Edition, Pentium 1, with 133 MHZ, with a turbo button (which I've never used it !), and 32MB, and 1MB graphic card lol...

Used to play alot: Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior ...

Game nowadays are easy, god, I remember configuring the sound in setup via MS DOS for those games (sound blaster) to make 'em work, all those IRQ and DMA, it was hell ...

Well I started out on stuff that was for me already very old for my agre group. While most kiddies were rocking p2 and p3 machines on up to P4 or Athlon xp I was stuck with p1 boxes. I learned a lot though in those years. I still remember my first windows 95 experience in the third grade at school. but my first mac experience was in the first grade Years later I would get those machines off the school and they became my first rigs. I was just a poor country kid. Worked my way up since. It wasn't until just a few years ago ware I started to catch up to every one else. I still envy those rich kids with their $3k usd machines that they seam to have a new one every 6-8 months with all the latest gear.

Apple II back in high school. My friend had a Commodore 64 with a tape drive. The first computer I used in a work environment was an IBM 8086 with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and a 5 Meg hard drive. Thought I was hot stuff when I filled that bugger and needed an second 5 Meg drive installed.

First computer I bought, though, was the Amiga 500 I used to play Lemmings and an F-18 Flight Simulator to no end! That was my first real foray into computer gaming. A couple years later, I bought an AST 486DX2-50. I think it came with 512K of RAM, a 4 Gig hard drive and Windows 3.1. The big game, at the time, was Doom II.

The first upgrade I performed was putting in 4 Meg of RAM and installing Windows 95 onto that AST system. Later, Cyrix came out with a DX4-100 CPU upgrade.

The first system I built was based on an Intel PIII-800 processor and 256 Meg of RAM. I pulled the hard drive from my old AST system, reformatted it and installed Windows NT 4.0. Added an S3-Virge graphics card (my first) and a second hard drive (6GB). That system tided me over for almost seven years, until it finally died in 2004.

Since then, I've bought one more desktop and two laptops. I've built and upgraded half a dozen systems since then; ranging from an AMD 3500+ to my latest Core I5 system (this system).

-Wolf sends

Did you add the math coprocessor to that ?

Actually they did sell a math co processor for the 486 SX (at least it was marketed as one !) :

My first PC, I didn't build it, but I sure as hell rebuilt it, quite a few times, though it maintained the same case forever.

Intel 33MHz 486, which originally had 4MB of Ram, a 128 MB hard drive, a 4X CD rom, a 200 Watt PSU, a Soundblaster 16, and some 14.4 Baud Hayes compatible modem. Lastly, a 2MB Diamond Video card. Of course, you had to have an IDE/ATA card back then.

Eventually I got a PCI diamond video card with 8MB, a 24X CD rom, a 36.6 USrobotics modem that I firmware upgraded to a 56K, a 2GB HDD from Maxtor, and eventually upgraed the motherboard to take on EDO memory and got her up to 16 MB and AMD's 133MHZ 486 (which outpowered the original Pentiums).

The good old days of using jumpers to set your frequency, voltage, and mutipliers, no thermal paste and for some reason it wasn't uncommon for a Motherboard to set the wire for your internal speaker on fire.

My board had a slot for one, but I never did buy one. My next summers lawn mowing profits went to a 66 mustang and I got distracted from computers for a few years.

A cat always pisses on it!

First computer -TRS-80 Color Computer 16k with chiclet keyboard and cassette drive-could peek and poke it to OC it
Still have it- Should still work though a cat pissed on outside of box
Darn cats.....

I'm "younger"(28), so my first comp was a 33mhz 486dx with a huge 16MB of edo-dram and some video card with 2MB of vdram. This comp cost $3.2k

Yes, it included a turbo button

My first computer. I was ~11.

Rich parents or family.

The first computer I recall in my family was an Apple IIe. It was white with a tiny green screen. I played some fun games on there like Snake, Qbert, Bouncy Ball...

Then we got a 386. I'm not sure if I played on it much. Then we had a 686 and I remember using that one to game. I think at one point we got a 4MB video card for it, around the time of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. I think the 386 we used a lot of DOS. Probably had Windows 4.0 or w/e it was, or maybe that was the 686. Or both? Oh and I remember I got this space game, Mantis, for Christmas one year. It had like 8 install floppys. Haha.

I'm pretty sure the next PC after that was from Futureshop - Cicero brand. I don't really know what was in it, as I was still not really into the hardware stuff. This PC had Win 95. And it didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive, just the 3.5".

But then I bought my own PC, for the first time, around... 4 years ago. 5 maybe? Anyway it was a Core 2 duo. 2.4ghz I think. With an 8600GT that I burned out playing Dirt, because I never cleaned it's heat sink. Running Win XP.
Then after a while without a gaming PC I went and sold that one to my parents (who were still using the Cicero crap) and bought myself my current PC, which I absolutely love. And of course, Win 7 64bit.