Your first computer

Sonic Heros!!! Awesome game! So much fun to play!

And. Ah yeah, the good ol industructible lappys. Mine was a Dell that must've weighed r roms it seemed I dropped that thing so many times..nary a scratch.

 

I don't remember much about it, but it was a Dell laptop in 2006 (10th birthday present) and I spent the vast majority of my time on it playing Runescape, using AOL chat rooms, and posting on MySpace. All of that was so cool at the time - I miss how exciting things were when the internet was young.

 

The thought of calling 2006 as the "early days" of the Internet makes me feel old... I remember years before 2006...

I remember the Internet in the 1990s, when "normal" people started using it. I'm not sure when I first heard about it, but I knew about it certainly by the mid/late 1990s (if not before). My first experience was a library computer (a Macintosh running some version of System 7). The web browser was probably Netscape.

Indeed, it seemed like computer world changed dramatically in the 1990s. I went to a college in my area for a year about 1990. A year or so later, I ended up living far away. Then, I returned to the area in the mid/late 1990s. I visited my old college one day to see how things had changed...and one of the most dramatic changes was computer technology. The Internet was apparently increasingly a part of day to day life of ordinary students, not just computer geek types. One saw many laptops (I never saw anyone with a laptop when I was a student). Windows had gone from something hardly anyone seemed to use to major standard. All this in a few years...

 

My first computer? Oh man, this takes me back.

In 2005 (I was 4), my dad gave me his Compaq Presario 5WV270 desktop. That thing was timeless. An AMD Processor (Was it a Duron? Athlon? My memory fails me.) clocked at 751 MHz, 320 MB of RAM, a 20 GB hard drive, 2 CD-ROM drives, good ol' 3.5" Floppy, and Windows XP Professional. Served me well until 2012, when the hard drive died on me. I miss that beast... Many great memories made. Sending my first e-mail in 2007, chatting with friends and family on Yahoo! Messenger (It was recently shut down, R.I.P. Now I know how the AIM users felt.) in 2008... I could go on. I'm a big fan of technology, and I can credit the trusty Compaq to leading me down this path. It made me who I am today, really.

 

As I posted earlier, when this thread was new, I started out with a Macintosh. It occurred to me that I had another "first" computer that came many years later: the first time I had a generic PC. I was a Macintosh loyalist for years--even though all the computers I owned were old and out of date. I didn't have Internet where I lived, and the older technology did what I needed it to do.

But in 2003 or 2004, I found a Pentium I in a thrift store. I got it to play with. It gave me a chance to play with Windows on my own system. that PC also opened the road for another important first: it was the first time I tried Linux (Although the computer was so old that it only worked well with older versions of Linux--the best for that machine was Red Hat 6, which was years out of date by that point.)

That computer was replaced fairly quickly with a Pentium III (also a thrift shop find). That PIII, while not new or fast, was good enough to be usable in that era. It comfortably ran a current version of SuSE Linux. Almost every computer I've bought since that time was a generic PC of some sort, and Linux has been the primary OS. The Macintosh lingered for certain tasks...but I eventually started using the Linux system for pretty much everything I do.

 

I had a Dell Optiplex GX150 with a Pentium 3, and it ran Windows XP horribly. I don't know if there were other factors at play, but it was the worst XP machine I've used. Should have tried Linux on it.

 

Some Gateway POS that ran Windows ME. We got it back in 2000 (hence the Windows ME operating system). It got me very, very familiar with the Blue Screen of Death, and wiped all my files at least a dozen times in three years before finally dying for good all the way in 2011. I don't even want to consider how many hundreds of files I lost to that damn thing (even if most of them were stories I wrote that I'd probably cringe reading today).

 

I guess the first one would have been an ancient Macintosh that my dad brought home from work when I was a little kid.
Then a little later another ancient pc that used floppy discs.

 

I don't know what mine was but it was that huge box monitor. I remember the dial up tone for the Internet and it taking forever. It came with a free cd of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I don't think Wikipedia existed 20 yrs ago. I'm m not even sure it had USB ports. We used to have those free horrible science discs that came free in the Rice Krispies box. I can still remember searching for the first pictures of the actors who were going to play the lead in the first Harry Potter movie. It had Microsoft word, at least it was the only thing from office we'd use. I was an expert with word art.

 

The first computer I owned:

Intel i486DX processor at 50 MHz, the rarer single-clocked version (that is, 50 MHz on a 50 MHz bus)
8 MB RAM in 30-pin SIMMs
Trident TVGA8900D highcolor graphics card, 1 MB VRAM, driving a 14" CRT display (800 x 600)
Creative Sound Blaster 16 sound card
200 MB hard disk
Quad-speed (4X) CD drive
3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives
MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1; then Windows 95 (RTM)


The first computer I had access to:

Intel i386SX processor at 33 MHz, 2 MB RAM
Hercules monochrome graphics card, driving a 12" monochrome display (720 x 350)
Hard disk (don't remember the capacity)
3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives
MS-DOS 5.0 (then 6.0) and Windows 3.0