I rememeber when...

[BaldEagl]

... I upgraded my IBM PC with the next to the top of the line 400 Mhz Pentium processor from 16 Mb of RAM to the maximum 32 Mb of RAM.  Then I went all in and replaced my 1 Mb onboard video RAM chip with the maximum 2 Mb chip to get more out of Air Warrior.  Eventually my 4 Gb HD choked and I ended up replacing the PC.

I remember back then someone in the game told me they built their own PC and I was thinking OMG, how did you   do that (thinking they built everything from scratch).   

Share your stories of yesteryear.

[Copprhed]

My VERY first computer was an Atari 800XL, when it died, I got a Commodore 64. My first PC was a 386 DX40, later upgraded to a 486-66. My first Pentium was the P90, which had to have the processor switched because of the glitch. It had 16 megs ram, a 540 mb hdd and a 1mb video card....played Chuck Yeagers Advanced Air Combat and DOOM on that one! that computer cost me 3000 dollars from Dell, it had that new fangled SD Ram on it.....

[LCAMerciful]

My first computer was an ADAM (Made by Coleco).

Then I spent a lot of time with the C64 with a 300 baud modem.  Then I upgraded to a 1200 baud modem.. it was like lightspeed!

My first PC was an old IBM PS/2 I bought used for $150.  I also spent $300 on a VGA monitor and a 14.4K modem.  I'm sure these fell off a truck somewhere but the prices were incredible!

Then I built my first system.. a 386 DX 40.  Then I upgraded it to 4MB of RAM.

I used that for a long time then I traded it to my brother for an '84 V6 Camaro he bought but never could get running.  It took me about $10 in parts to make it run and then I traded it to a friend of his for a Pentium system (90 IIRC) with a VGA monitor and a bunch of software.  My brother was pretty ticked off at me for that but oh well.

My next couple of upgrades were systems I got dirt cheap through Ebay and onsale.com auctions.  Back in the day it was very easy to get stuff dirt cheap!  I remember getting a brand new eMachines system for under $100 and dirt cheap barebones AMD Slot A systems.  I built a few and sold them to support my habit.

I was a die hard AMD fan for a long time.  I had an AMD XP Socket A system for a long while until the Intel C2D processors came out.  I was considering an upgrade to an AMD X2 processor but based on Skuzzy's talk and AMD's early dual core bugs I purchased a E6300 C2D (1.86GHz) instead and never looked back.  I used that system for a long long while and ended up giving it to my brother who still uses it today.  The last few years I've been using an E7400 system.  This is the first time I've played with overclocking and I have had it running at 3.15GHz with stock cooling for all this time with no issues.

My next upgrade will probably be an i5 but I haven't made any decisions just yet.  It's getting hard to justify the expense of another upgrade when this workhorse is still working perfectly for everything I use it for!

[Wiley]

My family's first PC was a Zenith Z89, with the optional 8k memory upgrade.  It had 1 built in floppy drive, and 2 more on an external piece of hardware(!).  At the time, it cost just shy of $10k.

From there we graduated to a 286 where I got to play my first flight sim, called JET.exe.  You could fly either an F16 for ground based missions, or an F18 for carrier ops.  The enemy aircraft didn't even have a color, they were just wireframes.

When I moved away from home, I got my hands on a 486DX, and really thought I had something.  I could play DOOM, I could play Red Baron!  I could even kind of play Quake, except it moved at about 1/4 speed...  I remember purchasing my 4GB hard drive and thinking I'd never need another one...

Mercifully, I was too poor of a student to get sucked into the early online flight sim pay by the hour games like AW or WB.

Wiley.

[Hamltnblue]

I too had the Coleco adam. It had 80k of ram and dual tape drives.
Following that I had a Tandy 1000 with 384k of ram, and a 5 1/4 inch floppy. The Tandy also had built in color.
I upgraded it with ram chips to 640k ram, a 20 meg hard drive and a 3 1/2 inch floppy.
Had just about every generation of chip including current day.

[715]

My first desktop computer was an Amiga 1000 on which I played Air Warrior version 1.0 for $12 per hour.  ($6/hr to GEnie network and $6/hr for long distance charges to reach the GEnie POP number).  It was common for players to rack up several hundred dollars a month to play.

[FLS]

My first PC was a home built 386 20 mhz with 1 meg of ram and a 20 meg HD.  IBM was still selling 286's. I was cutting edge and could play Red Baron in glorious 16 color VGA with a Kraft 2 button joystick. That's what I had when I started in Air Warrior but I'd upgraded to 2 megs ram by then. I still remember my first AW kill, still have no idea what side they were on. 

[PFactorDave]

TRS-80 baby

[Getback]

I remember I use to salivate when I heard a modem buzzing and ringing thinking it was time to play Air Warriors.

My first pc was a 133 mhz Compaq. Can't remember how much ram. I think maybe 328 mb after I added a few more sticks. The video card was 1 mb that you could expand to 2. I bought a sister card at the time that hooked into the original video card and gave it 11 mb. The most astonishing thing was the 13 inch fishbowl monitor.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I went from C64 to Amiga500. My first PC was a cyrix 6x86 based no-brand box with a Seagate fireball HDD

Every computer I've owned I paid for with my own money (well untill now that is, now the company pays all my computers). Started delivering advertisements at the age of 12 to pay for the C64.

[steely07]

I can remember paying $400 for a 4MB Diamond Stealth graphics card, that said, it did improve my graphics immensely!

[bbosen]

I've got you all beat. My THIRD computer was a MITS Altair 8800 with 256 BYTES of RAM. I upgraded it to the IMSAI 8080 with 1K of RAM that's now sitting on my mantle as a museum piece. I published the original review of the North Star floppy disk system for the MITS Altair 8800 in Byte magazine, explaining how to rewire the PCB with a hardware patch to get it working.

.....and where's my dad-gum hearing aid?
 

[ozrocker]

Commodore 64 with a SpeedDOS toggle.
Load "*",8,1 


                                                                                                                                                        Oz

                       

[Pudgie]

It all started w/ a stock award that allowed me to purchase my 1st computer:
Packard Bell 1920 (486 SX 133MHz w/ 4 Mg mem) & while walking around in Wal-Mart to find something to run on it I stumbled across a copy of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat....................... ............................. ........

18 yrs later here I am!

 

[guncrasher]

I learned basic on the appleIIc.  I remember how cool it was when we started finally learning machine language that was back in 82-83.  I remember going to class and everyday you had to retype the program you were writing as we didnt have floppy disks yet.  then they figure out how to hook up the casset to the computer and we could save our work and load it up the next day.  oh I still remember the hassle of forgetting to do a pr#2 and pr#6 command so you print and use the floppy drive.  I wasted so many days writing my programs just to realize at the end of the class that I couldnt save it or print it.  oh the good old days.

when i bought my first computer  it was in 93-94 when AOL let you experience the wonders of the world wide web.  I remember web surfing was very popular back then with no fear of viruses/trojans.  actually the only time i got a virus was when on an aol chat room some guy offered to send me a picture viewer as computers didnt come with them back then.  I thought i was so cool.  till I found out my aol account was being used at times when i wasnt on.

I remember when I got my first video card that allowed me to see AW in hiresolution.  oh man the planes actually looked so real and the clouds were amazing.  I spent hours just looking at  the colors in the volcanoes around the pacific terrain.  it was so cool.  I think that computer had a Pentium 233 with a 4 gig hd.  I never got enough stuff on that computer to use 1/2 the space.



semp