What was your first computer? When and how much did it cost?

Discussion in 'The Guru's Pub' started by Airbud, May 19, 2021.

  1. mbk1969

    mbk1969 Ancient Guru

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    We have to ask:
    - YT
    - VEVO
    - Guru3d
    - Phil Oakley
    why one of them decided that Airbud is not from USA...

    [​IMG]

    PS
    Btw, are you sure you are in States right now?

    PPS



    PPPS
    It is with a strong nostalgy I watch that movie right now. I have never seen it, but in school days we were fascinated by Giorgio Moroder and ELO and we heard songs and music from that movie. My youth, where are you?...
     
    Last edited: May 21, 2021
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  2. Coolerking

    Coolerking Master Guru

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    Apple II, 1978 I think, it was a gift from my dad who worked for National Semiconductor for 40 years, so I got lots of cool stuff from time to time.
    Wizardy on floppy was fun.
     
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  3. XP-200

    XP-200 Ancient Guru

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    386sx Sprint from my local Dixons who of course robbed me blind on the intrest, £499 in 1993, did not even have a ad-lib card in it, only a 40 meg HDD and i think 1 meg of memory and Dos 4....BUT!....it was awesome....Star Trek 25th anni, Eye of the beholder and Wing commander.
     
  4. TheDigitalJedi

    TheDigitalJedi Ancient Guru

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    Commodore 64. International Karate (Chop N Drop) was cool but in truth the Atari, Colecovision, NES, Sega Master System and arcades had my full attention in the 80s.
     

  5. AsiJu

    AsiJu Ancient Guru

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    Similar story here :)

    First was an IBM 486SX2 25 MHz, 2 MB RAM, around 80 MB harddrive I think. Bought by my folks, was 9 years old at the time.

    RAM was later upgraded to 6 MB which often allowed running games that stated 8 MB as minimum as 6 MB was such an odd number (8 MB = you need more than 4 MB).
    Ofc the 486DX2 Overdrive upgrade was the big thing and I guess what ultimately sold the PC building / upgrading loop to me.

    Seeing a component addition make such a difference was a religious moment for a to-be geek.

    I think I can remember all the systems since:
    • Pentium 150 MHz (=166 MHz)
    • Diamond Stealth 64 + later Diamond Monster 3D (another religious moment!)
    • Celeron A 300 MHz (=450 MHz)
    • Diamond Viper V550
    • Duron 800 MHz
    • Asus GeForce 256 DDR
    • Athlon XP 2400+
    • used GeForce 2 GTS 64 MB -> Asus GeForce 4 Ti 4200 -> Club3D Radeon 9600XT -> Asus GeForce 6800 LE (unlocked shaders via RivaTuner ofc)
    • Athlon XP 3000+ (CPU upgrade to previous system, yeah that was a mistake...)
    • Core 2 Duo E6420 (=3.21 GHz)
    • Leadtek Winfast GeForce 9600 GT -> used MSI 9800GTX+ -> Palit GeForce GTX 460 -> Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 core
    • Core i5 4670K (and 4690K due to delidding incident)
    • GTX 560 Ti 448 core -> GTX 560 Ti 448 core SLI -> Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X -> EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC+
    • Ryzen 5 1600
    • 980 Ti -> MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor
    • Ryzen 7 3800X (CPU upgrade, thank you AM4)
    • RTX 2070 -> MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio...
    Core 2 system was the first I bought and built myself completely from scratch during college.
    I had bought upgrade parts for previous systems myself but this was the first 100 % own.
     
    Last edited: May 24, 2021
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  6. Ryu5uzaku

    Ryu5uzaku Ancient Guru

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    I built my first one I with AMD thunderbird after that I've been building. We had during our times riva tnt, geforce 256, diamond viper, matrox g200 I think it was g200 or g400 not quite certain.
     
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  7. Lavcat

    Lavcat Master Guru

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  8. Lavcat

    Lavcat Master Guru

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    And I still have a Fortran II manual.
     
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  9. ManofGod

    ManofGod Ancient Guru

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    Yep, my first was a commodore 64 but, I did not own it long and switched to an Amiga 500. :)
     
  10. Lavcat

    Lavcat Master Guru

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    I misspoke. My manual is Fortran IV.

    I have a Commodore 128. I haven't powered it up for a while. The Commodore is sitting behind me on the bed. I love how in programs you can switch back and forth between two processors. Unfortunately you cannot run both processors at the same time.
     

  11. mbk1969

    mbk1969 Ancient Guru

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    Btw, my first desktop PC at work (1992) had a glitchy HDD which failed to spin-up at boot sometimes. There was a FDD face placeholder panel removed - and I helped the HDD to start spinning with my finger through that hole (HDD had a spindle protruding out of its case).

    My first home PC (2000) was a laptop (which my wife managed to blow a chipset up by trying to insert an external floppy drive cable into LPT port). But my second home laptop was interesting due to a desktop Pentium 3 Tualatin inside.
     
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  12. Caesar

    Caesar Ancient Guru

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    Dad struggling ....at that time....got a loan specially for computers ...around $900 :
    Pentium 4 - 3.2 GHz - 256 MB RAM - 80GB HDD
    ................

    I did my first and second year degree....without a home computer.....everything was at the University computer lab....
    that time was awesome
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2021
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  13. Caesar

    Caesar Ancient Guru

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    Who played Tomb Raider 1 on PC at that time>?
     
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  14. DocStr4ngelove

    DocStr4ngelove Ancient Guru

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    Got a C64 as a present from my Dad sometime in the 80ies. Had the Commodore 1530 Datasette with it at first and had 2 cassettes full of games.

    First thing to load was TurboTape II of course (TurboTape V5 later on).

    My fav games were
    InterKarate II
    Uridium
    Commando
    Zaxxon
    Who dares wins
    Beachhead
    Ghosts'n Goblins
    BubbleBobble
    Defender of the Crown (never succeeded in the tournaments, so turned to robbing treasure at night)
    The Last Ninja I+II (awesome music)
    ELITE (game was fun until i had 4 military lasers)
    Platoon
    Predator
    Bionic Commando (awesome music)

    If you're into C64 music and metal you should give Fastloaders a try:

     
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  15. CrazY_Milojko

    CrazY_Milojko Ancient Guru

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    C64 back in the 80s, smuggled by the JAT pilot from Great Britain in airplane cockpit (here it was impossible to legaly import such piece of tech backthen). Commodore 1531 Datasette + Star LC10 9pin dot matrix printer + Final Cartridge II and God knows how many tapes with games and QuickShot I & II joysticks (trashed on week basis by us and our friends, I was the one to repair those). Few years later Commodore 1541 5.25" FDD and acoustic coupler 300 baud modem for access to local Ecstasy BBS (short: XTC) in early 90s, that one was our first connection to outer world (it had chat, lots of software and pics for download, I could even send e-mails). Final Cartridge II was a lifesaver for my brother and me for playing games because backthen (for youngsters here: there was no option to save game backthen) we had more than one power blackouts per day while we were playing games on C64: FCII could dump complete content od C64's RAM to tape od FDD, like a save game feature, so that we could continue playing games like Elite with everything we bought and harvested in weeks/months before. C64 and all above C64 hardware still in my collection.

    Late 80 got ourself Amiga 500, a bit later additional 512MB memory expansion card. She's also in my collection.

    First PC back in 1995, it was smuglled by my uncle from L.A. in few giant suitcases stacked/packed between layers of cloth (everything except CRT monitor, keyboard and PC case he bought here in Yugoslavia for some insane amount of cash). He brought motherboard with (atm quite promissing) VESA Local Bus slot and 4 RAM slots, few RAM sticks, additional HDD controller card, 2x ISA sound card (Crystal"something" and ES"something"), Conner 420MB IDE HDD, 3.5" FDD drive, Intel 468DX2 50MHz CPU, some Trident graphics card (he brought one more powerfull Cyrus Logic 54xx graphics card but guess someone at our customs ripped from a bottom one of his suitcases and stole that one, boy uncle was pissed like a hell when he discovered but he could do nothing), Serial/RS232 US Robotics Sportster 14.4Kbps modem, Serial/RS232 3-button mouse (without scroll, and of course he had no optical sensor: ball and rollers on the bottom were like a magnet for dust), (probably first 4X CD-ROM drive in my country!!!) Mitsumi 4X CD-ROM IDE drive and (can't remember the model) some PSU. Few days before trip from L.A. to Yugoslavia he boght just released Windows 95. He assembled everything on the table outside of PC case. My brother, me, my girlfriend and our friends siting around we were looking at my uncle like a mad scientist while he was smoking cigarettes like a steam machine, drinking whisky and doing everything needed to breath a life into our first PC. At first we were disgusted: it was fugly as hell to look at that pile of HW connected together everywhere on the top of the table, our C64 and Amiga 500 were much more appealing to us. First he installed DOS 6.2.2 from few (was it 3 or 5?) 3.5" FDDs (still have them but guess they are unusable now) and then installed Win95 from original CD (still have that one). For all of us sitting around we were like: "...OK, nothing impressive..." ...but the moment my uncle (he did it to impress us, for sure) was typing something in the WordPerfect, Windows CD player was playing audio CD in Mitsumi 4X CD-ROM drive and Windows Media Player was playing AVI trailer for Rob Roy movie (copied for original Win95 CD to Conner 420MB HDD) and EVERYTHING AT THE SAME TIME all of us around: we were speachless, how the hell this is possible all at the same time!? Uncle left few days later, left me few books about DOS, the night before his flight back to L.A. he run the Stacker to compress content on HDD and make me more room on 420MB HDD and then Murphy's law hit us hard: power blackout happened over the night, everything on HDD was trashed: DOS, Windows... everything. Morning after uncle was so pissed, wanted to cancel the flight to L.A. (it was not so easy to do that here backthen), but my mom somehow managed to convince him to take the fight and I'll will take care of everything about PC. The moment he touched the ground in L.A. uncle called me and we talked for hours on phone, with his insructions I've managed to install DOS 6.2.2 and then Win95, drivers for everything, some programs... dude really had a patience, guess his phone bill that month was insane... Few weeks later I've discovered motherboard has some DIP swithes for setting bus clock in MHz, it was set to default 25MHz needed for 486DX2 50MHz, hmmm... Few minutes later I've set those to 33MHz, aaannnnnnddddd... BAAAAMMM!!! Intel 484DX2 50MHz was (later discovered it was fully stable) working @ 66MHz!!! It was my first successfull OC attempt, that moment I was hooked to OC :D

    Complete list of PC hardware from mid 90s till now probably would clogged up this thread so I won't bother to list anything more :)

    Back in 2007 I've discovered Guru3D, it's the year we got a first decent internet here in Serbia, it was ADSL 256Kb download / 64Kb upload. Backthen I was looking for the latest ATI Tray Tools to OC some ATI Radeon card I had backthen, found it here on Guru3D, it was ATI Tray Tools v.1.3.6.1042. Was a long time lurker here on Guru3D, finally "forced" myself to register back in 2013, the rest belongs to history...

    For those interested I've upladed to my Dropbox complete ATI Tray Tools v.1.3.6.1042 folder I still keep on one of my PCs (and many other stuff downloaded from Guru3D over the years). There is MHT file inside folder I've made in Internet Explorer backthen so one can take a look how Guru3D looked backten, taken from my "small" Guru3D time capsule :)

    https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lzc2alzeljn8z8w/AACWx-ZsHhUoq89mCd3Ho9Tra?dl=0

    Here is the screenshot of my saved MHT file for @Hilbert Hagedoorn and other old farts here to refresh their memory how Guru3D looked way back in May 2007

    Guru3DMay2007.JPG :
     
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  16. AsiJu

    AsiJu Ancient Guru

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    That's a great story and some Guru nostalgia at the end!

    I can picture your uncle putting together the PC, sipping whiskey and smoking, thinking darn kids with their Amigas and Commodores wouldn't know a good computer if it bit them in the ass!

    Btw iirc we never tried overclocking DX2-50 to 66 because didn't want to risk it.
    What a bunch of noobs we were.
     
  17. CrazY_Milojko

    CrazY_Milojko Ancient Guru

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    Uncle (my father's youngest brother) visited us somewhere in late 80s, iirc it was 1987 and brother and I we were still using C64 (year or two later we got us Amiga 500, here brutally expencive at that time) hooked on black&white TV via RF modulator inside C64. Unclee was completely shocked we were using B&W TV, also: "...how the heck they've packed computer inside the keyboard?... Computer tape reader/recorder, wth is that.."? He was quite dissapointed to see all that computer stuff we we using backthen, but we were perfectly happy because maybe 1 in 500 kids here had something like that, guess uncle never had a contact with home computers, backthen he worked as IT engineer for some big tech company and travelling back and forth from US to Japan (on average at least 300 days per year in airplanes or away from home, few years in a row) using at that time very powerful desktop PCs still unavailable for consumers, in his world: "color monitor is a normal stuff", if I tell you backthen in 1997 he came to visit us with prototype 17" laptop what can I say more, seeing that 17" portable state of the art laptop my brother and me we had our "back to the future moment" :D Also he talked about his new apartment he just bought, was it in L.A. or somewhere in Japan, some super-tech building with DLS 400Kbps internet link. He asked us what internet speed we are using (remember, it was 1997), we: "...Dial-Up... 14.4K... if the weather is fine, but on average 9.6Kbps or a bit higher...". Uncle: "...WHAT THE F..K iS THAT!?..". The way he was talking about tech in Japan for us poors here it was like he teleported himself from the future or something :D We couldn't explain him, while staying at us, that he can't be online 24/7 with his laptop using Dial-Up connection because we needed that telephone line (no one could call us when he as using Dial-Up connection)... and Dial-Up internet was freaking expencive here backthen! He liked to gamble online using that laptop till the late hours, smoking and drinking whiskey non-stop. Since then he was visiting us every other year to see the our progress using computers, also to smuggle some new PC hardware to upgrade our PCs. He was like a IT version of Nikola Tesla for my brother, me and our friends backthen, but his marriage suffered a lot because he was away from home most of the years, despite he was extremely well payed, few houses and appartments around the world, lots of cars... his marriage ended like a Titanic in early 2000s, but like he didn't cared for the marriage, wife returned back to Venezuela taking their daughter with her... weird stuff... Some 6, 7 years ago he retired, somewhat dissapointed, sold everything and moved from L.A. to Vankouver, Canada. His health is quite bad past few years, I feel sorry for him living completely alone without anyone from our family anywhere close to him (we have a lot of family in Canada, but on the opposite side of the coast, Toronto area), wish I could see him once more but he's so bad atm he couldn't even move from the appartment, he's so ill he couldn't even talk over the Skype with us last few times we called him. He's waiting for a surgery in next few days, it's going to be tough for him next few weeks, we worry a lot, not looking well for him, all we can do is to wait...

    When it comes to OC... Backthen in late 90s I was OCing like a mad scientist knowing even if I f#ck up something my uncle is gonna send us new PC stuff :D Lucky me I've never burner anything with OC, son of the electrical engineer who's OCD was to "cool everything as much good as possible" and at the begining of my PC career same OCD got transfered to my brain cells :D
     
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  18. Airbud

    Airbud Ancient Guru

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    CrazY_Milojko I love reading your post, they take me back in time... you should write a novel Buddy!....Love ya!

    PS: add some fishing stories and some pretty girls in there please...oh yea, BBQ too.

    :D
     
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  19. CrazY_Milojko

    CrazY_Milojko Ancient Guru

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    Ahahaha, you were not the only one telling me that, the number of weird and stupid situations I was in since my early 20s is just mind blowing, especially knowing people for us IT guys are projecting the picture in their minds like we are nolifers sitting all day in front of the computer :) Still thinking about writing the book, but no way it would be just one, plenty of material to write at least 2, maybe even 3. Tbh I got a feeling first book would just kick in one more OCD and already have them too much :D

    About the pretty girls stories here is the one 2 days ago. Although chick from the story it's not the one I'd like to roll over in bed, way skinny for my taste, I like more meat here and there, not just bones :D

    https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/rtss-6-7-0-beta-1.412822/page-159#post-5918733

    Tbh I feel sorry for any guy (maybe he doesn't like guys, who knows, weird time we're living at) who has to deal with this kind of... species, in lack for better word. Marrying this kind of b#tch would be my worse nightmare, not even with a gun barrel pointed to my head. How come some girl in her early 20s can become so b#chy!? I'm blessed to been married with my perfect match, more than often she's my common sence, God knows how many time she saved me from geting into trouble with her sober thinking. And it's just weird thinking I've met her while I was completely drunk (she told me not that moment when I've met her, by the end of the night I was, haven't remember anything that night, when I've woke up had just one land line phone number in my pocket as a reminder I did "something" that night lol) "working" like a DJ on birthday party of my sister (daughter from my uncle from mom's side) while backthen she (my sister ofc) was *SPAM* a brother of my present wife. You never know the paths the life is leading you through :)

    meet -> meat ...now I'm hungy :)
     
    Last edited: Jun 9, 2021
  20. AsiJu

    AsiJu Ancient Guru

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    Yeah that bitch personality I don't get, how someone can be so self-centered and oblivious to everything around her (or him).
    Never my fault, always someone else's, everything I do is right, nothing I do could - for example - bother someone else.

    Sadly I have a similar personality visiting the house next to me every now and then who owns a few dogs.
    She is supposedly a dog "trainer" but the way her dogs behave proves otherwise.

    The thing is she may start running and barking the dogs late in the evening when at least our daughter is trying to sleep.

    Especially the missus has tried telling her couldn't you run the dogs during the day or somewhere else (there are forest roads just some hundred meters away) but it's as if she doesn't even understand the sentence.
    Or says something but the same behavior continues.
    It's the neighbor usually who ends up having to tell the dogs to shut up, she is an older woman and has her wits about her, thankfully.

    It's the other way around for us, wife is more keen to react while I try to remain calm for longer but the thing pisses me off equally.
    Besides I know words are a waste with those people.

    Idk maybe if I once grabbed the woodchopping axe and went over there and shouted as hard as I can shut the frack up now would that help...

    or chainsaw....

    or hunting rifle from brother-in-law... nah I might be tempted to just shoot.
     

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