Some x8086 monstrosity with amber monochrome screen & 2 (!) 5,25" drives. I forgot the specs by now. Just enough to run Space Quest 3 but not SQ4.

CPU: Pentium 150 MHz
RAM: 16 Mb
Videocard: S3 Trio64V+ 1Mb
HDD: 1.7Gb
Monitor: Samsung Syncmaster 15" (i used 1024x768 display resolution)
OS: Windows 95

I had an HP scanner with a SCSI interface. Had to dismiss it, because new computer (Pentium 3) didn't had ISA interface on motherboard for SCSI card. :/
Good times. =)

No idea about the brand.

It's an 8086 Intel with 2 big floppy drives. Use DOS on 1st floppy and anything else on 2nd one. Monitor was only 4 colors.

Played some old DOS games. Round 42, digger, burger time, golden axe, megaman, but most amazing game I played on it was the original Prince of Persia. I played it so many times I build muscle memory. Even now I believe I can still finish the game although not as good as I used to

386's, how modern. Can definitely remember having a Spectrum 48k. Had an Acorn as well. Used a Nimbus (ostensibly for school, but more Granny's Garden).

An example, I remember playing R-Type, and after each level having to press play on the tape to load the next level, after about 30 or so it would crash. And you even had to turn the tape over.

Hard to think a tiny memory card can hold over 200gb nowadays. I remember trying to PKZIP (way before windows :o) the command and conquer demo, over 7 3.5" discs. Good days.

the first computer I owned was an Amstrad PC 1512, an exposition model that I kept for years

PC XT intel 8086 8Mhz
512 KB ram
single 5.25 inches floppy
10 MB HDD card
MS DOS 3.2
GEM GUI
CGA ( the very specific Amstrad iteration of it )

I had previously had the occasion to use both an IBM 8088 with dos 2.3 and a CPC

I used the 1512 from 1986 till 1990, where I could get a 80386 (DX 33Mhz, coupled to a 80387 co-processor ), a system that I kept for years, first with a VGA, than SVGA card.

Same experience ;-)

Although I must say games were not the main use of my XT. Used it more as a writing machine actually, with, occasionally, some play time. PoP, Gunship, Chuck Yeager, Falcon, Crusade in Europe are the games I remeber foundly. The 386 by contrast was heavily used for gaming, CIV, Railroad Tycoon, Pïrates, Sword of the Samurai, Might and Magic, Laura Bow, Aces of the Pacific were the gems I got access to with that "modern system"

The first computer I owned was an IBM PC/AT clone, with some modification:

Intel 80286 12 MHz (with a button to slow it down to 8 MHz)
640 KB RAM (you know, it is in fact 1 MB)
two 5.25-inch floppy drives
MGC video card (MDA clone with CGA-compatible grayscale effect.)
MS-DOS 3.3
no hard drive, nor sound card

The first computer I played was an Apple ][ clone, with cassette recorder, and later a floppy drive.

Timex/ Sinclair 1000.
Z80 @ 3.25 Mhz
2 KB ram (eventually 16 KB ram w/ expander)
No HD or FDD, saved/loaded from cassette tape
No color or sound.. "monitor" was B&W TV.


Yep.. I'm old. :-)

I hope that you used Norton Comander, it was the best programm for managing your files on a DOS (Denial of Service?) computer.
Without NC, only with DOS commands, it was very complicated to ZIP a huge file and split it, so you can put the parts on several diskettes.

Nope, just used plain DOS commands. It was pretty easy to do with PKWare, simple command line split over multiple disks. I had a dodgy disk though, so number 5 always failed. Got a new disk and it was fine.

Well, NC was the real McCoy back then. I didn`t only use it on DOS, but also on the Win 95 and Win 98 PCs I had later, because filemanagement was so freaking easy with it. :-)

I'm only in mid thirty, but Norton commander and PKZIP sure bring back memories :)

none of them good i am sure

Our first family computer was the Xerox 820. My mom worked for Xerox at the time and the company gave key employees computers to take home so they could get comfortable in using them. This thing was awsome, I used to play a text adventure game called Adventure that was on an 8 inch floppy disk. Also, because my mom was in a managment position she was given her choice of "color" monitors. Instead of white letters on a black screen she could get a monitor that used orange or one that used green. We had the green one and it was awesome!


My first PC that I got for myself was Pentium 2 system that I built myself. I had a VooDoo Banshee graphics card and splurged for an enormous hard drive, 10 GB! I wondered just how long it would take to use up a hard drive that big.

Well, my parents didn't want us to play video games too much back them so they didn't buy us any console. Instead they bought the PC so we can learn to use computer

Hehehe, learn

Anyway, when you don't have any console you'd thinker with anything at your hand. So yeah, some of them are good memories :)

Well , actually for me, quite good memories. Using PKZIP, Dos Shell, multiple boot configs in DOS 5.1 & 6.2 to get the right memory profile for a given game, programing a centipede-like in Turbo Pascal, getting a recent MacAfee version, shareware distribution, and many other things were part of a wholy different user experience from what our daily windows use is. But attached to that was a sense of discovery and evolution that is now lost.

Norton was once a great company with great software, and that probably explains why their antivirus software still sells nowadays ( not to me. Once ended up reformatting my rig because of that soft, lesson learnt )