The new Pentium PCs of 1993 and the memories that came with them

[Daehawk]

[hitbyambulance]

got a Pentium 60 from Acer as my graduation present. first gen with the FDIV bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug - it stopped working after a week! brought it back to Best Buy where they determined the CPU burned out (!) and received a Packard Bell in exchange that i used all the way through college until i sold it for cheap in 1998 (where where i went straight from DOS/Win 3.1 to Win 98SE on an AMD K6-2 400 custom built desktop PC i inherited from my recently deceased uncle). unfortunately the Acer monitor was not exchanged as well - it was always too dark, even when adjusted to maximum brightness - and i suffered with that thing for too long. i will say it was pretty cool for Doom and Quake and any 3D shooters released up to about 1997. i definitely picked up a computer virus from one of the college's computer labs on a 3.5" diskette and infected my machine with it - i seem to remember the main symptom was it would make clicking sounds through the buzzer whenever keyboard keys were pressed?

and remember, it was called "Pentium" because it succeeded the 486 machines (which succeeded the 386, which succeeded the 286, which succeeded the 8086/8088) - but that naming scheme was ruined with Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV and no "Sextium"

[Kraken]

My first gaming PC was a Pentium that I had built at a local screwdriver shop. Pentium II, I think it was. Must have been 1996.

[Punisher]

Https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos

[Daehawk]

Https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos

That's still a great song and video.

[Lassr]

My first gaming PC was a 386SX from Sam's. Damn, i can't remember the brand off the top of my head, but I remember seeing that brand a few years back when I was shopping and didn't realize they were still around.
I remember, ABS was the name brand. They are sold by NewEgg now.

My first Pentium was built at a PC shop. Pentium I, cannot remember the specs.

[Daehawk]

Wasn't a Pentium if it was a 386. Pentiums were 586's.

[Lassr]

Wasn't a Pentium if it was a 386. Pentiums were 586's.

Yep, I didn't mean to type Pentium there but it was on my brain because I was trying to remember where I got my first Pentium. I finally remembered and updated my post.

[Blackhawk]

Https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos

Installed a T1 line in my house
Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse

I remember around 2000, sitting there on a 56k dialup that only got 26.6k, listening to that song, and dreaming. Then a couple of years ago I decided to check what the actual speed of a T1 line was.

Wow. Livin' the dream!

[Kraken]

I owned a 386 and a 486 before I got my Pentium II, but they were shared with Wife and not gaming PCs.

[Punisher]

my first computer was purely for gaming.
In fact I bought it specifically to play the original Mechwarrior.
Double in fact, I bought the game first and took it eith me when I went computer shopping to make sure it worked.
Nobody would let me test it on their floor models...except for PC Richards! They let me install it and play it. I think that I spent about 2 hours playing and they never gave me a hatd time. Even though they were a bit more expensive than other places I bought it then and there specifically because of them doing this.
I think it was a Packard Bell 386 IIRC.

[Isgrimnur]

486 DX/2 66 MHz with a 405MB HDD made by AT&T, a QVC special.

[Kasey Chang]

I actually bought a NexGen based mainboard and CPU back then... Then sold it and replaced it with a Pentium 133, IIRC.

[hitbyambulance]

if we're talking about first PCs, it was an Apple ][e borrowed from the school on a few vacations

[Kasey Chang]

My first "PC" was a VIC20 my mom bought from a neighbor's garage sale. I played on it so much my grandpa smashed it into pieces.

It wasn't until a few years later that I got an Apple //e with DuoDisk and matching monochrome monitor. I don't think I got color until another 2 years later, LOL.

[Blackhawk]

Since we're comparing firsts...

486/66, 8MB RAM, 500MB hard drive, onboard audio, no 3d acceleration. I got it because I had a bunch of handwritten material that I wanted to get typed up. At least, that was the excuse. The truth was that I'd rented Warcraft for the Playstation 1 and absolutely loved it. When I saw a copy of Warcraft for the PC, the graphics, just from the box, blew me away. But since my excuse was that it was for writing, I couldn't exactly go out and buy a full-priced game. What I did do was pick up a discount copy of Lords of the Realm II with a "Why not? Can't hurt." Lords of the Realm II was a gateway drug. It led me to Total Annihilation, which led me to my first PC upgrade (I got some extra RAM so I could play the bigger maps.) The pattern has never waned.

I didn't 'own' that PC, technically - I got it from Rent-to-Own, something that I now cringe about (I wasn't the smartest kid...) I didn't know the first thing about gaming, and the machine I'd gotten was already years out of date by the time it came to live with me (this was in 1998, and it was 1992 tech.) After a few months with that thing, four or five months spent picking up box after box and reading, "Requires Pentium 133 or higher", I traded it in for a low-end Pentium (maybe a 166?) with more RAM. I then paid for my second upgrade - even morer RAM (now I could play all of the Total Annihiliation maps!) I won't even get into the idiocy of paying to upgrade a rent-to-own PC (which they still owned, including my paid-for upgrades.) And that led to my third upgrade - I went out and bought myself a Diamond Voodoo 2 passthrough 3d accelerator. I was nervous as hell installing that thing, but it worked just fine. And since I'd installed it myself, a few months later when I gave it back to them, I was able to yank the video card myself.

I'd found a local place that had a similar rent-to-own deal going on, but with much, much better terms, and it came with a promise of a CPU upgrade when it was paid off. So I RTOd (again), this time a Celeron 333. By the time it was paid off, I'd doubled the RAM (up to 128MB), and had upgraded the video card to a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. We paid it off a week or two before we left Reno for Indiana, and just a few months before I met all of you discontents. They were dicks when we called them on the agreement for a CPU upgrade, but they grudgingly put in an Intel Celery 500, which was just shy of cutting edge. With that and my Voodoo 3, I had an actual gaming PC for the first time.

And wow, did I have a lot of memories on that machine. Deus Ex, Thief 1 and 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, System Shock, Diablo 1 & 2. I lived with that machine for years, even when it had slowed to the point that it would barely run anything (I'm pretty sure it's the system I played Morrowind on at 15 FPS.) By that point I'd ended up on disability, but hadn't actually gotten the money coming in yet, so upgrades weren't going to happen. It was then that I learned how to really tinker under the hood, learning every setting and tweak for Windows 98 that I could, adjusting the motherboard, you name it. By the time I had money for parts again, I didn't hesitate to build my own, something that's never changed.

[Isgrimnur]

My first "PC" was a VIC20 my mom bought from a neighbor's garage sale. I played on it so much my grandpa smashed it into pieces.

Such a healthy family dynamic. You have my sympathy.

[Kraken]

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 EX. I bought it for Wife to start a freelance business, since she was otherwise unemployed at the time. Meant strictly for word processing, I took no interest in it until someone showed me Starflight.

[Blackhawk]

Geeze, you people with your efficient, succinct stories.

[Kasey Chang]

Such a healthy family dynamic. You have my sympathy.

To be fair, I was 9 at the time.

[Isgrimnur]

Such a healthy family dynamic. You have my sympathy.

To be fair, I was 9 at the time.

Your age doesn't matter. Instead of teaching you about moderation and controlling yourself, he destroyed something of value that belonged to someone he loves (I assume).

[Carpet_pissr]

My first gaming PC was a 386SX from Sam's. Damn, i can't remember the brand off the top of my head, but I remember seeing that brand a few years back when I was shopping and didn't realize they were still around.

Same! Except mine was a DX and not an SX, but it was definitely from Sam's Club. It also was the computer that started me on my "you WILL build/modify/upgrade your own computers from now until....2023 (at least)!"

I think I added a Sound Blaster or Ad Lib card, and not sure if it was the same computer, but added a Roland "daughter" card for better music as well. I still remember being absolutely floored at the difference the Roland card made vs the AdLib or whatever I had been using. IIRC one of the titles where that Roland card was off the charts amazing was with X-Wing, but also Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

https://youtu.be/BMmFcs-_4x4

For anyone that wants to revist the differences between Soundblaster/Adlib, PC speaker and the Roland card, click away! You can skip directly to 3:40 (for the comparos) and 12:30 for more game music on the Roland.

[hitbyambulance]

or this



(i ordered this cassette directly from Sierra On-Line, and i listened to it SO MUCH. _begged_ the parents to get us a Roland MT-32 for xmas. no no, toooo expensive. but we did get the AdLib for the 286. "AdLib at 1:59 I love that card. At least 1/3 as good as an MT32 and less than 1/3 the price! ")

[Kraken]

Geeze, you people with your efficient, succinct stories.

Whenever I start to tell a story verbally, I can see my listener start to check out halfway through the second sentence. So I try not to go over three.

[Blackhawk]

In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.
His nephew threw the family jewelry into a fire.
They lived happily ever after.


(Peter Jackson would still make a trilogy out of it.)

[Daehawk]

In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.
His nephew threw the family jewelry into a fire.
They lived happily ever after.


(Peter Jackson would still make a trilogy out of it.)

[Carpet_pissr]

Thanks. Spewed coffee all over my dog and now cleaning him off. :/

[Montag]

Epson Equity 1 - 8088 with 12 MHz turbo button! The first game was Cinemaware's Rocket Ranger. We upgraded that bad boy with EGA graphics and threw in a 20 MB ISA slot hard drive card.

[Zaxxon]

Compaq DeskPro 286e, running at a blistering 12 MHz. 1 MB RAM and a 40 MB HDD. This was 1989, I believe. 2400 baud modem. I remember sneaking down to the computer in the middle of the night to get my Jazz Jackrabbit demo downloading early.

[Victoria Raverna]

My first PC (gaming PC? since I played games with it) is an IBM compatible Intel 8088 PC.

[Kasey Chang]

PC History, hmmm... I know I mentioned my Apple //e earlier. Actually bought the PC Transporter card for it that turned it into a x86, but didn't like it, ended up returning it. Then sold the Apple //e to buy a... Tandy 1000 SL for college. Then had to trade it in a month later for a Tandy 1000 TL because the SL only had 384K of RAM, and I had to take a class which required a compiler that needed 640K, and my local Radio Shack did not have the RAM kit available (it's backordered until who knows wehn). The side effect is the 1000 TL is actually a 286 (but still has Tandy 1000's PC jr graphics).

Later I added another 128K of RAM, to make 768K of RAM, so it was able to run the Radio Shack exclusive Tandy 1000 version of Wing Commander, LOL.

Even later, I opened up the inside and added a 40 MB Miniscribe hard drive.

Eventually I sold the computer when I moved to California, and bought a 486 at my "local" PC store. I remember blowing out no less than 2 monitors because I picked a refresh rate that's too much for the monitor. There were good old 15 inch CRTs.

Then we got to the NextGen 586 I talked about earlier. Replaced that with a Pentium.

Eventually bought a Toshiba laptop on clearance at an Office Depot 45 minutes from where I lived, I remember playing original Borderlands on it, so much so I ended up frying the mainboard. Learned my lesson, went on eBay and bought a Dell XPS 17, the the version that had the original Core i7. This was a beast, as it was able to take RAM and HD upgrades. Even got an external monitor so I ran both at once. Used that for about 5 years before buying my current system off Amazon: iBuyPower Core i7-9700K w/ RTX 2070.