Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes!

MunnabhaiMBBS · 18th November 2020, 19:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr.Boss

Keyboard & Mouse : PS2, roller ball type mouse

Oh! And those rollers would require frequent cleaning too!

Quote:

Originally Posted by saket77

Also remember having a 'sancharnet' dial up connection with the modem making funny noises while connecting.

I actually discovered it very late that I could "mute" that noise by accessing modem through "Device manager"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leoshashi

December 1999
-Had a huge 19 inch monitor with speakers mounted on sides. Was a big thing for its time.

That was surely one of the gorgeous looking monitors!

Quote:

Originally Posted by mayankk

Installation was done through 20-30 3" FDDs, which used to be done almost every 4-5 months. God help you if even one got corrupted!

Ah! You said it! Those floppies with "Bad Sector" error.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gansan

This is what I bought, assembled, in 1999. This photo is the actual quotation for it. Need I say more?!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sreejithkk

Make : Assembled in 2001
OS : Windows Me (Later upgraded to XP, when it was available)

It was indeed a very "Cute" O/S built on NT. IIRC, it did not have the command prompt(!?).

Quote:

Originally Posted by reignofchaos

8MB EDO RAM (Later upgraded to 32)
Sound Blaster 16 + Creative 8X CD Rom + Some speakers
.

I remember those tiny EDO Rams! First it was a Sound Blaster 16 and then Creative Vibra 128 -> Wonderful sound cards! Then came the onboard sound card

Quote:

Originally Posted by padmrajravi

This was the first computer that I saw. It supported some primitive version of BASIC programming language and even had a small floppy disk-like thing. Looked something like this.

Classic! Thanks for sharing!

Quote:

Originally Posted by anandhsub

Had a Satyam 32kbps internet connection (100 hours in the morning + 100 hours at night)

See, technically we all had the "unlimited" internet back then!

GTO · 19th November 2020, 09:17

Nice thread! I don't remember the exact configuration, but my first PC was a Zenith bought in 1999-2000. With the MTNL dial-up internet then, it sure opened up a whole new world!

My first laptop was this. Kids of today will find the bold area hard to believe

. This was the laptop that took Team-BHP live though!

Quote:

Originally Posted by GTO

Mine:

Compaq X1000 Laptop

1. Pentium Centrino 1.4 Ghz Processor
2. 60G 5400 rpm Hard drive
3. 512 MB Ram
4. WSXGA+ 1680x1050 resolution 15.4 inch widescreen.
5. 64 MB Video Card.
6. 3000w Altec Lansing Speakers with Subwoofer (External).
7. DVD/CDRW with external Yamaha CRW-F1 burner (am damn particular about my music quality)

Its lightning fast, and I reinstall the OS myself every three months to have a clean system. Have the hard drive partitioned into 3 parts of 20G's each.

landcruiser123 · 19th November 2020, 10:03

Well, mine was a system dad bought from a WIPRO store which was offering everyone in his company home desktop PCs at corporate prices. I was excited to get a computer at the age of 5.

In late 1999 or early 2000, we had:
1. An Intel Celeron 1.x Ghz processor (I know it was lower than 1.5 Ghz)
2. 1.9 GB of HDD
3. 256MB of RAM
4. 2 speakers + woofer. These were solid and outlasted the PC, compared to the garbage iBall or similar made.
5. We had a Mic which had a base and a stalk
6. CD drive (talk about missing features today haha)
7. Floppy Drive

Use:
1. Mom & I would talk to dad (who frequently went to the US) on Yahoo messenger over a BSNL dial-up connection.
2. I'd play Roadrash, NFS, Wolf, Hearts, Solitaire etc.

deathwalkr · 19th November 2020, 10:13

My first PC? 1994 or so i think.

Pentium (Forgot the series. Way before Celeron) 60 i think?
16MB RAM or was it 8?
500MB HDD
Windows 3.1 i think it was

Came with shareware versions of Doom, Heretic and Raptor. Oh man did i play the heck out of those games

TheHelix0202 · 19th November 2020, 10:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by GTO

My first laptop was this. Kids of today will find the bold area hard to believe

. This was the laptop that took Team-BHP live though!

Hey GTO, I was going through Rtech's old laptop thread from 2004 and I was indeed surprised to see that 30 gb of HD space and 625-ish mb of RAM were considered decent specs back then

RadixLecti · 19th November 2020, 10:31

My first PC was an Amstrad PC1512
which my parents bought in 1988 or 1989.

It had an 8086 processor and 512 KB of RAM. It had no hard drive, but had two 5.25" floppy drives.

The Wikipedia article mentions that the processor was able to run Prince of Persia. While this is true, in my case the game had to be split over two floppy disks, and I would have to keep swapping them between drive A and drive B until the whole game was in the memory. It would also only run in four colour mode, so the prince's skin was magenta.

Amazingly, it didn't give a single problem in the 10 years we used it until finally upgrading to a Pentium 166MMX in about 1998.

bejoy · 19th November 2020, 12:14

Year 1997
Assembled PC:
Pentium MMX 133MHz
16MB RAM
40MB HDD (Upgraded to 1GB HDD for a princely sum of 10K in 1998)
Hansol 14" Color monitor
33.6kBps Modem (Upgraded to US Robotics 56kbps Modem later)
VSNL Dial-up connection

VSNL had two kinds of accounts. Shell only and TCP/IP. The difference in cost was 3 times.
These guys came up with a windows patch that could access full TCP/IP with a shell account. It was simply unbelievable back then.
https://www.xtendtech.com/ss/

dragonfire · 19th November 2020, 12:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by MunnabhaiMBBS

It was indeed a very "Cute" O/S built on NT. IIRC, it did not have the command prompt(!?).

Windows Me wasn't built on NT, but was the successor to Windows 98. In fact Windows 2000 was built on NT, but since it had compatibility issues with a lot of Windows programs, they decided to revive the Windows 9x line and brought out the Me. I think Me was the buggiest of all Windows releases, with perhaps Vista coming close to it.

BTW, my first computer had a Pentium 100 with 8MB of RAM, 1.2GB hard disk and ran Windows 95.

tchsvy · 19th November 2020, 13:16

Mine was an assembled PC, with following configuration back in 2002:

Intel Celeron 1.1 GHz processor
Gigabyte M/B
128MB RAM
40GB HDD
QHMPL ATX cabinet
Floppy Disk
LG CD Writer
Creative Speakers
14" Samsung Monitor
PS2 Keyboard & Mouse Combo
BSNL dialup connection

aadya · 19th November 2020, 13:32

Ours was the first family to purchase computer for personal use in our town and it was in 1995

Wipro Super Genius Intel 486 DX2
8MB RAM could be sped up to 32MB by some Toggle switch
Had both 3.5 and 5.25 Floppy disc slots.
Black and white LCD monitor
WIPRO(TVS) printer
Later installed Windows 95 and Mouse to it
Ran IBM OS2 Warp before installing Windows 95 - Used to crash freuqently but the screen had a Cat which will catch mouse pointer whenever it stops
Had Lotus 1-2-3, Dbase, Basic, Fortran and etc.,
Bought it mainly for Accounting using Tally - I did voucher entry myself 25000 odd entries over first 3 months.
Had Prince 1 game installed and Level 10 was the big block for almost an year.
Got VSNL Dialup in 1997(had to wait in VSNL office for 2 days for connections procedure)

FarPatel · 19th November 2020, 15:00

You guys make me feel really old.
The first compact, portable computer I used (company's; not my own) was an HP 85. This was in 1985-86 when I was a young mud-logger on offshore oil rigs. I was too young then to know anything about RAM, ROM, HDD, etc. Just knew how to use it for inputting my technical work into it. It had a slot in the back to insert various modules, like a maths co-pro and others which I cannot remember now. And it had a really thick cable, on which you could piggy-back other connections, somewhat like using multiple USB ports today to connect your mouse, printer, ext HDD etc. It didn't have any memory of its own and its programs were stored in small, compact cassettes.
Oh, and it had a small in-built printer, using thermal paper. You can see both the printer as well as the cassette in the pic below.

Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes!-hp-85-computer.jpg

7000plusrpm · 19th November 2020, 17:27

I have just one word for this thread, wow!

Below was my first ever computer, parts zeroed down by me and assembled with the help of a senior in 2006.

Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor
Intel original motherboard
2 x 512MB DDR2 RAM
160GB HDD
Some generic cabinet and SMPS (!)
LG DVD Writer
Creative 2.0 Speakers
Some LG CRT Monitor
PS2 Keyboard & Mouse

Intended Usage - Programming!

Actual usage
Gaming: FIFA/PES/Football Manager/Mafia/May Payne etc, and Movies!

Used for 4 years before I had moved out of Kolkata for my first job. It used to run 24x7 (for some p2p downloads) and never had a problem.
My college mates would come to my place just to see the computer with 1GB of RAM!

Good times!

MunnabhaiMBBS · 19th November 2020, 20:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by GTO

My first laptop was this. Kids of today will find the bold area hard to believe

. This was the laptop that took Team-BHP live though!

It was indeed rich in specs for that time!

Quote:

Originally Posted by landcruiser123

I'd play Roadrash, NFS, Wolf, Hearts, Solitaire etc.

NFS, RoadRash = Classics!

Quote:

Originally Posted by deathwalkr

Came with shareware versions of Doom, Heretic and Raptor. Oh man did i play the heck out of those games

Remember IDDQD, IDKFA, God mode and what not?!

Quote:

Originally Posted by RadixLecti

It had an 8086 processor and 512 KB of RAM. It had no hard drive, but had .

512KB of RAM back then? = I am jealous!

Quote:

Originally Posted by aadya

8MB RAM could be sped up to 32MB by some Toggle switch
Had Prince 1 game installed and Level 10 was the big block for almost an year.

Wow! That toggling RAM is a new thing for me! Never heard of it.
Price 1 = Even those basic mono sounds used to give goose bumps after crossing a level!

Quote:

Originally Posted by FarPatel

The first compact, portable computer I used (company's; not my own) was an HP 85.

Simply Amazing! Thanks for sharing!

Quote:

Originally Posted by 7000plusrpm

I have just one word for this thread, wow!
Actual usage
Gaming: FIFA/PES/Football Manager/Mafia/May Payne etc, and Movies!
Good times!

Good times, Indeed!!!

deathwalkr · 20th November 2020, 08:54

Ha ha yeah, the cheat codes were good fun. Then in a brainwave moment i tried using it in Heretic since both games were from the same developer

Typed in iddqd with a grin on my face only for screen to go red and me getting killed off with a message "die, you cheater"!!!

sandeepmohan · 20th November 2020, 09:25

Got my first PC rather late but it was spec-ed to the max for its time.

AMD Athlon 900Mhz
Asus full ATX motherboard
128MB Hynix Ram
40Gb Seagate Hard drive
32Mb nvidia Ge Force 256 GPU card
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 with the front panel Midi, Firewire interface
Some run off the mill cabinet
A TVS Mechanical keyboard
Epson Color Printer
Philips 19" Brilliance CRT monitor.
Pirated copy of Windows
APC 500VA UPS
Logitech 2.1 speaker system.

Some points about this PC. To start, we paid well over a lac for this computer. Father funded off course. You could fry an egg on that AMD CPU. The GPU card came with 3D Glasses but I hardly ever used it. The sound quality of the dedicated sound card was the best I'd ever heard at the time. The Philips monitor had a Hitachi picture tube in it. The Logitech speaker system was made up of two slender speakers and a compact little sub woofer with adjustable woofer level. It was the best computer audio speaker for its time and set us back Rs. 9000!

The cabinet (minus the power supply) and TVS keyboard are still in use.

19th November 2020, 10:03	#18
landcruiser123 Senior - BHPian Join Date: Jun 2015 Location: Chicagoland Posts: 2,985 Thanked: 6,857 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! Well, mine was a system dad bought from a WIPRO store which was offering everyone in his company home desktop PCs at corporate prices. I was excited to get a computer at the age of 5. In late 1999 or early 2000, we had: 1. An Intel Celeron 1.x Ghz processor (I know it was lower than 1.5 Ghz) 2. 1.9 GB of HDD 3. 256MB of RAM 4. 2 speakers + woofer. These were solid and outlasted the PC, compared to the garbage iBall or similar made. 5. We had a Mic which had a base and a stalk 6. CD drive (talk about missing features today haha) 7. Floppy Drive Use: 1. Mom & I would talk to dad (who frequently went to the US) on Yahoo messenger over a BSNL dial-up connection. 2. I'd play Roadrash, NFS, Wolf, Hearts, Solitaire etc.
	(2) Thanks

19th November 2020, 10:13	#19
deathwalkr Senior - BHPian Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Trivandrum Posts: 1,283 Thanked: 4,119 Times View My Garage	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! My first PC? 1994 or so i think. Pentium (Forgot the series. Way before Celeron) 60 i think? 16MB RAM or was it 8? 500MB HDD Windows 3.1 i think it was Came with shareware versions of Doom, Heretic and Raptor. Oh man did i play the heck out of those games
	(2) Thanks

19th November 2020, 10:31	#21
RadixLecti BHPian Join Date: Nov 2020 Location: Poona Posts: 55 Thanked: 341 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! My first PC was an Amstrad PC1512 which my parents bought in 1988 or 1989. It had an 8086 processor and 512 KB of RAM. It had no hard drive, but had two 5.25" floppy drives. The Wikipedia article mentions that the processor was able to run Prince of Persia. While this is true, in my case the game had to be split over two floppy disks, and I would have to keep swapping them between drive A and drive B until the whole game was in the memory. It would also only run in four colour mode, so the prince's skin was magenta. Amazingly, it didn't give a single problem in the 10 years we used it until finally upgrading to a Pentium 166MMX in about 1998.
	(5) Thanks

19th November 2020, 12:14	#22
bejoy BHPian Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Bangalore Posts: 923 Thanked: 1,405 Times View My Garage	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! Year 1997 Assembled PC: Pentium MMX 133MHz 16MB RAM 40MB HDD (Upgraded to 1GB HDD for a princely sum of 10K in 1998) Hansol 14" Color monitor 33.6kBps Modem (Upgraded to US Robotics 56kbps Modem later) VSNL Dial-up connection VSNL had two kinds of accounts. Shell only and TCP/IP. The difference in cost was 3 times. These guys came up with a windows patch that could access full TCP/IP with a shell account. It was simply unbelievable back then. https://www.xtendtech.com/ss/
	(2) Thanks

19th November 2020, 13:16	#24
tchsvy BHPian Join Date: May 2018 Location: Hyderabad Posts: 237 Thanked: 738 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! Mine was an assembled PC, with following configuration back in 2002: Intel Celeron 1.1 GHz processor Gigabyte M/B 128MB RAM 40GB HDD QHMPL ATX cabinet Floppy Disk LG CD Writer Creative Speakers 14" Samsung Monitor PS2 Keyboard & Mouse Combo BSNL dialup connection
	(2) Thanks

19th November 2020, 13:32	#25
aadya BHPian Join Date: Dec 2016 Location: BANGALORE Posts: 297 Thanked: 1,270 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! Ours was the first family to purchase computer for personal use in our town and it was in 1995 Wipro Super Genius Intel 486 DX2 8MB RAM could be sped up to 32MB by some Toggle switch Had both 3.5 and 5.25 Floppy disc slots. Black and white LCD monitor WIPRO(TVS) printer Later installed Windows 95 and Mouse to it Ran IBM OS2 Warp before installing Windows 95 - Used to crash freuqently but the screen had a Cat which will catch mouse pointer whenever it stops Had Lotus 1-2-3, Dbase, Basic, Fortran and etc., Bought it mainly for Accounting using Tally - I did voucher entry myself 25000 odd entries over first 3 months. Had Prince 1 game installed and Level 10 was the big block for almost an year. Got VSNL Dialup in 1997(had to wait in VSNL office for 2 days for connections procedure) Last edited by aadya : 19th November 2020 at 13:33.
	(1) Thanks

19th November 2020, 15:00	#26
FarPatel BHPian Join Date: Oct 2012 Location: Mumbai Posts: 247 Thanked: 328 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! You guys make me feel really old. The first compact, portable computer I used (company's; not my own) was an HP 85. This was in 1985-86 when I was a young mud-logger on offshore oil rigs. I was too young then to know anything about RAM, ROM, HDD, etc. Just knew how to use it for inputting my technical work into it. It had a slot in the back to insert various modules, like a maths co-pro and others which I cannot remember now. And it had a really thick cable, on which you could piggy-back other connections, somewhat like using multiple USB ports today to connect your mouse, printer, ext HDD etc. It didn't have any memory of its own and its programs were stored in small, compact cassettes. Oh, and it had a small in-built printer, using thermal paper. You can see both the printer as well as the cassette in the pic below. Last edited by aah78 : 21st November 2020 at 04:33. Reason: Picture inserted in-line.
	(10) Thanks

19th November 2020, 17:27	#27
7000plusrpm BHPian Join Date: Mar 2020 Location: Kolkata Posts: 188 Thanked: 553 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! I have just one word for this thread, wow! Below was my first ever computer, parts zeroed down by me and assembled with the help of a senior in 2006. Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor Intel original motherboard 2 x 512MB DDR2 RAM 160GB HDD Some generic cabinet and SMPS (!) LG DVD Writer Creative 2.0 Speakers Some LG CRT Monitor PS2 Keyboard & Mouse Intended Usage - Programming! Actual usage Gaming: FIFA/PES/Football Manager/Mafia/May Payne etc, and Movies! Used for 4 years before I had moved out of Kolkata for my first job. It used to run 24x7 (for some p2p downloads) and never had a problem. My college mates would come to my place just to see the computer with 1GB of RAM! Good times!
	(3) Thanks

20th November 2020, 08:54	#29
deathwalkr Senior - BHPian Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Trivandrum Posts: 1,283 Thanked: 4,119 Times View My Garage	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! Ha ha yeah, the cheat codes were good fun. Then in a brainwave moment i tried using it in Heretic since both games were from the same developer Typed in iddqd with a grin on my face only for screen to go red and me getting killed off with a message "die, you cheater"!!!
	() Thanks

20th November 2020, 09:25	#30
sandeepmohan Senior - BHPian Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: Wellington Posts: 3,133 Thanked: 5,443 Times	Re: Configuration of your first computer and anecdotes! Got my first PC rather late but it was spec-ed to the max for its time. AMD Athlon 900Mhz Asus full ATX motherboard 128MB Hynix Ram 40Gb Seagate Hard drive 32Mb nvidia Ge Force 256 GPU card Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 with the front panel Midi, Firewire interface Some run off the mill cabinet A TVS Mechanical keyboard Epson Color Printer Philips 19" Brilliance CRT monitor. Pirated copy of Windows APC 500VA UPS Logitech 2.1 speaker system. Some points about this PC. To start, we paid well over a lac for this computer. Father funded off course. You could fry an egg on that AMD CPU. The GPU card came with 3D Glasses but I hardly ever used it. The sound quality of the dedicated sound card was the best I'd ever heard at the time. The Philips monitor had a Hitachi picture tube in it. The Logitech speaker system was made up of two slender speakers and a compact little sub woofer with adjustable woofer level. It was the best computer audio speaker for its time and set us back Rs. 9000! The cabinet (minus the power supply) and TVS keyboard are still in use.
	(1) Thanks