What was your first home computer and how powerful was it?

I got an IBM PC/XT (5160) when I started high school in 1983. It cost an absolutely obscene amount of money, something like $5,000 (~$15,000 today). My father had said he'd match however much I was able to put together, and I think he expected me to get the significantly cheaper 5150. In hindsight, he was right. The differences weren't actually worth the price. But I was a kid, and the XT was new and shiny, so that's what I bought.

That said, scrimping, saving, and hustling to be able to afford it really taught me the value of a dollar. I probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful as an adult if I hadn't put that work in as a child. So I guess it all worked out. Plus, my friends were super jealous.

I got this as a hand-me-down. It was a family friends laptop he split wine on so the keeb, mouse, and battery didn't work.

we were but I managed to scrounge together external keyboard and mice to use. I put so many linux distros on the things because the family friend had an old Fedora install on it. !zoomers !codecels origin story.

Prior we had a Dell prebuilt that ran Windows XP, I cut my teeth with Pokémon hacking with that.

I do have an 8-bit collection though. I've got a C64, VIC-20, TI-99\4A, TRS-80 and an Apple II+

Apple IIe

it only had green

1995 packard bell that cost $3000

It was beige, had AOL dialup which I wasn't allowed to use bc they charged by the minute, and constantly froze/crashed. It was on some super early version of a microsoft OS.

My parents said they didn't want to upgrade because the internet was useless, all they needed was a word processor, and that I should just read more books.

286 dx 33, ran DOS, WordPerfect 5.1 and Betrayal at Krondor

Commodore 64, useless toy, left me with a lifelong distaste for computer shit

My mom's hand me down laptop.

It struggled to run Civ 4 and Spore.

The tradeoff was I could download pron

The Commodore 128

128 kilobytes of random access memory, central processing unit clocked at 2 megahertz

but very little software was ever written to take advantage of all of this, because the 128 had a compatibility mode for the much more popular Commodore 64, using only 64 kilobytes at 1 megahertz.

This machine made it easy for you to read/write the contents of arbitrary bytes of memory, which is sadly generally frowned upon and discouraged by today's cuckputers. Also had a sweet synth chip

2008-9 I think? Phenom II dual-core, onboard radeon HD 3300, 2GB DDR3 and 500GB HGST, my dad brought me to Fry's with a $300 budget

AM3 was the tits, upgraded to a phenom X6 and it ran AAA games fine up to 2021

I think the old hard drive is still working too

I think our family computer was an Athlon from '98 that barely managed to run XP

GATEWAY GANG RISE UP

My family's first computer was a packard bell 386 computer. There was a physical lock on the computer that prevented it from being turned on which I tore through with a knife trying to "pick" it because I wanted to play Monopoly on it

It was my introduction to the internet, I would use Netscape navigator on it, before then America Online demo disks, before that was prodigy. Any of y'all neighbors remember prodigy?

Also played duke nukem 3d just fine. Back then there was no wasd + mouse combo, it was awkward arrow keys + ctrl and alt and shift and page up/down to look up and down

Mac LC2, 12Mhz processor I think. I had a SCSI cd drive and a 256 Mb external drive, it felt like more space than anyone could ever use. I learned photoshop and illustrator on that thing, I think I still have the disc's for photoshop 1.0 and illustrator 3. It's amazing to think I managed to do anything on that shit.

Mine was an Apple IIgs, 256k ram lol.

First one I'm a bit vague on. It was a Packard Bell 386 running Windows 3.1. Think it was 2nd hand from where my mum worked.

100MB HDD, 4MB ram, big floppy and little floppy drive, but no cd drive and no sound card.

The best thing we had on it was the Johnny Castaway screensaver:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Castaway

After that we eventually bought a 350mhz Pentium II with 64MB ram and an 8MB Intel AGP (lol) graphics card. It was amazing and it came bundled with a bunch of games like G-Police, Tonic Trouble, Jazz Jackrabbit 2.

Did most of my formative gaming on that including hours in Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires.

Some Gateway box with a Pentium 3 and a Voodoo 3. It wasn't much, but it could run The Sims and SimCity 3k so I was happy.

I don't remember what the few PCs i used were (they were technically my dads) but the first pc I got was a Sony Vaio tower computer

IBM Aptiva

AMD Athlon K6-2 500 MHz

64 MB RAM (upgraded to 128 MB when I stole a DIMM from a school computer)

4 GB HDD (upgraded to 40 GB when the original died)

CD-ROM drive (upgraded to CD writer when I got good school grades)

Intel 815(?) integrated graphics (upgraded to Voodoo Banshee 16 MB when I did something else good. I asked for a GeForce 4 MX 440 but the repair shop stiffed me)

An old Compaq desktop with a 250mhz Pentium II and 64mb ram. A ran an Ethernet cable under the house so I could get internet access to it in my room without my parents knowing.

NEC 4MB of RAM with a Cyrix MII-300 clocked at 299mhz.

I think a Dell with a Pentium D in like 2006. I was a freshman in high school iirc.

Neither of my parents had jobs that required computers and were not interested in them and basically said we could type our papers at the library or at school lol. Plus we were rurals so the internet was garbage here until like 2011 when they put fiber in my area.

We had a commodore 64 growing up that my dad bought for the family. I was allowed to use it to learn a bit with Basic, and I think I got a few of the older magazines type-in programs to work, but I don't remember really being allowed to use a computer seriously until I was in my teens with Windows 95.

The Mattel Aquarius, with a whopping 4096 bytes of RAM. I think my grandmother got it for free when it was discontinued.

Later we got a Tandy 1000...TX, maybe? I don't remember the exact model, but it had an 8 MHz 286 CPU and 640k RAM. Computers were expensive back then, so we held onto that one for like six years before upgrading.

This was before computers had learned to stand up. Rather than a tower, it had what was called a "desktop" form factor. It was about the same size as a tower, but it laid flat on the desk, and it could be used as a monitor stand.

Family first computer I it was some sort of ancient laptop from the early 90s provided by the university.

Then we had some gateway computer in 95 where I played sim games.

MY first computer to call my own was the emachines "never obsolete" model where I enjoyed Lego island, counter strike and WC3 and black and white, etc.

This bad boy got 16 colors, 1Mhz processor and had 64KB of ram

Get rekt.

1996 I think custom assemble Pentium 266mhz with an SIS pci gfx card, not even AGP

NEC Pentium 133. I think it had a 1.5GB HD and 16MB RAM. Definitely remember it had a 28.8 modem

I have no idea what the exact model was bc I was 3, but it was some kind of Mac. It used this system called "At Ease" which was like a grid of buttons my dad setup for our games. Basically the interface looked like this:

(except obviously with REAL games like Caesar II and SimCity 2000)

I remember d2 took more space than our computer even had...

It was a Compaq with 5GB of storage, and it made me want to kill all Compaq employees

Leading Edge WinTower 486.

486SX at 33MHz, probably 8MB RAM, Vesa-bus video card, 260mb hdd, and a 14" monitor running Windows 3.1. 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, Colorado tape backup.

It was later upgraded to Windows 95 with a 1.2GB hdd and an Evergreen Technologies OverDrive processor upgrade at 133MHz.

Second PC was an HP Pavilion 8580C purchased from Circuit City in 1999.

Pentium III 500MHz, 128MB, 20GB, and an Nvidia Riva TNT2. Had both a CD burner and DVD-ROM.

Atari ST - the old fashioned sound chip was crap to listen to but there was fun games - Formula 1 Grand Prix was the one I spent hours on, a 3D racer on real tracks when the other games were sprites and made-up tracks.

We had an Apple (one with green/black only display). A 286 and an Atari ST. Don't know which order (the Apple first probably). After that 386, 486, ...

Some MS-DOS box with a 5" floppy drive.

386DX 33Mhz

A 486 running at 96Mhz with a whopping 32MB ram

Played the shit out of Red Alert and Flight Simulator