I was about 7 or 8 years old and got sat in front of an old BBC computer, I was amazed that one key could have two different functions, I also had a commodore 64 at home around the same age and used to love playing Dizzy the egg on it, however I had a bit of a hiatus and only really played on Sega/Nintendo systems until I got to a young teenager, it wasn't until I was 13 and we got our first windows machine in the house (P166 CPU and windows 95)that I really got interested in the actual workings of a PC, and then when I was 15 I finally got my own machine and my mother nearly had a heart attack when she came into my room and found me with the PC opened up (I was replacing the video card with a voodoo4, ah memories, I miss you unreal tournament!) - the knowledge of putting hardware together was passed down to me from an older friend I had and I just went from there, researching on the (slow 56k dial up) internet and asking him for help if I got stuck with something.
Circa 1992 I had an Amiga 1200, which I loved (edit - prior to which I'd had ZX Spectrums since about 1983).
But then I remember seeing promo videos for two PC games from Ocean, called TFX (Tactical Fighter Experiment, and Inferno (both used the same engine), and realised how much more impressive PC gaming looked even at that early stage.
Just after that I went to uni and a few guys in my halls had 386 or 486 PC's, and so started playing stuff like Indycar Racing and F1 Grand Prix. VGA PC's were lower res than the Amiga back then, but polygon counts and frame rates were miles better than my Amiga. I realised then I needed a PC, so got my first one around 1993 I think (a 486 DX2/66).
Back then I didn't have a clue, so couldn't understand why my shiny new DX2 performed poorly compared to my friend's. Eventually we twigged that it was because his CPU was Intel, and mine was Cyrix. Still it was fun though, and got me locked into the whole never-ending cycle of upgrading which I still love about PC's (despite the cost). And tinkering with my PC's taught me enough to get my first IT job, back in 2003.
They’re the hate and spite and war against the natural state of humanity. They’re the combined revenge for a billion wedgies delivered over untold millennia. They’re spit in the eye of physical fitness. They’re the Rage of Nerds made manifest on the material plane.
Computers are F' You, that is what they are!
Watching how much fun someone was having playing the original DOOM.
My cousin's ZX80, my ZX81 and, shortly afterwards, the Model Bs at school.
Corky34
Watching how much fun someone was having playing the original DOOM.
Good grief, how could I have forgotten Doom during my uni days. That was probably the game changer in the end, which is convinced me it was time to sell the Amiga.
My parents got us an Apple IIc since our school had some Apples. I started playing games and eventually typing in programs from a PC magazine that we were subscribed to.
I was really blown away when my data got his first 286, hercules graphics & it had some wonderful invention called a hard drive (20 MB) … no more swapping disks all the time … woohoo!
After 1 week I broke the computer (replaced the boot files on the hard drive when I tried to copy in a game). My dad told me that I was going to pay to have it fixed if I broke it again.
Well I did it again but managed to figure out how to fix it after about a week or two. From there I continued with my gaming & learning more about computers (sometimes when I broke something) & programming.
Yes Doom was big in my life later on but in the 286 days it was Wizardry for me.
1994… installed Duke Nukem 2D demo and the game had an option to always start when Windows loads. After installation, everytime the game would load even before you got to the Windows desktop! Had to ask an aunt to reinstall Windows 95.
Trying to get Max Payne to run on my parents' first (only and subsequently last pre-made) desktop - a Pentium III Fujitsu machine bought from Tesco.
I replaced the Rage Pro with a Radeon 7000 series then proceeded to brick the motherboard with a BIOS update. My Dad and I drove to Scan to pick up a replacement board, fitted it that afternoon and I've been hooked ever since. :)
My first computer was a ZX81 which was bought in kit form,
then a ZX Spectrum and a commodore 64
The first time i played Unreal Tournament (GOTY), Diablo, Warcraft 2, Dune 2000.
My mum got me a ZX81 from WH Smiths for Christmas. Was the best gift ever. Did anyone else ever try and recode the magazine program printouts so they'd work in 1k ? I did, and loved every minute of it even if it was impossible to actually do, but so many of the games that'd take even up to 3k could be tidied up into that single kilobyte of memory.
The only let down was cassette tape.
The nest year, I got a 16KB ram pack. I remember I could only print things at school though, they had the Sinclair Thermal printer !
THEN A BIG GAP UNTIL :
Lombard RAC Rally for Windows 95 !
We had an Atari 2600 as well, but the first computer we owned was an Amstrad CPC 464, which we replaced with the 6128. The first IBM compatible PC we owned was a shop built 486-DX2 66. That was upgraded to a Pentium 200 MMX. Eventually that PC was replaced with something newer, and the 200 MMX became my little toy. It was the first PC I started upgrading myself, and I've built all of my PCs since.
A combination of things I'd say. My home computer evolution from Vic 20, Oric, Atari 800XL then Amiga. The idea of being able to upgrade components relatively easily in a PC was certainly a factor, the innate tinkerer in me couldn't resist. The final decision maker however was watching a work mate install and play DOOM on a work PC (naughty boy!). January ‘94 I had my shiny new Escom 486 DX2 66 and the tinkering and games playing hasn’t stopped since.
It all started when my pc run games at 1-2 fps
fend_oblivion
Video games.
This.
:)
I got a job testing faulty Dell laptop hardware in ‘96. I knew literally sod all about computers before that, then bought my first in ’99. Came to PCs a bit late, was already 35 when I bought that first one.
Music. I got one in 97. I'd wanted a home music setup for years, but the cost wasn't just the parts and some software in the early 90s; you'd need a lot of expensive music hardware too. I had a synth, but that was it. The new Logic Audio had just hit the point where it was a plausible, if not an easy way, to make music. You had to bounce down tracks a lot in order to save resources, but it forced you to be cunning. Given the speed of improvement in tech, that seemed to be the moment to jump on board - very much the right decision! Music became my life, and it's given me opportunities I would never have had without it.
Last year, I built what I hope will be my last desktop system. This year, I bought a very powerful custom laptop which I love like it was my first PC.
el_raberto
A combination of things I'd say. My home computer evolution from Vic 20, Oric, Atari 800XL then Amiga. The idea of being able to upgrade components relatively easily in a PC was certainly a factor, the innate tinkerer in me couldn't resist. The final decision maker however was watching a work mate install and play DOOM on a work PC (naughty boy!). January ‘94 I had my shiny new Escom 486 DX2 66 and the tinkering and games playing hasn’t stopped since.
My DX2 66 was from Escom too. I seem to remember they went belly up not long afterwards.
I had a huge number of O'levels to choose from while at school. RE and art were the only subjects I was not allowed to study at the O'level stage. Anyway as a 14 year old, I returned to school after the summer break only to discover someone had entered me for computer studies instead of O'level history. I then opted for computer studies once I spoken to my house tutor. He just happens to be the Head of Maths and computer studies was under his umbrella. Surely a conflict of interest, now thinking about it. However, he said computers were the future.
In those days, I learnt how to program in BASIC using punch cards and then later with the RM380 PCs with CPM. A year later, I had a BBC model B where I then upgraded it with a floppy disk drive from Viglen computers in order to play Elite. Upgrading was a bit worrying as I had to break a link on the motherboard.
I also took a one week summer course at a London University where I built boolean logic gates using switches as a 16 year old.
Never really take computers all that seriously even though I have played around with Pascal, VBA and HTML. I do enjoy the research and buying of parts for PC which is not so different when I purchase clothes, kitchenware, etc. In other words I enjoy the chase for quality stuff. Building a PC isn't difficult at all.
Having fun while at home…. I like intellectual stuff and don't usually connect with anyone my age, so I had to find my own best friend and that is my PC.
What sparked your interest in (x86) PCs? - Seeing Doom
What sparked your interest in personal computers? - Helping my father build our Acorn Atom in 1982. None of this “just plug everything into the slots” business, this was soldering idividual ICs, resistors, & capacitors onto the motherboard.
Got a VIC-20 for Christmas…. my sisters never got a look in!
C-64 was the real thing for me though… SID chip still rules
I used to work in a cyber café and the person there build PC's to order and the sparked my interest in PC :)
Overclocking. When I was about 12, I was so amazed by the copper heatpipes associated with enthusiast motherboards and CPU coolers (at the time videocards still had no heatpipes). From then onwards the bond just grew stronger and stronger which led to a Computer Science degree and me being a DevOps professional now. Quite a wonderful journey, I shall say.
I was working at Plessey Traffic Controls in Poole 1980, I used a Rhode & Schwarz PPC process controller to control test kit - a sort of forerunner to Labwindows !
The PPC was actualy a Commodore SuperPet in disguise and I taught myself BASIC on it. From there on I was never computerless. I even built a NASCOM I, with over 2000 solder joints *AND* it worked first time, useless though it was :)
My first proper PC was a freebie from a friend, and old and very knackered original IBM with a 10MB HDD and the original 640kB RAM. Horrible thing.
When I was in the sixth form, we had access to a serial terminal at the college of FE next door, and we learnt BASIC. We also did a bit of FORTRAN coding on coding sheets, which were sent away to be punched onto cards, run, and then the cards and results would come back for debugging - the turnaround was a week - very low bandwidth!
Fast forward to uni, where the mainframe had a whopping 96Mb of hard disk storage taking up a large room. If you exceeded your disk quota, you could ask for a mag tape on a 10 inch reel. The mount command sent a message to the console operator to physically place the disk in the machine.
A bit later the Tandy TRS 80 came out probably one of the first Personal Computers, although not the IBM architecture that was the forrunner of the modern PC. It was too expensive, but later at Uni we used Commodore PETs and I did some real world system controlling with a Apple 2 which had quite advanced I/O controllers - I think I was using digital to synchro converters for controlling synchro (analogue*) based servo systems. I think I built a NASCOM2 at the time - with a 48 Kb memory card, and I built an 8 inch disk drive system for it.
My first introduction to the PC was an Original Apple Macintosh, and I dibnt use a windows PC until Widows for Workgroups. Windows 95 came out and I assembled my first WINTEL architecture PC. Several more followed, including Windows 2000 - the case for that is still in use - some Linux machines and so on to Windows 7. I didnt like the way Windows 8 was going and saw no reason to upgrade (in fact lots of reasons not to) and so I concentrated on Linux systems, the moved to commercial unix based system with an Intel Based Apple Mac - and that is probably where I'll stay for a while. So currently a Linux based server (with tape backup) and a legacy windows 7 machine for a couple of legacy windows only applications, a MAC and an additional Linux machine for when others can't do what I need them to.
(*Synchro systems used to be widely used for high power servo systems, but there use has largely been superseded, except for some specialised applications - small aircraft still use them. For anyone interested, there isa brief description here -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchro)
Very similar to Peter - my interest in “PC's” came about because I was already well hooked on “proper” computers, from playing Battleships on an IBM 360 mainframe, to printing pictures of the Beatles on lineprinter paper, using only the characters in their names.
And having seen things like that, I asked the fatal question …. How do they do that?
The answer, of course, is coding. And the rest is history. History that involves programmable TI calculators in the early 70's, languages like BASIC, Fortran, Algol and, of course, COBOL.
Then, moving into PCs, an Apple II, and Pascal, then a CP/M board. And of course, the TRS80s, Aoricots, Sirius and so forth, until finally, eventually, the world shifted on it's computing axis with the original IBM PC, and “clones” like the Amstrads. I've bypassed a lot of he same stuff Peter mentioned, but I too went through submitting jobs on opticsl mark cards, then punch cards, etc. Oh, and ASCII paper tape and uploading programs via a teletype terminal …. including, again, Battleships.
By the time “PC's” came about, I'd already been hooked on computing, and the clear, concise structured thinking using them required, and the sheer beauty of well-written code, for about 20 years.
I credit the TI-59, which introduced me to the idea that you can program stuff and save it. A later assembly course for a Z80 (I think) also helped, and a TRS-80 which introduced me to the idea of having a real keyboard and display. My parents got me a ZX80 that didn't work and was upgraded to a ZX81, and I tried programming Space Invaders for it in machine code (worked to an extent). The rest, as they say, is history.
As for the PC (IBM compatibles), I hated it. I sold Commodore computers for a few months, and told people to buy C64/C128 over the PC's, which were bigger, more expensive, with worse games and terrible graphics. I finally succumbed and bought one (DX2-66) in late 1994 to replace my Amiga, and hated every moment of tweaking autoexec.bat and such for playing games. I used OS/2 Warp (like many ex-Amigans) so at least I could have some decent multitasking and long file names.
It's been a love hate relationship for me ever since. The only part that really excited me was the early days of 3D accelerators (or decelerators, in the case of the ViRGE chips). I still enjoy playing with PC's, but I also still consider it masochism.
peterb
Widows for Workgroups
Sounds like an interesting charity.
Ahh good gold memories :)
a cousine of mine had an Enterprise 128 computer with the built in toothpick joystick. I inherited it about 20 years later. There were games like learn ths keyboard or some arcade stuff where we had to navigate a mouse (4 pixel is the body and other few the legs :D ) and one that was some kind of start wars clone. Then I got my 2nd hand C+4 and much later the 386. I took it apart, couldnt put together, asked a friend and we figured out together and since then I m hooked and work in IT :)
For me it's not the fact that I love the old Commodore 64 which essentially was an all in one PC back in the day.
I remember the guy I was working for was well into PC Games like Baldurs Gate and I had played Doom on LAN at University. Then Unreal Tournament, American McGees Alice, Nocturne and loads of other games came out that weren't available on N64 or PS1 so I bought some second hand bits and cobbled a basic machine with S3 Graphics and an Intel Celeron and went from there
In a word, “Linux”
I was forced to use PCs as a work tool with 8086 and 286 machines running DOS 3.x and they were beyond awful. I wouldn't have one in the house, and then I found out that if I had a 386 I could run a Unix clone, and I had to have one. Running Doom later was a clincher, and for years ID games drove my upgrade cycle.
ET3D
I credit the TI-59, which introduced me to the idea that you can program stuff and save it.
Many similarities there to me, I went TI59 -> TRS80 -> Dragon 32 -> Atari ST -> Atari TT -> PC
Never had an Amiga, really should get one one day :)
Phage
Then This
XTREE Gold - I'd forgotten about that - I had that on a Compaq laptop with a huge 10 Mb disc and a whopping 2Mb of ram - it was DOS6.2 and I ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it - and had XTREE gold! (I splashed out and had. 1200 baud modem built in too :) )
From my Grandfather, amazing man he was.
He worked for IBM and GCHQ as a spy on the Russians, during the Cold War.
He built my first computer, rebuilt the zx80 into a full qwerty keyboard, and upgraded the ram to 16KB. I was the coolest kid on the street, with screeching sound of the tape deck loading my games.
Oh the joy of watching that single pixel make its way down that old black and white CRT monitor, i will never forget.
Happy days :)
I played Doom 95 and GTA on my dad's old pentium p5 or p6 pc. Pretty sure it was a p6, I remember seeing 266mhz on bootup… Think I was about 11 or 12
any company that is cheaper than intel that can do the same thing as intel. they are price gouging on the entire “lake” line. charging idiots $100 to $more than what it is really worth, for a 15% difference?
Played Wold of Warcraft for years on my 27" iMacs. But over time Apple gave up caring about performance and ran on looks and how thin they could make products. So I watched Youtube channels like Paul's Hardware and Jayz2Cents and started planning a build. Now I just use Apple products for fun and game with a Windows 10 machine.
Built my forst pc peice by peice payday by payday and remember having to wait 2 weeks to buy 4mb of ram :D
This was a dx66 486 machine that ran doom like a boss, it was doom that made me build and get into pc's at firs well that and shareware .
Never gone back to a console since
The ability to put something together as well as being able to upgrade whichever over time and replace items my firs actual PC was a 386SX 16Mhz with a whole 1mb of ram and oddly enough 256kb GFX and VGA monitor it had 90MB HDD, before that the classic C64, I still have that one as well.
The old days of joy and fun and actual quality games I do miss, a lot of garbage today that more or less is trying to sell us another skin or make us broke in micro transistions.
Mostly games. Building PCs was fun, too, so much that I thought it would be my bread and butter, but over the years I became increasingly disillusioned with IT in general. I still like to read HEXUS and other technology sites, learned a few programming languages to fend for myself when needed, learned Linux/UNIX, but I would never do any of that for a living. Trying to get into gaming again, I played a few times, then left them in a corner, like a toy I've outgrown. I guess I don't need to be entertained anymore.
Mine started with BBCs and I was the only person in primary school (including the teachers) who could change the toners in the apple laser printer!
Games.
Games.
Games.
and when things broke down - there was no one to help me out - so i had to figure stuff out myself. Which was pretty neat - as it was the basis of how i learned reading and writing in English. Still remember how nervous i was once i opened my first pc. Smell helped me diagnose that the cpu was totally cooked.
Tie fighter. I broke my parents PC trying to optimise DOS to run it (640K fun!). Learn a lot fixing that and was hooked. Had exposure prior to this (z81, c64 etc) but this opened my eyes.
Airwolf on the Amstrad, nothing like waiting 5 mins for a game to load off of a tape… ah, those were the days
Clearly games. Despite many previous consoles, A combination of Civilization and Red Alert took my curiosity to a dangerous obsession…
I wanted a typewriter for my 4th birthday!
When we got a TI99/4A a year later, it didn't take me long to want to start writing programs for it (obviously only simple stuff). From there to a Spectrum+, to a +2a, to an Amiga 1500, to a 500+, to a 1200. I rehoused my 1200 in a tower casing and bought a PPC accelerator for it. We first bought a PC in '97. 486DX4100, Windows 95. I finally built my own PC in 2000 - it took me a year to save up for it, and the 1GHz Athlon was brand new :)
tunrip
I wanted a typewriter for my 4th birthday!
When we got a TI99/4A a year later, it didn't take me long to want to start writing programs for it (obviously only simple stuff). From there to a Spectrum+, to a +2a, to an Amiga 1500, to a 500+, to a 1200. I rehoused my 1200 in a tower casing and bought a PPC accelerator for it. We first bought a PC in '97. 486DX4100, Windows 95. I finally built my own PC in 2000 - it took me a year to save up for it, and the 1GHz Athlon was brand new :)
And did you read the HEXUS review for the 1Ghz Athlon back then? :P
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/69-amd-thunderbird-1ghz/
I think I got my first 286 in 1987, it was part of a scanner and film writer system I'd purchased for my photographic business. It also ran photoshop 3.1. We moved on to a 386 then a 486 and recall buying 4 x32mb 72pin Simms for £3200 delivered by Securicor as at the time memory modules were being stolen from delivery lorries and telephone exchanges as there was such high value and small so easy to transport.
My wife convinced me to start writing a novel as she had said I was good with words having written poems and songs. She insisted on me getting a Wordprocessor as I would be doing re-writes and altering things a lot and using a typewriter would be a pain. I had a contact that would get me an Amstrad 9512 at a good price as he was a dealer for them. My wife changed her mind and suggested ( Told me . lol ). to get a computer instead as it would be more versatile.At this point like many others I was anti-computer ( putting people out of jobs syndrome) which was a common belief at the advent of PC's in general. Anyway , she who must be obeyed got her way and a bank loan for £1000 was instigated and the search was on. Local IBM engineer advertised in Micromart and the deed was done… AST AMD DX33 , 4mb ram( most machines only had 1MB at this time) colour EGA monitor 2 x 40MB hard drives and an HP Lazserjet printer ( Goodbye £1000 ) .lol. I took I took it apart Within weeks to see what made it tick ( I'm like that with stuff ). Read through various Dos manuals and started tweaking and fine tuning ( Memsys etc , etc) PC was much faster and started tweaking other peoples , then building and upgrading , getting parts from computer shows. Got to the stage of installing complete networks ( hardware wise )to the point I got sick of the sight of Cat5 and found it boring preferring to doing house re-wiring. I only build for myself , family and close friends now as I think the art of building died years back for the most part. Most PC's set themselves up now providing you buy the correct parts , back then you had to set jumpers throughout the motherboard for voltages to cpu's and memory otherwise nothing or bang. Even so I appreciate what we have now and have enjoyed the trip , another learning curve and something else under my belt.
I didn't gain an interest in computers until they upgraded the lab at school to have Windows 3.11. I realised that I had that at home (well, 3.0 on a 386) and something twigged that it was something I could do at home and at school.
Dived full in to the DOS 5.0 manual and every computer book I could get my hands on. Messed up plenty of things. Parents finally upgraded to a Pentium and I got the 386, which I rebuilt and spent all my time tinkering with the system. Finally gutted it to a Pentium 200MMX and the rest as they say, is history.
My interest was aroused back in the early 70's.
This was back before electronic sliderules were introduced (more comonly called calculators today), we used to have, pencils, paper, log tables and cos, sine tan books accompany our slide rules into class.
How many out there have even seen a slide rule?
Our school teamed up with a nearby university (the only place you could find any computer for 1000 miles around) and introduced computer programing (mostly Fortran).
Back then there were no GUI's, keyboards, and mice were still things that you caught in a mouse trap.
All we had were punch cards, boxes and boxes of these cards.
On one hand they were wonderful because they made the computer do something and we wrote it.
On the other hand, there were so many reasons why these were absolutly horrible.
Examples - one card accidently out of place and the program would not work, drop a box and a part of your program was a mess, have one small piece of punched out card fall in amongst the pile and your program did not work and ages spent/wasted trying to fix it.
But in the end, our first class project was a successful moon landing - the course combined what we were learning in maths, chemistry, biology and physice, and it only involved the basics of what NASA had to deal with.
What a buzz that was and I was hooked.
Then a fantastic new console game was released that entralled us - PONG.
Wow, now you could actually use these new fangled electronic gadgets to play games, who would have thunk it.
I think my interest came from always wanting to find out how things worked. As a kid, I was forever taking things apart to see what made them tick, although I didn't always manage to put them back together again :P
After a ZX Spectrum, Amiga and a spell with the first consoles (Sega Megadrive and PlayStation), I decided to teach myself about the PC. I built my first in '95 and have been at it ever since.
If I remember correctly, it was a Pentium 200 MMX or something like that, with an ATi graphics card which had a massive 8mb memory on it or thereabouts. I could be wrong, it was a long time ago :D
I grew up in the 80s but never wanted a console - I wanted something I could control better. A proper computer seemed to be the answer.
By some fortune I got a hand-me-down zx spectrum 48kb (rubber keys wow) and played with that for a few years. Mainly games to be honest, but it was fun typing LOAD etc etc (or was that commodore 64?).
Fast forward a few years and we got a BBC model B, more programming fun was had and my dad used it effectively as a word processor (maxing out the 64kb memory a couple of times) and we got a dot matrix printer for it. High technology at the time.
Family were on board at this stage and I think I next got a second hand Amiga A500 with a crapload of pirated software and games from some guy 2 hours away. Loved that, amazing graphics (Shadow of the Beast? Didn't get past 2 mins into the game but loved it) and kept ‘buying’ software and got into programming and music (MODs) on it. Kept that for a long time, loved it.
Upgraded to an Amiga A1200 for a later Christmas (Pinball dreams in AGA - whoah) and loved that just as much. Not as big a jump but a brilliant system and just what I needed for school work and mainly gaming (ok I was about 11 lol). My friend had a 486 (low end one) and the PC bug bit me after a while (Norton Commander, Windows 3.11, etc etc).
I think my A1200 was my favorite computer ever, but off it went for sale, and we got a very cheap 486 DX2/80 after trawling through Micro Mart / PC Mart back page adverts for a couple of months for a deal. Think we got it for under £500. Nice. About a year later, doubled the memory to 8mb and added a 28.8kbps modem add in card. And that's how it started folks - BBSes at first, then somehow got unmetered internet access (after multiple £250 month bills for phone) dialup with Direct Connect who had a dial up number with my local new telephone provider, which did an unmetered calls deal. That was bliss. Newsgroups, warez, dialup, all still on Windows 3.11 (with no built in TCP-IP , you had to pirate it). Occasional games of doom 2, duke nukem 3d and descent 2 with friends also using that unmetered phone provider locally. Bliss.
Upgraded that DX2/80 to Windows 95, still with the original 420mb hard drive, as it had enough system memory. That was all I needed to be hooked for years (and until now), worked in a computer shop for around 3 years part and full time and by the end of that had a PII-300 overclocked to a PII-450 for free and I was golden. K56 Flex modem and as far as I can remember still unmetered internet (god bless dircon).
That's about 4-5 systems ago, went through Athlon twice, Opteron, Intel, Intel and Intel again leaving me with my current 6600K. Will be AMD next time, but I don't really game any more and this system is seriously snappy so no need to change.
BBC and Amiga were the best. But dialup multiplayer on the PC was pretty excellent too :)
A mix of both what it offered and how cheap it was ;)
Being able to build my own system and play video games at the cutting edge technology really.
