We've gone a LONG way in video technology!

I remember back as far as the voodoo2 and tnt days. That was 1997, no? I had gotten my first real computer too, a packard bell 166MHz pentium MMX. Paid $999 for that system too. included a 15" KDS monitor. Didnt know much about computers back then either. I then heard in my school of 3-d games and how theres something special called a "video card" I thought a video card did nothing more than send a signal to the monitor to give visual output? didnt know a video card makes games faster? Thought it was all about the ram and cpu. Well time passes by oneday I get quake3. That was 1999 now I think. I also had my 19" monitor and just bought a tnt pci for $40. I know they retail for $80, the fastest card was a tnt2u. I load quake3 and wtf I get only 10fps and thats with my cpu OCed to 233. My first OC as well. I bragged about it to my friends as well(the OC, not the 10fps) well I played with 10fps but kept getting fragged and the slideshow annoyed me. I found out it became smooth at 20fps and thats if I look at a wall too. A new cpu was very expensive so more time passes by. I think in the year 2000 I get a 366@550 celeron for $90. Athlons were like $250 for a 500MHz, a 450MHz pentium2 was like $180. The celerons were budget cpus but I figured a 550MHz celeron should still perform nicely, best bang for the buck. I was also thinking of a 300a@450 but he said he already OCed it so he guaranteed itll do 550. I needed a good mobo, the pc chips board I had worked fine(it did either 66 or 100fsb) I got the abit be6-2 for $130 but sadly the cpu wouldnt even do 103fsb(turbo) But that mobo gave me another 20% boost! I was getting almost 60fps in quake3 in 640x480x16 with a tnt man it was soooooooooo smooth and fast! I still wanted more and at that time the geforce came out. I think in the year 2001 I finally get a geforce2mx for $60 I think, not sure. my bro paid $100 for his a few months before I got mine. Just last month I finally buy a whole bunch more video cards. Geforce2mx's going for $25 now, the GTS for $45, the pro for $60, the geforce3 ti200 for $80, the ti500 for $99, the ti4200 for $130.......Id imagine in the year 2005 the geforce4 ti4600 is gonna cost only $99!!!!!!!

Remember Digger? that was the game back when...or what about King's Quest...those were highly graphical INTENSE games. I remeber my first PC (i grew up poor...used PC's my whole life, but didn't buy one till Jan 1997)...a Pentium 133 Packard Bell with 32MB of RAM!!! and a 2GB HDD!!! best of all an 8MB vid card!!! these were cream of the crop for that year (cept the 133...it was passed by the 166, then the 200MMX 2 months later)...I was riding high...I actually used this computer until the year 2000, when I built a 900Mhz Athlon with all the best components, the ORIGINAL radeon....now I HAVE to upgrade almost yearly for the CPU and every 2 years for the graphics card. Too many good games to get left out of the loop

My first computer (the whole families computer actually) was a radio shack color computer (I want to say it was a TRS80, but can't be sure). Then onto the commedor 64, then to a 486 25 mhz SX computer for about $1500.

My first computer of my very own was a Pentium 90 Mhz for close to $2000 and man could it fly!

This was of course before 3d gaming. I didn't get my hands on a 3d card (if you can call it that) until I built a Cyrix 166+ with an S3 Virge car with 2 mb ram and I added 2 more mbs later. I think it came bundles with Decent, but I can't be sure

i remember playing Wolf3d, and this crazy maze game, then when my dad hooked me up with this 180mhz P1 compaq Monster Truck Madness was beast! and then he gave me his old P166 (which was actually better since it wasnt compcrap and had quality components) and i played tons of games, QuakeII probably being the best i played on that machine. Then my dad got himself a PIII450 and TNT 8mb, and QuakeII was freakin beautiful, the first time i saw opengl rendered graphics , and then i got my PIII600E with Rage Fury Pro, Half Life, UT, QIII, SOF, they all played beautifully on that machine but only after i overclocked my cpu, the only reason i started ocing was because of stuttering in Serious Sam........now i have a Celly tualatin [email protected] and it runs everything ive thrown at it nicely...

Very fun thread, my first computer was a macintosh performa 600, my sister talked my dad into buying it cause they had one at school. It was a 32mhz pc, 4mb ram, and a 600mb hard drive. I got this pc in 92, used it to play simcity 2000 mostly (I had no cd rom) and finally got a crappy cyrix 233 pc in like 97 I think. That pc totally crapped out on me and couldnt even run flight simulators, barely worked well for simcity 3000, I WAS SO MAD. So after that my parents bought me a 500mhz p3 compaq, still didnt know **** about computers. I used that pc with its 8mb video card and played everquest for a year and a half. Never got a new card for it until that next xmas, got a voodoo 5, and used that with my pc to play cs until the next summer, when I built my first system, 1.4 tbird

Ahh yes, back in the day I started my PC experience with a 286. Can't remember the specs but all I did with it was write "BASIC" programs. Then I moved on to a Celeron 300a. It was funny because at the time I didn't know anything about computers or overclocking, and one day a computer tech from my local comp store told me that the CPU I had was a really good overclocker. I ended up getting that 300a to 400 stable with no extra volts or anything...even on a crappy all-in-1 board. My next system was a P3 550e, and I loved that system sooo much, I even wish I still have that board and chip today (P3 would do 733 stock volts and the board was the Asus P3B-F). I remember playing Quake 3 @ 800x600 32bit nicely with my Asus V3800 Pro 32MB (TNT2 Pro). At the time, I was the king of the hill. I had a better computer than any of my friends. My comp was so good it even made my friends PARENTS jelous! Now I am running this beast, and for some reason, even though it's plenty fast, it still doesn't bring me as much satisfaction as my old P3 system did. Boy do I miss that system!

I didn't really get into computers that early. My first one was a 50mhz 486 or something, which was used for word processing, a few games, and some internet. Then I got a 700mhz P3 Sony Vaio system, started playing Starcraft and Diablo 2 and once that thing couldn't run Warcraft3, I did some research and built the rig I have today.

my first was a P133 with 16MB and a S3 Virge PCI 4MB...my how I remember loading up Decent 2 and being blown away

ohh... yeah 1997 it was when told my dad i needed a computer for school homework. It was an IBM 386 which i upgraded to 8mb of ram, i would only do word processing and windows games, so go figure.

A year later i started to be a serious computer geek so i told my dad i needed a computer that would run SNES games smoothly lol. So we bought a crap p2@266MHz 32mb ram with all onboard with a sis 8m video chipset, no opengl so i couldnt play q2 hardware accelerated. grrrrrrrrr But i was happy to play all the snes games i couldnt because my dad never bought me the console, so then i bought n64, forgot a while about pc gaming and then n64 emulation came out, my comp wouldnt cut it so in 2000 we bought another crap computer from the same dude. It was a p3@800mhz, 128mb ram, tnt2 m64 32mb and 20gb hd; this was real gaming to me, i finaly could play q3 at 640 with descent detail. I upgraded to a gf3, sb live, then sold it and got an audigy, my current burner. Then the crap gf3 surprisingly died, supposedly because i installed it wrong, but ohh well. On the hurry for new stuff i got to this boards and convinced my dad to go for bang for the buck, you can see my currend computert in my sig. I can say this is the very first computer ive really loved, now i can play any game (but ut2k3) at 1280x1024 with kinda high detail and 60+fps... besides it was the cheapest of them all

First computer my family ever had was an Adam computer. It had a Colecovision game module that attached to it so you could play Donkey Kong. Only other game on the Adam was Buck Rogers. Loved that game.

One day I come home and there was an Apple IIe sitting downstairs. Top of the line in that day. I loved playing games on that thing. Legacy of the Ancients, Wasteland, Wizardry I.

From then on the family was kind of behind the times on computers. Friend had a Commodore 128 and I loved playing CaveMan Olympics on it. Another friend was the rich friend who's dad always had the latest technology. He spent like 4000 dollars on a IBM 586 or something a while back. Played games like Syndicate and Castle Wolfenstein on it.

Dad eventually upgraded to a Pentium 133 that he kept for years. Actually had work buy it for him and he payed them back since he used it at home for work. Played Quake on that one and thought Quake was the greatest game in the world.

Few years later when I was living on my own I didn't have a computer and was bored. Went out and spent over a thousand dollars for a Packard Bell 166. Thought it was pretty smooth and then found out about video cards. Got a Riva TNT and was amazed at how much different Quake looked with a dedicated vid card. Tried upgrading the sound on that Packard Bell and couldn't do it with the TNT installed so decided it was time to build my first computer. Asus P5B motherboard and a AMD K6-II 300. Been upgrading ever since. I still have the Asus boards laying around as well as an extra BE6-II board with my Celeron 700. Built a computer for my son and have 2 computers for myself now.

I really miss playing Legacy of the Ancients and Wastelands though. They were really great games.

In high school I took a course in basic on a 300lb card puncher.

I wrote a program that used slope to draw a right triangle of any input x and y (using *s instead of pixels). Modern 3D graphics isn't much different.

edit: except it takes slit seconds instead of several, and most people can do it at home instead of the teacher making a weekly trip to the nearest mainframe.

I've got an intel 4040 in the attic. And a TRS-80.

My first non-integrated video card? ATI EGA wonder w/256k. I used it for AutoCAD R10 on an 8088 with an 8087 math co-processor. That was the card that made ATI

- JW

My (family's) first computer was a 16MHz 386SX with 2mbs of ram and a 200mb hdd. In '97, got a 233mhz k6-2 32mbs of pc66, 3.2 gig hdd, 17" moniter etc. then the family got a 1ghz athlon, 128mbs of pc133, tnt2 m64, 19" moniter 40gb hdd, burner etc, and in 2001 I built my first computer.. Duron 800@900, GF2MX400, 20 gig hddm 17" moniter & burner. Have learned sooooo much since then haha.

man you guys have uber pcs for the first one, my first was a 286 win 1mb ram 1mb video card (trident) and 40mb disk, the best was the 14" svga monitor (there wasn´t anything better), it lasted a few years until the 486dx2 came and well from them too many to make a list

PS: in the 97 the AMDs where k5 and k6 not athlons

LoL
I remember playing text only games on my familys DOS only 386. I remember when DOOM I came out- It ran at like 7 Fps - then I spent $80 to upgrade it to 8mb of ram so it could run at 14fps.
wonderful
A few years later, I spent $80 on a "monster 3d" 4mb vid card back when "3d" cards were first coming out for my pentium 133. It ran the original need for speed beautifully.
The real breakthrough came when my family bought a p3 700 with a vodoo3- still runs most of todays games (at low res)

My first computer (and I still have it) is a Pentium MX 166Mhz, 32MB (upgraded to 64mb) 3d Rage 6-8mb? 28.8kb modem, 1.6gb hd, creative vantra (or something), 15" monitor, windows 95.

lol u guys had some awesome pcs startin out i had a apple IIc as my first puter that didnt even have a hdd and it hada real floppy then a 286 (11/12mhz it had a turbo mode) 1 mb video card lol then a pentium 60 , pentium 200 , pentium 600 athlon 1000 and now a 1700xp gradually movin up. wolfenstein on the 286 was awesome. i remember stayin up all nite in a dark room playin the first doom walkin around a corner and gettin the **** scared outta me

Darkseid said:

man you guys have uber pcs for the first one, my first was a 286 win 1mb ram 1mb video card (trident) and 40mb disk, the best was the 14" svga monitor (there wasn´t anything better), it lasted a few years until the 486dx2 came and well from them too many to make a list

Click to expand...

i even consider that uber, my 286 (or was it a 186) didn't even have a hard disk

ahhh... the memories...

I went all out on the TRS-80 (Zilog Z80 @2mhz):
- extra 32kb of memory (48kb total)
- lowercase module (so you could type "a" and "A")
- tape drive
- 180kb single sided floppy drive (but you could turn the disks over)
- 300 baud modem (that's 0.3k or 0.03 kbyte/s for you youngins)

Next up was an 8088 @4.7mhz:
- 512kb ram
- 2x 5.25" 360kb floppys
- onboard CGA
- 2400 baud modem

8086 @8mhz:
- 8087 co-processor
- 640kb ram
- 2x 5.25" 360kb floppys
- 30mb HDD
- ATI EGA Wonder 256kb

486DX-33 (P4 core)
- 8mb ram
- 3.5" + 5.25" high density floppys
- 80mb HDD
- ATI VGA Wonder XL 1mb
- 14.4k modem

P-200MMX (P55C core)
- 24mb ram
- 3.5" floppy
- 5.1gb HDD (in my Tualeron now )
- ATI Mach64 4mb (in my Tualeron now )

486DX4-100 Dell laptop
- 12mb ram
- 3.5" floppy
- integrated VGA graphics
- still in use as a print server

PIII-500 (P6 core) - now upgraded to Tualeron 1.2
- 256mb ram - now 512mb
- Asus P3B-F
- ATI Rage Fury 32mb
- 20gb HDD - now 30gb
- 33.6k modem

tBird-900 (K7 core)
- 256mb ram - now 512mb
- Asus A7V
- ATI Xpert2000 32mb
- 40gb HDD

Dual PIII-800E (P6 core)
- 512mb ram
- Asus P2B-D
- Radeon 7200 (now 8500)
- 20gb + 40gb HDD
- 56k modem

Tualeron 1.2 (P6 core) - work in progress
- 256mb ram
- Asus TUSL2-C
- 5.1gb HDD
- ATI Mach64 4mb

- JW

I still think I've got you all beat, since my mainframe was beat by everything listed. As I remember, PONG came out that year.