what sort of PC did you have at age of 15, compared to now?

[ratbuddy]

The year was 1992. Ultima 7 had just been released, and I was horrified to find that it actually REQUIRED a 386 to run. I thought my system was pretty nice and ran Ultima 6 perfectly so that was shocking to me.

Tandy 1000 TX, XT-286 type machine. 80286 processor but 8 bit bus. No support for UMB. I still upgraded the pants off it, including 768k RAM, 60 meg SCSI hardcard from Hard Drives International, Soundblaster 1.0 with CMS chips, 512k Trident SVGA card, Boca 14.4k internal modem and a Boca 2400 external with MNP5 and V42bis as a backup. Good times.

I don't think it was OCable, but I did use a few tweak programs to squeeze a bit more out of it and raise the Norton Utilities system performance number thing a bit higher. Lowering the memory refresh rate to free up the CPU for other stuff was probably the biggest single boost.

Oh yeah, I still have it

 

[MechaWyvern]

When I was 15...that would have been around March 1993, so I still was using my Commodore 64 at home. Played with the high schools 486 systems a lot, but family saw no use in buying anything newer than the C64. First real computer was bought in 1997, and was an Acer with a 166mhz processor and 16mb RAM with a 3 or 5GB harddrive.

 

[JLK03F150]

When I was 15 my "PC" would have been a LED pocket calculator. lol

I got my first computer in the mid-80's when I was in my mid-twenties. It was a TI-99/4. It had a fun little graphics program and a F-15 flight sim. Good times.

 

[necrokiller]

pentium 3 444MHz
40GB Hard disk
geforce 4 MX440 64MB
512MB RAM

thats about all I can remember.

 

[Shiggity]

Age 15 - 2000 - P4 / ti500 graphics

512MB DDR1

80GB 5400RM

P4 Northwood

64MB graphics (before nvidia 6xxx)


Age 18 - 2004 (my first build)

1GB DDR1

Athlon 64+

ATI Radeon X800 PRO 512MB (500$ when I got this)

160GB seagate 7200.7 7200RPM

Sound Card


Age 22 - 2008 (2nd build) (1st overclocked system)

2GB DDR2

Core 2 Duo 65nm

8800GT 512MB

10kRPM raptor, 3 640GB 7200RPM storage drives

Felt no reason to buy a sound card.




I don't remember what our very first computer was (1992). It was 90 megahertz which was like amazing when we got it, that's all I really remmeber.

 

[Niku-Sama]

umm, i think it was an 850Mhz @ 1Ghz Duron with pc2100 ram and geforce 2 gts/pro

 

[Aynjell]

When I was 15 I was incarcerated.

HOWEVER, I do recall some of our family computers. An old gateway pentium II (all i can remember), a boutique builder's Pentium III rig, and before all of those... some old old old thing I can't even recall what kind of CPU it had but it was the stuff, man. Played Monkey Island, Full throttle... you know, the good games.

 

[hafa]

Oh man, but I'm old

When I was 15, personal computers would not be introduced for another 7 years and the first portable pocket calculator, complete with an LCD screen, had just come out and was selling for $100.00+ (that's 1974 dollars BTW).

I had a slide rule, however

 

[Chris_F]

I had a Pentium 3 Coppermine 933MHz custom built desktop with, I think 128mb of ram. I upgraded it to a 1.3GHz Tualatin P3 a short while later when it was released to get a bit more performance out of Quake 3 and Counter-Strike.

 

[Springbok]

I had a P2 400MHz with a big double 60mm heatsink and a Voodoo 2 for a three-dimensional kick in the pants!

 

[donuts]

At 15, err. umm.

Pencil, paper, maybe an LED calculator and the grey matter between my ears that couldn't pass Memtest on a bet.

My first pc didn't get into my house until 2003 (I think)

 

[SuperMiguel]

Oh man, but I'm old

When I was 15, personal computers would not be introduced for another 7 years and the first portable pocket calculator, complete with an LCD screen, had just come out and was selling for $100.00+ (that's 1974 dollars BTW).

I had a slide rule, however

damn u are old

 

[mxthunder]

When I was 14-15 I had just gotten into computers and make the mistake of buying a retail system. It was a Compaq presario model 5360 with a K6-2 450Mhz processor, 64mb ram, 10Gb hard drive, build in 4mb graphics, and a cdrom drive.
After about 2 years I built my first system. I was 15-16. It was an Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz. I was so proud that I had a 1GHz chip. It had 3d prophet Kyro II graphics, 256MB of DDR and a 40 gb hard drive.

 

[torin3]

My dad was selling computers since I was pretty young. We had a teletype machine that I used to play Star Trek on in the mid-70's. When I was 8, I was in a local commercial for the Commodore Pet.

My first computer that I owned was a Timex Sinclair 1000. You know...the doorstop.

 

[Neuromancer]

Hmm, I think it was a 486 DX 50, but it might have been a 486 SX 33. I always got hand-me-downs from my dad.

I think that is what I had around 15 too. Played text adventures, Eliza and some BASIC programming. (Started C on that machine, but never got more than the first chapter).

TRS80 listed above I had at 8 or 9
Except we had sound, and audio tapes for loading programs


And yes it was before windows

It used BASIC.

 

[Quigsby]

A cyrix 133+ processor and 64MB of RAM I believe. I think I had a Bigfoot hard drive, but not sure how much space it had. Had the requisite 15" CRT monitor. Diamond Viper sound card IIRC. Beige case (with Turbo button), beige monitor, beige everything back then (except Acer cases were black). Motherboard was a Matsonic.

 

[hafa]

damn u are old

Who is this "u" person, anyway and how old is he/she?

 

[Trombe]

Who is this "u" person, anyway and how old is he/she?

I'd love to hear some stories about the civil war


When I was fifteen 4 years ago I was building my first computer, and it was an AMD 3200+ / ECS mobo combo with 256 mb. of RAM and an nVidia 6200 running Windows 98. The only cool part was the evaporative cooler I made for it.

Edit:

Compared to now, where I have an E8400 on a mini-ITX board with nVidia 7100 built in graphics, with 4 gigs of RAM and 2 Terabytes of harddrive, all crammed into a case no larger than a piece of printer paper (albeit a little thicker).

 

[hafa]

I'd love to hear some stories about the civil war

Hey, whippersnapper, we called it the "rising of the North". Oh wait, you wouldn't remember Granny Clampett either. Never mind...

 

[SuperMiguel]

Who is this "u" person, anyway and how old is he/she?

I dont know, all i know is that his nick name starts with an "h", it ends with an "a", and it has the letters "af" in the midle. How old is him/she? not sure but that person was 50 when she/he builded a computer and that was 60 years ago... So by doing a bit of math x+y=age x=50 y=60. That person must be 110 years old??