TL;DR It was an old Wang system, 286 processor(I think, anyway), with no hard drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, and a lovely green monochrome monitor. I didn't have it long enough to reach the point where I could have identified the actual hardware/specs.
Back in 1993, I was 10, and the internet really wasn't a thing yet(yeah, yeah, I know. But for most of us, the internet didn't exist until the mid-late 90's). You'd probably have difficulty even finding someone in the neighborhood who could tell you what a computer was, nevermind having used one. I was out running around the city, as you used to be able to do at 10 years old, when I passed by some local business/office/who knows I was 10. Big pile of trash out front, waiting to be picked up. When you're a kid, and you're poor, you go picking. Trash picking, I mean. You can get all sorts of cool shit, especially from the wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe it's different nowadays, but back in the day, people would toss out perfectly good toys, bikes, electronics, furniture, and as they became more commom, videogames, computers, etc. A ton of the shit I owned as a kid is stuff I picked straight out of the trash. Even after that, I picked trash for years. Resold a metric FUCKTON of stuff that other(presumably wealthier) people deemed to be garbage.
Back to this business/office/free stuff location, I obviously start eyeing what's in the big pile out front of this place. Among the stuff, I see a big, beige, metal box, a weird looking TV, and something with a big coiled wire hanging off of it. Now, it's not like there weren't computers in movies/TV at that point, and I had just read Jurassic park the same year, so I did recognize, vaguely, what it was. So I start looking at it, poking around, It had a name on it. "Wang". Don't know what that means, but I'm 10; that's hilarious. I decide I'm taking it. Tried to pick it up, and yeah, that shit is heavy. Nevermind the TV thing, and the keyboard. So as you do, I look around for a stary shopping cart, and sure enough, there's never one far away. Grab the cart and start lifting my haul into it, when someone comes out of the business/office/treasure-hoard, and yells "HEY!" Thought I was about to be in trouble, but instead, this guys walks over to me and says "you're gonna need this." Handed me a bundle of wires, and a square envelope, and just went back inside. So I toss that in the cart, and start pushing. And push I did. A shopping cart full of early 90's computer hardware, pushed by a 10 year-old, down the street, on and off of curb, up and down hills, from the other end of the city, is hard work. But eventually, I got home with it. Not to worry though, I only lived on the 3rd floor of a three-story building.
So I get home, and I start unloading my haul, one piece at a time, and start dragging it up the stairs. Thankfully no one was home, so I could bring everything into my room without anyone complaing about what I'm doing. That was also one of the only times I actually had a bedroom, so that worked out. Once I get it in there, I put the big metal box on the floor in the corner of my room, I take my monitor and decide that I'm pretty sure it's supposed to sit on top, so I put that there. The keyboard was next. After I untagled that cursed coiled cable, I obviously checked the back of the monitor, looking for where I need to plug the keyboard in. Figured out that no, it gets plugged into the big metal box. What next? Oh, right, that bundle of wires the guy gave me. It tuned out to be a couple of power cables, and a (what I now would assume) was a VGA cable. So I get to work plugging all of that in, and when it comes to the VGA cable, that's when I realize that oh, everything plugs into the metal box, that seems important. That must be the part that is a "computer." So what the hell is the TV thing? Took a minute, but I eventually remembered my NES, and realized that oh yeah, the box is where everything happens, and the screen is just where you see it. Again, I was 10, and all of this technology was still new to the average person. Give me a break here.
And last up was that square envelope. Would you believe it had a black plastic thing inside? It's really floppy. Weird. What the fuck is this thing? It has a white sticker on it, and some illegible scribbles. Nintendo to the rescue again. This black plastic thing sure does look like it would fit into the slot on the front of the metal box. Oh shit, it did! Now I just have to turn this thing on. How the fuck do you turn this thing on? Spent a while on that one, flipping the obvious big red power switch in the back. Took a while before I figured out there was a second power button on the front. TWO power switches?! What is this nonsense? Whatever. It's on now.
I sat and watched as bright green text started popping up on the screen. Various numbers, and phrases that I'd never heard in my life. Clearly, this stuff could only be understood some secret government agent, or that one kid I read about Jurassic Park, who was obviously like, a genius hacker or something. The slot where I shoved that floppy plastic square sure is noisy. What the hell is it doing, anyway? It loads in just like my Nintendo games, maybe it's a game?! Maybe a game is about to start. It sure was, friends. Maybe the greatest game ever made. We called it... DOS.
Man, did I love that game, DOS. I spent the several hours, typing random shit on the keyboard, as the command prompt did absolutely nothing of interest, since I had no idea what I was doing. But after those couple of hours of typing swears and random nonsense, I finally started to get bored, what with all of the nothing that was happening. And for whatever reason, I thought maybe someone could help me. Or, why not the computer itself? Maybe it will help me. So I typed the work "help", I hit the enter key, and sure enough, something finally happened. Holy shit, it's doing something. It's telling me how to DO stuff.
And so, before this novel goes on even longer, yeah. I found the help menu, and spent many more hours needlessly using very basic commands to create, copy, move, rename, and delete empty files and folders. Truly, I was now an elite haxxor man.
Over the next couple of years, I pulled many systems and parts out of various trash piles, and cobbled together different systems. Many, many different 386 and 486 systems. Until finally, when I was 15, I managed to get my hands on an obscenely slow, but absolute magic at the time, dialup modem, and a pile of "free hours" of AOL.
And they all lived happily ever after... Until social media was invented. The end.
If people like/want to read/discuss such poorly written nonsense, maybe I'll write up some nonsense about other technology-based shenanigans from over the years. And if people would rather make fun of my poor writing skills; fair.
My first computer was a brand new Commodore Amiga 600 that I got for Christmas in 1992. I was 10. It was glorious. It had 1MB of RAM with a built-in floppy drive (and no hard drive) and was paired with a lovely 14" CRT monitor at a time when most non-PC home computers were connected to TVs with RF modulators. The difference in image quality was immediately apparent when I went to my friends' houses and played on their Amigas.
My parents were convinced because you could do educational-type stuff on it, but really it was a games machine with a keyboard for me - we never had dedicated games consoles. I played the hell out of it for a few years until we got our first Windows 95 PC around 1996.
eMac, age 7. i concerned myself primarily with clarisworks, making nested folders, and age of empires 2. my siblings and i argued about strategy in age of empires 2 a lot. i think i am the worst rts player of all time.
i was very good at deimos rising and otto matic and was the only one of us who could beat them
Mine was a Leading Edge Model D, an 8088 PC with 512k of RAM. It was the more expensive model that had a little metal switch on the back that could turn on EGA graphics. My family got it 3rd hand when I was 8 or 9. I mostly used it for making greeting cards and banners (on the tractor feed dot matrix printer) and copying basic programs out of Byte magazine.
I got an emachines tower and a bunch of secondhand peripherials. I was thrilled to have my own computer at the time, but in hindsight it didnt really meet any of the system requirements of the games i wanted to play. I remember getting a smooth as gravel 3 fps in Ironforge. Miserable, but i didnt really know any better
An IBM PCjr, when I was 4 (I was one of those kids that picked up reading very quickly).
I learned DOS, played King's Quest, and even picked up simple programming in BASIC from a book. Not sure if the book was a pack-in with the computer or if my parents got it for me separate. I didn't learn PC internals until a few years later, although I do vividly recall an ISA-slot 15MB hard drive that was the size of one of today's big video cards.
A friend of the family built it for us. I think it was '96 or so. I was maybe 13 or 14. I had used computers a little at school and at friends' houses.
It was a pc clone that ran win95. Cyrix p166 cpu (which actually ran at 133 mhz), 16 mb of EDO RAM, 800ish MB hard drive, a 4x cd rom drive and a 33.6k modem. I loved that thing and learned everything I could about how it worked.
We didn't have internet access at first, so I started dialing in to local BBSs. I eventually found a local board running wildcat that shared it's ISDN internet connection to users. And I would download pornographic images and save them to floppy disks to sell at my all boys catholic high school.
Mac LC. The family computer. Tried to "overclock" it as a pre-teen. I was a dumbass. Thing still works. But I credit that little tank for sparking the fire.
Windows 95. A Dell I think? It was in our dining room lol. Played a lot of Lego Island and Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver.
A hand me down from my rich uncle, he paid 5k for it back in the late 2000s, but what I vividly remember was the humongus and ridiculously heavy gaming CRT monitor it came with. That monitor was one of the last gaming CRT monitors ever made, the Sony GDM-FW900, it was expensive as hell back then and still is these days. I remember playing for hours and sweating buckets, that thing would output so much heat it was unreal. The table it sat on would get so hot, i had to move the monitor somewhere else to cool it, huge bubbles formed under it. But man the colors were so crisp, the deepest blacks ive ever seen on a screen, OLED has nothing on that old CRT tech, it also had incredible refresh rates. That system was so powerful it could still run late 2010s game on medium, but eventually parts that couldnt be replaced started to fail and the monitor eventually broke, couldnt find anyone able (or willing) to repair it, apparently repairing it was already hard back then. Eventually i saved up and bought myself a very good build for ~1k, dont use it much for games now, mostly for 3D work.
This was a great read. Thanks for sharing your experience of your first computer.
First computer, I got was via a trade. I was about 12. At the time I knew next to nothing about computers, with desktops being a thing at school (in one room). Something like this in a home… that’s rich people stuff. It ran Windows XP, and was almost certainly a Pentium (don’t know which).
I remember making several trips to transfer the monitor, desktop, and accessories home. That thing was HEAVY, for me back then. It must have been about 3 miles before I carried everything home. I connected everything, booted it up, and everything worked perfectly… Then five minutes later I found out the importance of the internet… optical games worked fine, but no porn… My next purchase would be a USB 2 mobile internet dongle. How else was I going to do all that valuable “research”.
About two years or so later, it wouldn’t turn on (the PC). There wasn’t any shops near me that could fix it, and I thought what would be the harm in opening the side panel, and taking a look. Suffice to say… I made things worse. Can’t recall what I did, but the power supply went bang, thankfully no fire. I ended up throwing the computer out, and selling the accessories and monitor. I didn’t want to own a desktop computer, again for years. That loud bang scared the living hell out of me.
I only later got back into computing, because I was kinda addicted to video games, heard PC gaming was better, and slowly aquired several games from relatives (Crysis, Total War Empire, etc). That computer I purchased, new, with cash I earned from trading with folks/shops (still haggle, to this day). My next computer was AMD, a A6-3600, I think. No graphics card, though I would later haggle for a GTX 960. This computer was where I started to get really interested in IT. I wanted to learn why my old computer bit the dust, and figure out everything I could. It was more than a porn and gaming machine. That computer taught me more than most IT lessons ever did (still can’t believe using Google Search, constituted as a “lesson”).
Thinkpad T60. A relative of mine got it from their employer, IBM, as a decommisioned machine that was only used by said relative. I was 4 years old. I played hours of GTA: San Andreas, then about a year later I installed Ubuntu which sent me down the Linux and C programming rabbit hole. I learned so much. Thank you, kind relative (whom I'll not name, not doxxing myself).
Commodore 64. I had no idea wtf this thing was that my grandparents bought. They got a few cartridges and the 5.25 floppy drive. I put a cartridge in and a game came up. I was hooked. I slowly learned basic and how to use the floppy drive. A few years later, we got a Macintosh Performa 450. That was the first "real" computer I got to learn on. I quickly realized Mac wasn't for me and the next one was a Packard Bell with a 150mhz processor. From there I built my own and never looked back.
