Your first PC?

[whiskeytown]

Mine was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A which I used to play chess on all the time...and I also learned the first I'd learn about programming - in basic. - but my first real IBM, that's a different story.

The scene starts with a roommate - he has a computer - it starts old gears cranking again - I hadn't had a PC since the TI994A days and I sure didn't have the internet -
the wheels start in motion - I'm poor but a friend says he can let go of a blown custom made Computer City PC for $250. (He's a manager there) - It needs a motherboard - and it's only a Pentium 125, but we think we can overclock it, and eventually, we have it going at P166 speeds.

The bed is a giant wooden loft - I sleep on two foam matresses on top - below is a blanket and an office chair and a box to move desks in. It has books in it currently, but it's obviously the size of the desk - a 14 inch VGA monitor - old IBM that no one will miss is given to me by some station engineers at the radio station I work at - but it's obvious either the video card or the monitor sucks, so both are upgraded. I get in a 56K modem that someone left lying around the repair shop one day. (no kidding, under a rack of shelves - I was also fixing PC's at the time) - and my provider supports the x2 USR Robotics standard, so I'm usually connecting at 46,000 bytes/sec.

Sitting under that loft, blanket down as to not disturb roommates, I proceeded to well, start the life that would become this one - one more internet focused -

Not sure if that's a blessing or a curse - jury will be out a long while, but thinking of that old piece of [censored], wanting to play Heroes of Might and Magic 2 - 800 MB harddrive - that was the day.

That eventually went to my stepmom who I THINK still runs it today...it's older then dirt, but she still runs. the next PC, an AMD K6-2/350 had issues - so I eventually build a PIII 600 for my main box and Athlon 1200 for my Windows 2000 server - I try to upgrade that to my home PC but no dice so now I have a new custom built 3.2 Gig pc.

But I still like that old p.o.s. too - back when you could find computer parts that actually might help rather then hurt your machine.

That was a long, long, long time ago. Hard to believe I've built 4 upgraded PC's since then.

RB