Show your age...

Around 1989, my first PC was a Commodore 64. When you forgot the 5" floppy disk was in drive and turned off the PC, it erased your floppy.

Around 1992 or so, my second PC was a 486 (can't remember if it was a SX or DX) with Win 3.1.1 that I spent around $100 to upgrade to a P90, and another $100 for another 128 MB of RAM. I also upgraded my 1440(?) modem to something I could use without disabling images from displaying in the browser. I was on AOL back then. What a pain to get the modem string configured. It had a 420MB disk drive. I remember loading Windows and MS Office and it was pretty full.

Around 1998, my third PC was a $1500 Gateway P3 500 that came with Win98SE. I was learning to program so I wanted it to be fast to compile code. It was Gateways second fastest processor. That will get you a very nice I7 now!

I then bought a Dell Pentium D 820 with 2GB RAM and Win XP in 1996 that was fast compared to the gateway but now seems unremarkable.

In 2009, I sold the Dell and built a nice $1500 top of the line gaming PC with an I7, 4870 graphics card, and Vista but sold it because gaming was consuming my life and I wanted to trade being tied down to a desktop with the portability of a desktop replacement laptop. Running Vista on good hardware resulted in good performance and drivers weren't a problem at all, in my case.

While searching various forums to see what a good laptop would be, I stumbled across a post stating Gateway accidentally put I5 chips in I3 laptops sold at BestBuy, so I went down to check it out. Low and behold, I got an I5 with 4GB RAM, Blu-ray, and Win7 for $450. I saved like $300. That's what I use today and I love Win7.

It's kind of sad looking back at the money I wasted on such pathetic hardware! I won't even mention the amount of cash I wasted on software.

We'll be saying that same thing in another 20 years.

My fist computer was a Packard Bell 286SX. At the time I was just starting college and I had to get a bank loan to buy it. Now it seems you can purchase a computer with the all the coins you find inside of the couch.

My first computer was in 1983. An Atari 800XL. I loved that computer so much and thought my life was complete. One of my friends ran a local BBS and we could actually email, download, and play games online. In the beginning of the 90's, I opened a small(micro) computer company and sold used 8088's and 80286's. Running DOS and Windows...I didn't like Windows at first and found it difficult to navigate. But with time...

PS: Scott, those Packard Bell's were great, but if I remember correctly, some of their architecture was propitiatory like many PC's(HP and IBM PS2's using micro channel) during that time.

Tom, you're just a young whippersnapper
I bought a Sinclair ZX-80 not long after they came out (circa '80 or '81)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80

I'm with you. What happen to the simpler days of dos commands.

My first ever computer was a Tandy 200 laptop which used when working for Tandy in Sales back in 1986. When I left Tandy a year later I was allowed to keep it

From TI to Atari to Commodore 64 to the beginnings of the PC with no harddrive at all and less than 10 MB of RAM lol, we've been through it all in this house since the early 80's. It's been quite a ride I must admit.

My very first actual experience on a PC type computer was in '88. I got my first office job, and the person that would become my new boss called me and asked me to come in for an interview. His first question was to the order of "Do you have any experience on computers?". My first thought was... "well there goes that job" lol. But he surprised me after I said that I didn't. He said, and I quote:

"No problem, if you can press F10 you can run a computer" LOL and I got the job, go figure lol.

But they weren't sorry, I was a quick study back then (not that you can tell it today in this old brain lol).
I took home every book they had on all the programs they used and I read them all from office computers to DOS which I became pretty proficient at for a basic user not programmer. Learned everything I could, I was in love lol. I've been on them ever since and have done all I could to have jobs that used them.

The first computer that I owned was an ATT without a CDdrive, 4MB of ram and a HDD of 350MB. This was in 1993, but I had used computers at work before that, also the ones that you had to load the OS into at every startup. I ventured to bui9ld in the CD drive and more ram myself, and felt very proud when it actually was working after I had put the bonnet back on. A year later I was on the internet with it, connecting with a slow dialup modem (don't remember the speed, but when I got a 14400 baud modem somewhat later, it was a major improvement) and Trumpet Winsock. Anyone remember Trumpet winsock?

I have had several computers after that, most of them I assembled myself. It's only lately that I have become lazy and buy them ready made.

How about an Atari 800 with a acoustic cup modem and a cassette to load the programs. Modem has a lightening top speed of 300bps. Dont cough or you would interrupt the transmission. We used to hack the games for fun!!