I remember I once got a commander 64 (with a cassette reader), but "my" first PC was my dad's pentium 120, like 20 years ago...

Nooooooo.... *splat!'

It is Commodore. Sure we had nicknames for it like "Kammoraato" or "Cammoraato",, roughly translated "a gory carcass".

One of my biggest regrets in life is that I didn't get a Commodore 64 like all my friends, but a marginal Spectravideo SVI-328 (after TI-99/4A became obsolete).

SVI-328 wasn't even fully MSX-compliant, more like a precursor to real MSX computers (which also got much more games). Technically I think it was identical to MSX computers, as well at the Colecovision console. I think it could even play Colecovision games with an adapter, which unfortunately I didn't have.

Sorry about that, must have thought of Magic The Gathering commander! XP

The first computer I had my hands on was my dads. It was a 286 with an amber colored monitor and... *drums* it had a turbo button to unleash the power of the CPU from 8 Mhz to 12 Mhz!!! It also had a 20Mb hard disk and, not sure about that one, 640Kb of memory.

Thanks to my brother's friends we had a lot of pirated games on it: Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc, etc...

And I still have it and it still runs although the hard drive is getting bad. :-( I did help me a lot learning English though, playing those games. :) And thanks to GW Basic I'm now a software engineer...

Emulation is your friend. :)

Sure, yes, I do that but.. nothing beats the real thing! ;)

Well, the real thing did read Amiga diskettes, which was a benefit. But on the other hand, it took ages to do that. If only for the easy loading, emulation beats a real Amiga hands down.

I'm new to computers! My first computer was a Pentium III 450Mhz / 512 RAM / 8Gb HDD / Trident 3d 8MB VGA / Win98

I grew up playing games on consoles until 1998/ 1999 that i've got my first PC; i was amazed by the quality of the games! I remember the first time i played Viper Racing (couldn't believe it's graphics & it's physics!!!).. Or the first time i played Half-Life (still, my favourite FPS).. Or Phantasmagoria & Black Dahlia (they were a new genre of games for me!).. Or Diablo.. and Age of Empires.. Ohhh, so many great games... Later i upgraded my video card and tried a Voodoo card; OH MY GOD what an improvement i had back then!

At that time, we had 56k net connections (if i remember correctly, DSL came here around 2005) and i used IRC to communicate with others.. Then it came the first game i played online, it was Grand Prix Legends (still my favourite racing game!); i participated in some races that have been organized by RSC community and met some wonderful people that loved (and still love) that game...

At the same time, i thought i could learn new things with my computer so i learned HTML (i don't remember anything now, but i'm trying to re-learn it so i can make a website), i got into programming (mainly Pascal and a little C++), into image processing and then, after i got tired of all the viruses in windows, i switched to Linux (thankfully there was a professor in my college, willing to help me in my first steps - i remember he even took the time to introduce me to UNIX at the time) which i still use for all the internet stuff and some light gaming.

And of course, i can't remember how many times i de-assembled that computer in order to learn it's components, what they do etc..

edit: how can i forget the floppy disks? I was carrying one in my pocket all the time (like we do now with usb flash drives) where i had stored my game saves and a collection of screenshots. :-)

C64, early 80s. it's still running and I'm playing some C64 games on it regularly.

The first PC was 286 with Hercules graphic card (B&W) and 5,25 floppies. I don't remember HDD, maybe there wasn't any, I really don't remember. And no mouse, just a keyboard. The first game I played on it was Prince of Persia.

My very first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It only had 5 kB of RAM (including the Basic ROM) and a resolution of 176x184 pixels (or 22x23 characters). All the games and other programs were stored on cassette tapes that were taking forever to load, leaving you no time to play! :-)

We eventually switched to a Commodore 64, and it was so much better! It came with 64 kB of RAM (including the Basic ROM), had a resolution of 320x200 pixels (160x200 pixels in multi-color mode, or 40x25 characters), used a 16 colors palette and had full sprite support. All the games and programs were stored on floppy disks, and it was also equipped with a dot matrix printer and two joysticks. Like the VIC-20, it was hooked to a standard TV.

The Commodore 64 had one of the best sound chip for its time. Take a look at this demo, and keep in mind it was running on a 1 MHz computer, with only 64 kB of RAM. ("kilobytes", not megabytes)

I learned Basic and assembler programming on these beasts, and I had a huge collection of games to play with. I was also the co-sysop of 2 BBS's (a precursor of the Internet).

R.I.P. Jack Tramiel!

My first PC was a 486 with 4Mb of RAM and a 600Mb HDD. But I did have a CD-ROM :o Also, S3 video card :)

I think it was about 1987, 1988.

I desperately wanted a computer, and my Dad was insistent that we got a 'proper' computer - an IBM-compatible as was the term back in the day.

We got a 10MHz 286, with 640KB of RAM and a 30MB HDD. I dread to think how much it cost at the time, but it was amazing.

An HP Pavilion xt953 running Windows ME...

It was equipped with a pretty nice 1 GHz Pentium III processor and 128 MB of ram that was pretty good in 2001, the time I got it, but it had a pretty bad integrated Intel GPU with only 11 MB of VRAM. I couldn't do a lot of gaming on it at the time but I still managed to have a lot of good memories with it despite my frustrations with Windows ME. It was around that time I was starting to learn how to use a computer thanks to being part of a program called GenYes in elementary school and it was this new thing that I was starting to really get into. I would apply my lessons learned in that program when I got home to my own computer, and learn even more by fiddling on my own.

I did a lot on that thing, I played The Sims obsessively on it, discovered the world of retro gaming through emulation, which was getting very well programmed at that time. If it wasn't for that I would have never played a lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis classics or even some arcade ones for that matter. I also was part of the abandonware scene for some time since I couldn't run newer computer games at the time (I got the PC in 2001 and didn't stop using it until 2010, Linux made that possible) and couldn't get many games as a broke preteen that would run on the thing. Blood, Shadow Warrior, Heretic, Hexen, Lemmings 95, Marathon, Alone in the Dark, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Quake, System Shock 2, SiN, and many others dominated my existence from 2005 to about 2007 when I eventually switched to Linux to keep the machine going for modern purposes. The computer was old, ME was a nightmare, and I missed out on some really good PC games from the 2000's when they launched... but by god was that machine the thing I called my own. It was something else entirely when I learned to use it, and if it was not for that I probably would have never learned how to use a PC properly, have an interest in computers at large, or even enjoy older PC games and be a part of the GOG community.

The VIC-20 had a 20K of ROM, far as I could find: 8K kernel, 8K BASIC, 4K character images. Of the 5K of RAM, 1K was for kernel use and I/O, 0.5K for the display and 3.5K for the user. Plus it had 0.5K nybbles for display colour.