I answered this question elsewhere and figured it was worth doing properly, if any of you have stories behind this question please share it with me as it may give a bit of a background behind your PC roots. What was my first CPU purchase: Short answer - a DX2 66MHZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486DX2 ------------- Long answer, skip if your not interested in long stories. As a family I had access to an Atari 2600 with 2 controllers and paddles, I had a Commodore 64 from 1985 through early 90's, In 1992 we had an Amiga 500 and early in 1994 I owned my first PC - a 286 11MHZ with 14MHZ boost, it had a full length 2MB XMS memory card ISA slot, it ran VGA graphics, my screen was a 640x480x 16 colours or 320x240 256 colours, My dad owned a Commodore Amiga 600 with TV in/out at about the same time and I used to use that for a while, then he got our first 386 at 33MHZ it was the same year (1994) he later spent $980 on a CD-Rom with a Sound Blaster card and Day of the Tentacle (talkie version) included, changed the way I thought about computers and games. it was like this for a couple of years with us only upgrading from 4MB to 8MB of ram and an extra 528MB HDD (also Expensive for the time). In 1995 I used my own hard earned money to buy a 486DX2 66MHz with a SVGA screen - that lasted me until I brought a AMD K62-233MHZ in late 1998 followed by a Voodoo Prophet 2 3D Card - Wish I got the TNT2 that was a bit more expensive at the time. I then moved through AMD K7 Athlon on a ASUS board and brought my first CDRW - that is when XP came out and things got interesting I don't really have any documentation after this as I went through AMD's burning out and switching to being an Intel only man and after my ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 (2001 model) stopped for no reason I also abandoned them for nVidia Only. My current system is an I5 -2500K with a GTX 550-Ti - so as you can see it is why I did casual games for my Mega Games Pack I just released Apart from my dad in the first photo, I am in the others, but these are the actual PC's and locations I used my them - for many hours. Now OS's - I started on C64 OS, then Amiga Workbench, then DOS v6.X and Windows 3, 95, 98se, XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and every service pack in between - the amount of crashes and time installing all these OS's then updating them on multiple PC's was the very reason I made LastXP etc, some of the Service packs in XP took over 40 minutes to "sometimes" install but often fail or BSOD after the reboot. I used to use a ghost image for Windows 98 and could have my PC usable in 15 minutes off a single CD with a self booting ghost for dos image I made - I have always automated and improved where I could. I started programming in 1992 on my C64 using some intro to programming books and went straight to QBasic in 1994 when I got my first DOS OS. I have always used Basic as it does what I need.
My first CPU if you can call it that was a AY-3-8500 This was used in an Australian electronics magazine and was developed as a kit that i built back when i was learning about electronics for a game called 'pong' or 'tennis'. the background story here. It had a RF video output that you plugged into the TV antenna input and it displayed in Black and White. Then in 1977 i went to Malaysia to work and where my friend introduced me to TRS80 or trash 80 as we called it and i suppose my first hand experience of using BASIC on a personal computer. The rage in Malaysia was TRS80 or Apple ][ clones that where available in abundance as well as software and books at low cost. Then there was the delima of one or the other and in the end i went for the Apple ][. I didn't buy the Apple ][ overseas because it was a long way to travel if something went wrong with a clone computer but i did manage to get a few (hundred) books and some (300+) software disks that was a start to getting into Personel Computers. When i returned to Australia i met a person that was a big fan of Apple ][s nd told him of my exploits and what i collected. We became fast friends . I told him that i had all this software but no computer as of yet. He exclaimed "WHAT!!!" then followed with "WTF" and so the hunt was on for an Apple ][ or clone. He then put me onto a company in the north of Australia called "Energy Control" who were selling Apple ][ + clones. I contacted them and a week later i had a brand new Apple ][+ clone that was 1/2 the price of a real one. From there i got a green screen monitor, 2x floppy disk drives for 360k floppys, a Z80 cpu card that allowed the computer to run CP/M software, a dot matrix 80 column printer, a card called 'Replay' which could take a snapshot of memory to save on floppy disk. I suppose one of the first apps that i used was visicalc a spreadsheet app and then wordstar a word processor, then a database app called Dbase2 which i used to develop mailing lists, inventory etc. I also got an assembler program for the 6502 CPU where i learned a lot of how the code worked on an Apple computer and created a catalog program that i could then put the contents of each of the floppy disks into a database ready to print out for people to view and get disks in return. As time went on Apple released new versions of the operating system one of them called ProDOS it was ok but on boot up if you didn't have a real Apple it would fail to boot, however there was a workaround in that you could modify the boot sector of the disk to ignore the check. Later i found out what it was doing on boot up, it was checking the EPROMs to see if it had APPLE or Apple. So i burned a new EPROM with the modified code and stacked it on top of the existing EPROM with a switch to swap between the ROMs. Later in my life my knowledge of databases that i learned on my Apple computer paid off when they were looking for people to do some database coding. I then proceeded to learn how to program in informix SQL and 4GL A tutor was employed to teach me how to program with these languages and within a few weeks i was so knowledgeable that i knew more then the tutor. Then in 1987 i went to Malaysia and i found all the rage was for IBM computer clones so this time i bought an IBM XT clone that had a 80286 CPU, 128K of Dynamic RAM, also had a wopping 20MB (thats Megabytes) hard drive that needed a IBM DOS 3.3 bootable 360K 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. Then later changed the computer to a 80386 and added a 1200 baud modem then the era of the internet hits Australia.
Cont.... Upgraded to a Pentium, MSWindows 3.1 then Pentium 2, pentium 3, pentium 4, MSWin95, MSWinXP Then several Windows notebook computers starting with winxp. When i got a computer with win vista first thing i did was downgraded it to winxp. When win7 appeared i had a new notebook computer with 8GB RAM, 1TB hard drive, 14inch screen. I learned how to install win 7 and did many installs for friends and others. Started to learn more languages such as HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, MySQL, PHP for web site development. Then changed computers to an Apple Mac Book Pro where i do all the things that i did on a windows computer and if i encounter a windows only app i then use an app called 'parallels desktop' running win7. I run MSOFFICE mac version and several other IDE software for programming, starting to learn Python and Ruby with a touch of learning C++ on a Mac. Also learning about Arduino microcontrollers and creating tutorials on what i have learnt over the many years of computing.
