What game turned you to PC?

[Bacon]

How many computers have you bought new, second hand or got for free?

1982: Commodore VIC 20, Brand new for Christmas
1984: Commodore 64, Brand new
1987: Commodore Amiga 500, Brand new
(I don't have any of the above anymore)
1993: 286 PC, used
1997: Pentium PC, Brand new
1998: Pentium II PC, Brand new
2001: Pentium III PC, Brand new
2001: Amiga 500, used, from a flea market
2001: Commodore 128, used
2001 or 2002: Commodore VIC 20, used
2002-2006 (my memory is a little blurred here):

• 6-7 Commodore 64s (breadbox and 64C, all with old motherboard and 6581 SID)
  4-5 Commodore 128s
  another Commdore VIC 20
  3 Commodore Plus/4s
  1 Sord M5 (only had it for a day)
  2 Sinclair ZX81s, Brand new
  1 Sinclair Spectrum 48K with Nordic ROM
  1 Sinclair Spectrum+
  1 or 2 Commodore Amiga 500
  1 or 2 Commodore Amiga 500+
  2 Commodore Amiga 600s
  1 Pentium III laptop PC, Brand new
  Several Atari STs
  1 486 laptop PC
  Several old desktop PCs, used
  1 VIA Mini-ITX motherboard, Brand new, used as web server/router

2004: AMD64 3000+ PC, Brand new

I think that's it.

[MacbthPSW]

How many computers have you bought new, second hand or got for free?

1983: NEW Timex-Sinclair 1000 (but eventually returned it since I couldn't get the thing to save or load to tape)
1984: NEW C-64, bought March break in Duluth, Minnesota
1987: Used C-64, bought while I lived in Australia for the year; bringing my C-64 from Canada would have been too much trouble, never mind the NTSC/PAL issues which I didn't understand at the time
1989: NEW Amiga 500
1992: NEW 386sx/20 laptop
1997: NEW AMD K6/233 desktop
2001: NEW Duron 700 desktop, later upgraded to a Duron 1200.
2004: NEW AthlonXP 1800+
2005: NEW Athlon64 3000+ laptop
2006: NEW Athlon64 3000+ desktop
2006: NEW Athlon64 3200+ desktop

Starting sometime around 1992 is when I started picking up used machines kind of whenever I saw them, or they were given to me. I was going to try and insert them in the list above, but it seems like too big a job to be possible for me... quick attempt at just listing them:

1 PET 4016
3 PET 4032
3 CBM 8032
1 SuperPET
10? VIC-20s (I counted the number for some other thread here)
40+ C-64s and 64Cs
1 SX-64
3 Plus/4s
7 C-128s
5 C-128Ds
9 Amiga 500s
1 Amiga 1000
1 Amiga 2000
1 Atari 400
1 Atari 130XE
1 Atari XEGS
4 Timex-Sinclair 1000s
1 Sinclair ZX81
1 Tandy CoCo 1
1 Tandy CoCo 2
1 Tandy CoCo 3
1 Tandy MC-10
2 Tandy Model-100
1 Mattel Aquarius
1 TI 99/4a
1 Mac SE/30
1 Mac 580CD
1 Power Mac G3
1 Compaq luggable
1 Olivetti luggable
1 Commodore PC 50-II
6 or so misc PCs from Pentium class up

[eslapion]

Around the time Wolfenstein 3D came aroumd it also appeared on the Mac so I still played it with the Emplant card on my Amiga 3000.

What truly moved me to the PC, on the gaming side, was Dark Forces which came in around about the same time as Doom. I found Dark Forces to be more entertaining that Doom because it consisted in more than just shooting your way through monsters. The puzzles to resolve were more appealing.

However, I did buy a PC long before I started playing on it because Windows NT (the first full 32 bit operating system from Microsoft) was able to run Netscape Navigator and browse the internet. That was in 1994, more than a year before the appearance of Windows 95. Windows NT 3.5, back then, sold for 495$ and I ran it on a 486DX2-66 with 16MB of RAM.

To me, Windows NT, even if it was outrageously expensive and failed to run many of the software people liked, was the only operating system on the PC that was as powerful as the Amiga OS (preemptive multitasking) and as flexible (who cares you got millions of colors on a Mac and a fast processor if the whole machine is stuck when you format a simple floppy!!).

Back then, everybody told me Windows 95 was better than NT but now... Windows XP is actually NT 5.1 inside...

[Bacon]

Oops! Forgot the Oric-1 and Commodore SX-64 I got last year, and the Mac Performa 5200 (I think it is) I've had for some years.

[Boray]

My "main" computer through the years...

January 1987: Bought a used Vic-20 from my brother.
1988: C64 (or if it was Christmas 1987)
1990: Amiga500
March 1993: Amiga1200, got updated the same year with a 28MHz 020, later with a 50MHz 030.
1999: PC 200MHz Pentium
Jan 2004: Back to Amiga1200 when the PC broke down. Updated the A1200 with a 40MHz 040.
March 2005- My current P2 running at 350MHz! Bought for 300 SEK at Tradera... The absolutely fastest of my 20 computers...

[PaulQ]

How many computers have you bought new, second hand or got for free?

1981: Used Atari 2600 system with games, joysticks, and steering controllers (similar to paddles). Technially not a computer, but it was billed as a "Video Computer System." I still have most of the original games and the original console.
1983: New Commodore Vic 20 with Datasette and games. Xmas gift. Got it because I wanted to learn more about computers, but wasn't getting nearly enough time on the PETs at school.
1984: New Commodore 64. Xmas gift. My "Peer pressure" computer; I got it because everyone else had a Commodore 64 and laughed at my poor Vic 20. I reused the datasette until I could save up for a 1541, then sold the Vic and Datasette to put towards a monitor, a 1902.
1989: New Commodore Amiga 500. Sold my entire Commodore 64 system (which was considerable by this time) and used that money towards a brand new Amiga 500 with a 1084s monitor. This was my "Vanity" computer, so I could laugh at the poor 64. Soon after, I bought an Epson LX-810 printer which I used well until 1996.
1993: Epson Equity '286 PC. Built from cheap or free used components for $100; it featured 640k, a 30MB hard drive and a big orange monochrome CGA/EGA monitor which was very crisp and easy to read. In my first year of college, I needed to run PC software; my A500 just wasn't cutting it anymore. This became my "Ultimate Telecommunications" computer; it pushed my USRobotics Sportster to speeds well beyond its capabilities, made for a great fax machine, and I learned to appreciate the superior terminal and offline mail reading software for the PC.
1994: '386SX16. I needed to run Windows software, so I sold my '286 system and used that money to build this system. Featuring grey-scale monochrome VGA graphics, a 40GB hard drive, and 4MB of RAM, I finally packed away the old Amiga 500 into storage after getting this machine.
1994: Later on that year, I flipped that '386SX-16 system for a profit once again, and put that towards building a '486 DX2-66 because I wanted to play Duke Nukem. Again, put together from used or free components. This was the final result from my initial $100 investment in that '286 in early '93, with a 500 MB hard drive, colour VGA graphics, 8MB of RAM, and, for the first time, a sound blaster card.
1995: Worked for Apple Canada for a little while, so I bought a classic Mac Plus system. I still have this computer and it still works, if anyone has some Commodore stuff they'd like to swap for it (I'm thinking a Commodore 128 system). I used Power Macs all day at work, but couldn't get myself to like them; they actually made me miss using my PC.
1996: Landed a sweet job as a Y2k programmer, so I bought a Pentium 133 system, which I later upgraded to 166 and then 200.
1999: Sold the P200 system, built an AMD K62-350 based system; later upgraded to a K62-450. Currently running Red Hat Linux as my web server.
2000: Toshiba Satellite notebook; a genuine piece of crap, as the hinges broke both within warranty (had them replaced) and outside of warranty.
2001: Built my wife an Athalon 1.6Ghz system in a mini tower case, connected to a Samsung LCD monitor with 512MB of RAM running Windows XP professional.
2004: Built the computer I'm using now from used and new components; an Athalon 1Ghz system with 512MB of RAM, running Windows 2000 professional. The processor and ATI all-in-wonder card were used, and I recycled (currently share) the keyboard, trackball, and monitor on a KVM switch with my server.
I've also acquired several yard sale and free PC's over the years, including a PS/2 and an Aptiva. I set them up for my son to use, who promptly stuck things in the disk drives and rendered them useless.
2007: Came full circle by buying a Commodore Vic 20 from a flea market. No more peer pressure, no more vanity, no more computer industry career to worry about; I can finally kick back and enjoy computing as a hobby.

[ral-clan]

And the funny thing is that the 386 and 486 (and eventually even the >Ghz machines) you owned will eventually be worth less than the VIC or the Amiga (and a lot sooner than it took the Commodore's too).

[PaulQ]

However, I did buy a PC long before I started playing on it because Windows NT (the first full 32 bit operating system from Microsoft) was able to run Netscape Navigator and browse the internet. That was in 1994, more than a year before the appearance of Windows 95. Windows NT 3.5, back then, sold for 495$ and I ran it on a 486DX2-66 with 16MB of RAM.

To me, Windows NT, even if it was outrageously expensive and failed to run many of the software people liked, was the only operating system on the PC that was as powerful as the Amiga OS (preemptive multitasking) and as flexible (who cares you got millions of colors on a Mac and a fast processor if the whole machine is stuck when you format a simple floppy!!).

Back then, everybody told me Windows 95 was better than NT but now... Windows XP is actually NT 5.1 inside...

What about OS/2 Warp? I bought that in 1994 for $40 at a computer show (red spine, needed Windows 3.1 disks for Windows application support) and installed in on my DX2-66 with 8MB of RAM (they claimed it could run on as little as 4MB of RAM, but it thrashed terribly). It came with IBM Works and Online Access. Apparently, Windows NT is built on OS/2. To me, OS/2 was the closest thing on a PC to the Amiga's OS, including the REXX programming language (comparable to AREXX on the Amiga). At the time, the IBM Explorer was much nicer to use than Netscape.

Then there was OS/2 Warp Connect, which was probably more competitive to Windows NT in '95 than the regular Warp was.

And the funny thing is that the 386 and 486 (and eventually even the >Ghz machines) you owned will eventually be worth less than the VIC or the Amiga (and a sooner than it took the Commodore's too).

Yeah, some of the old PC stuff can't be *given* away.

[Bacon]

I forgot to list my GP2X, bought in 2005. Although touted as a handheld gaming system it definitely qualifies as a computer: it uses Linux for an operating system and you can log in to a shell over telnet via USBnet. Add a breakout box and you can connect a USB keyboard and USB hard disks.

With the GP2X port of python installed it is even possible to program directly on the machine itself. You could probably even port gcc to it if you wanted to program in C.

[eslapion]

What about OS/2 Warp? I bought that in 1994 for $40 at a computer show (red spine, needed Windows 3.1 disks for Windows application support) and installed in on my DX2-66 with 8MB of RAM (they claimed it could run on as little as 4MB of RAM, but it thrashed terribly). It came with IBM Works and Online Access. Apparently, Windows NT is built on OS/2. To me, OS/2 was the closest thing on a PC to the Amiga's OS, including the REXX programming language (comparable to AREXX on the Amiga). At the time, the IBM Explorer was much nicer to use than Netscape.

Then there was OS/2 Warp Connect, which was probably more competitive to Windows NT in '95 than the regular Warp was.

I did buy an original box of OS/2 Warp but I ran it for a few weeks then quickly realized I had a terrible time getting the drivers for many pieces of hardware. I couldn't even get my MSC optical mouse to be recognised. With NT came a small booklet called the HCL or Hardware compatibility list and almost everthing decent was in it.

One of the reason I settled for NT is because it was the only OS capable of running the PC version of Lightwave in true native 32bit mode (Win32). It was the ONLY one capable of doing that (No OS/2 warp couldn't do that and no Win95 couldn't do that and no the patch for windows 3.1 didn't do that and even Windows 98 couldn't do that, ALL of them used emulators of varying quality). Same is true for the PC version of VistaPro 3.X.

So by the time warp connect came out, it became even less appealing because by that time, Photoshop 3.0 or 4.0 were also using Win32 and Illustrator jumped from version 4.X to 7.X and also became a Win32 application. Only NT gave the full power to these applications.

OS/2 warp and connect required that you have Windows 3.1 installed in it and then the Win32s (s=simulator) emulator installed inside that windows 3.1 to be able to run Win32 applications. The result was less than impressive and very cumbersome to install and manage.

The Win32 emulator integrated in Windows 9X was called Win32c (c=compatible) and was better than the windows 3.1 Win32s but it was still not running in a flat memory model environment in true protected mode like the Amiga OS does. NT had that and so I settled for the OS that became the core of all other OS from Microsoft.

That's why I still use Adobe Illustrator 7.01 since 1997 and Photoshop 3.0 since 1995. They are still 100% compatible with Windows XP and probably Vista which I haven't tried yet. For some reason Lightwave 5.5 appeared to be incompatible with MMX CPUs so I had to upgrade this one. I also still use office 97 which was designed for Windows 95 and NT 4.0.

True enuf OS/2 had that but apart from a few freewares and sharewares, only IBM applications exploited the native 32bit mode available in it. Too few third parties appeared on the market for it.

[saundby]

Fall 1975: Got a friend's Scelbi 8b on "long term loan" after he got his 8080 operating. Added 2K of static memory to it to replace the 2K of shift-register memory he had in it. Spent about $50 on the boards from which I pulled the SRAMs, made $75 on selling tested chips that were left over. Programmed it using toggle switches on the front panel and developed a hatred for toggle-switch programming that lasts to this day.

Early 1976: Built a homebrew variant of the RCA reference design for the 1802, later modded to be Elf-compatible, and placed it into a hollow cut out of a hardcover book, powered by four D cells. 16 key hex keypad, dual digit hex display, 256 bytes of RAM, three eight-bit output ports. Total cost, about $110. Keyswitches and hex display drivers were the most expensive components, since the CPU price had dropped from $80 to $25 while I was designing the system.

June 1976: Bought a Netronics Elf II kit for $100. Built it on the kitchen table in about 4 hours, 2.5 hours of that was hunting down a single cold solder joint. Paid $5 for a used power supply for it, already owned an old Radio Shack tape drive that became the mass storage for it.

October 1976: Built a SBC using the newly-repriced 8080 (~$25, down from about $200). It was a pain to build and bring up. Spent over $250 on it after budgeting only about $150. I only completed it so that I could sell it to someone else to recover some of the costs. It had 2K of RAM, 2K of ROM (1K monitor plus I/O routines), 32x24 character video via a barrel shifter circuit, a character ROM pulled from a terminal board and the 2K of shift register memory from the Scelbi for character memory. Input was via a 48-key full-stroke keyboard, which I replaced with a membrane keypad when I sold it for about $400.

December 1976: Built another SBC over Christmas break using the 8080A which was much easier to bring up and get running than the 8080. This one had 2K of RAM and 4K of ROM with a full assembler/monitor, but no video on this board, only RS-232, since I planned to use it with a terminal. Ended up selling it two weeks after I finished it to a friend who literally waved $500 in my face (I had spent about $200 on the system, not counting reused parts from other systems.)

January-February 1977: Built another homebrew system based on the Motorola 6800, over the mad protests of two friends who really wanted me to build a 6502-based system. I threatened to build one based on the Fairchild F8 instead, but fortunately it never came to that. 4K of static RAM, 8K of ROM, full RS-232 x 2, I made the board to take up to 32K of memory, either RAM or ROM. Ported a version of Tiny BASIC to it, just for the heck of it. Took it to a computer club meeting and never came home with it. Sold for $800. I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever actually own any computer other than my Elfs. I was weak in the face of hard cash, I'm afraid. Total cost in parts was about $100 since nearly all the parts had been pulls from boards that were more than paid for with the other parts I sold (you can see I had a bit of a business going there.)

March-June 1977: Built a system based on the 8085. It was a minimalist system, 1K of RAM, three 8-bit bidirectional ports, 2K of ROM. Used it as a controller for a WEFAX system for a year before I sold it, too. Cost: about $100 since I bought Intel-specific chips to build it and put on a moderately expensive keypad and display. The display was a set of eight-character 14-segment displays to give a 16 column by 3 line display (48 characters). I ended up selling it to a ham friend of a friend in 1978 with all the WEFAX electronics I had except my fax printer and satellite dish for about $350.

After this things started to slow down a bit...I was building about 1-2 new systems a year until about 1984, when I dropped to only about one every 2 years. Now I'm back up to doing about 3 homebrews a year, but since most of them are based on modern "superintegrated" microcontrollers they hardly count. This is aside from my work, where I design several systems every year (though most are variations or adaptations of earlier designs, or updates to old designs to use new components.)

The number of systems people have given me number in the hundreds, even if I discount the ones I was given for being a developer. I've made myself the "electronics dumpster" for my friends for many years. I've reconditioned and passed on about 60 systems to needy people over the years. I had to stop about the time the Pentium came out since it got too hard for me to support people who were learning to use the Windows-based PCs, so I've only done about 5 since then with the firm understanding that it's working and fully loaded with software and includes a full set of manuals, disks, etc. and that I take no further responsibility for the system after I've plugged it in, tested it, and walk out their door.

Anyway, running out of time here so I'll conclude with the fact that both my present Vic-20s were given to me, I was foolish enough to sell my first one (well, second one, it was a warranty replacement for the first), but had one given to me by a coworker within a year so I didn't suffer long, then had another given to me about 10 years ago.

-Mark

[saundby]

What truly moved me to the PC, on the gaming side, was Dark Forces which came in around about the same time as Doom. I found Dark Forces to be more entertaining that Doom because it consisted in more than just shooting your way through monsters. The puzzles to resolve were more appealing.

I agree, Dark Forces was a great game! DOOM was what had gotten me interested in gaming on the PC, I'd done my gaming on the Amiga and C64 prior to that and while the PC didn't displace them, it took its place alongside them.

I was extremely disappointed by most games on the PC, e.g. Populous, and even Wolfenstein 3D didn't do it for me, but DOOM did. And then Dark Forces was even better. In addition to what you've said, the atmosphere and feel of the levels was also more consistent than DOOM's, and far better than DOOM II, which was a huge disappointment as a game (as a base for 3rd party WADs, though, it was great. Where else could you blast Barney with a BFG?)

I wish the console versions of Dark Forces had turned out as well as the PC version, then I could still play it every so often. I have two but they're both about impossible to play, much less enjoy (Playstation and Saturn, if I recall correctly.)

-Mark

[saundby]

Windows NT was started as a separate development effort by MS while they were still developing OS/2 for IBM. The codebases are entirely separate, and the basic design of each is quite different. OS/2 has a better architecture, in my opinion, but suffered from a really poor implementation until about 2.0. 1.3 was usable, but only just. 2.0 was a huge improvement.

NT had a lot going for it at a time when os/2 was vulnerable, though I feel technically it is inferior to OS/2 architecturally. It has paid for those problems over the years. A lot of things that were good about it originally have been compromised, as well, such as isolation between processes. However, in spite of these faults, it has demonstrated once again that technical elegance is not what assures success. It's ugly and twisted and has a file system out of the 70's, but it more or less does the job and it's still here many years after many competitors either died or became embedded or vertical OSes.

But I've never gamed on NT, and have no plans to do so, even in the current descendents of it. I want to play games when I have the time to do so, not waste my time on system maintenance when I want to be blasting aliens. So now I game on consoles and my Mac.

-Mark

[viznut]

I've never regarded PC as a superior gaming platform.

Of course, Wolfenstein 3D had some never-seen-before graphics, but it was because of the raycasting algorithm, not the hardware platform. Several Wolf3D-like engines have been made for 8-bits as well.

And besides, great numerical specs are never enough to make the game itself great :)