First PCs
1990ish…the PC era calls me…the PC Technician is born
I need a PC…hmm…this’ll do! Or not…
Mi(ghty)Tac(ky) 386DX25
System Specification
Mid range Desktop case
Floppy Drive
340Meg hard drive
2 Meg in 30 pin SIMMS
Naff ISA 256K video card
Serial Mouse
101 Key Keyboard
Dos 5 and Windows 3.1
Shudder…yes…Bought by me and mum..
It was a Mitac 386DX/25, with 2 meg of 30 pin 80ns RAM, a 340Meg Harddrive, a thoroughly silly 1Meg “so damned shite I forgot who made it” video card (16 colours if you were REALLY lucky!), a 101 Key Keyboard and a serial mouse. Not a bad machine in it’s day, but it blew up twice in 4 days and got sent back, and the identical replacement arrived.
It ran Windows 3.1…just. In standard mode I might add. I upped it to 6meg for College work, and tried to boot “enhanced” mode (HAHA!)…lots of beeping…it seems that either the board, chip or drive had an issue with 32 bit access.
It ran office 6, and DOS games…and it kept me amused for hours, with my 60 meg partition! It also has the useful benefit of keeping the (now thankfully very much EX) missus quiet and away from my person.
Genetic Engineering….
System Specification
Mid range Desktop case
Opti Chipset, socket 3 486 motherboard, with a cyrix 5×86/100 chip,256k W/B cache
Floppy Drive
1.2 Gig hard drive
4x creative CDROM
Opti MADpro Soundcard
2 Meg in 30 pin SIMMS
4Mb PCI CL Cougar video card
PS/2 Mouse
101 Key Keyboard
Windows 95 B
This machine I “retired”…and replaced the shite almighty motherboard and chips.. with a hybrid 486 motherboard, sat on which was a Cyrix 5×86 100 Processor. Not quite a pentium, not quite a 486. Damned quick though.
All of a sudden, Windows 95 was mine, 72 pin Ram was mine, and CACHE was mine! Wow…this PC shifted…it hammered the AMD K5, the P60/66/75s of the time too. It got a PCI CL 5440 Cougar VGA SVGA card, and an Opti MADpro soundcard. Allied to a Creative 4x CD drive, and 1.2 Gb hard drive, it was a runner like no other PC I knew.