Every IT person has a personal history with computers to share, and he might remember better computers he owned rather than the girls he was in relationship with
Jokes apart, with this post I want to share with you my passion about computers, how I discovered it and how it grew trough years.
I was born in 1989, that time MS-DOS was the standard, Windows was only “vaporware” or more a toy rather then a professional Os. By the way when I was 1-2 years old I was too young for remember that time computers, and to be honest my parents did’nt own a home computer, my papa was never interested in some retro computing such as commodore or amiga personal computers.
So from when I have memories my papa when I was young he was working as secretary in a big international company in north east of Italy, for his work he was using that time office computers equipped with Windows 95 (ah yes one of most advanced Os for that time <3).
At that time I was in elementary school, sometimes my papa bring me with him in office during saturday morning and that was first time I meet a Pc with Microsoft Windows.
My activities were something like type fancy documents in Word, Drawing with Ms-paint and it’s instrument like draw rect, fill color, draw smile etc etc… in those moments I was the happiest child.
So my papa after a while ask the IT guy of the company if he can give us an home computer. Those are my first footsteps in IT, next I’ll share with you all computers I owned and some memories I have about them.
1996-1997Intel 486 with 8mb ram and Windows 3.11
This is first computer IT guy of that company assembled for mine family. I remember I was using this computer for drawing in Ms-paint, I was happy I can do digital art from home as well. My papa was using computer also for it’s home business, my time with computer that time was very rationed by my parents because I was too young for understand how to use well a computer.
1998-2001Intel Pentium 133mhz with 16mb ram and Windows 95
This was the second computer IT guy of that company assembled for me and mine family. In here I remember I was starting exploring the hard drive file system with file explorer, I discovered System32 and exes inside with that all weird icons. On this computer I remember I broke file system integrity a couple of times and my papa everytime was angry with me because he need to ask IT guy to reinstall the Os for fix it.
Fun fact: In middle school we were using the software Neobook and I wanted to practicize it at home so I ask my papa, and he ask to IT guy. But my papa understood “Notebook” instead “Neobook” so he said me “You already have Notebook, it comes default with computer!” I was like “meh…”
2002-2003Intel Pentium II 350mhz with 64mb ram and Windows XP
This was the first computer my papa gifted me while he bought and use for home business a Pentium III 650mhz and 256mb ram with Windows Me. In this period I remember I learnt how to reinstall Windows because I choose an IT course in middle school and teacher shown us how to format and reinstall an Os. He went through Windows 95 to Windows 98. I remember I format Windows XP beacuse yes, it was that time best shining Os, but on my computer with only 64mb of ram it was slow as hell, so I mostly reinstalled Windows Me. From what I could understand as a 13-year-old, it seemed like the best OS ever!
2003-2004Intel Pentium III 800mhz with 512mb ram
After the church confirmation at age of 14 my uncles gifted to me this nice piece of hardware. I was very happy, I decided to install and use Windows Me. I used it for a while but later I went my friend house tring to flash the bios, I miserably failed and that computer never turned on again.
2005-2011AMD Athlon 64 3400+ and 2gb ram
In the period 2004-2005, between high school first and secondary classroom, during the summer I went doing some seasonal work and with moneys I earned I decided to buy my first computer. This was my first AMD chip; I decided to try AMD because my a friend of mine owned an Athlon XP 3000+ Cpu and he was saying it’s a very good Cpu. I remember graphic card on this machine was an ATI Radeon X1600.
On this machine my computer activities were increasing alot, also because I choose an IT high school and I was using computer for school and form programming. With this computer I also wrote my high school thesis: I programmed the Snake game as Java game for mobile phones with Java ME SDK, that time Android did not comes out yet. I was mostly using this computer with Windows XP 32 bit.
2011-2017AMD Phenom II X4 965 and 12gb ram
I bought this computer with mine moneys after I start working. I decided to remain on AMD chip because I had great experience with Athlon64. That time Phenom II X4 had worse performance then a Core I3 2nd generation I mostly was using this computer for daily activities, for that time games and for software development.
I remember I bought this computer for play Skyrim, that comes out in 2011. I was mostly using this machine with Windows 7 64 bit. Graphic card was an Nvidia GTX 560
2017 - presentAMD Ryzen (varius)
This is my current computer, at last the case and some original components, I bought it with mine work moneys. I watch AMD Ryzen live presentation at beginnin of 2017 and I was sure I wanted to buy a Ryzen chip, so when Ryzen comes out in march 2017 I bought my first Ryzen 1700x Cpu. From 2017 until now I replaced many internal components, such as different hard drivers, a M2 drive, motherboard, Ram, Gpu, Cpu, monitors… I switched Cpu from 1700x to 3600x, 5600x and finally from Christmas 2022 I own a Ryzen 5800x. I had Nvidia GTX 1060, RTX 2060super, now I own a RTX 3070ti and the PC is equipped with 32gb DDR4 Ram.
Software side this is the PC where I tried Linux for first time; I was using Windows 10 until 2019, but after that period I start experimenting some Linux distros such as Debian, Pop!_OS, Linux Lite, Linux Mint… After Windows 11 comes out in autumn 2021 I also tried to use it daily, but I felt it was not my cup of tea. Recently I decided to stabilize my workflow on Arch Linux on real hardware and Windows 11 in a virtual machine.
future - ~~~~
I don’t know yet, but in next years I’m considering to order a Thelio desktop from the American company System76. I like too much those fancy wood-maded with colored plastic finishings cases. They look so solid and compact! Also System76 computers are factory made compatibile with Linux, so it would be very pleasant running a Linux distro on them.
I’ve always owned a Desktop computer, only recently for work needings I own, beside my Ryzen desktop, a notebook with Windows.
And what about you? What is your IT history and which was your first experience with computers?
Fell free to reply and share your personal history, I’d love to hear about your experiences and it would be great to discuss and read everyone’s memories in IT world
~~I know I’m relatively young compared to some veterans here, so please don’t go like: “Hey you! greenhorn! I was already coding when Bill Gates founded Microsoft ”
wow that’s detailed!
I can’t remember it that precisely.
But I do remember what my first computer was.
A 386 DX40 with 4MB RAM and 40MB hard disk
Over time it got a few upgrades: RAM up to 8MB, additional 80MB hard disk, doublespeed CD-ROM drive and a sound card!
Of course it ran DOS 5 (later 6.2) and Windows 3.1.
I loved it and it never let me down!
My dad bought me compaq desktop EN
back in 2006 it has windows xp,128MB memory and intel 440BX (Pentium II) and some old games includes Need for Speed II
it’s the first game I’ve ever played on a desktop pc
yeah these we good days change windows xp wallpaper
staring at windows media player visualizer for hours lol.
In my office I’m usually working on my desktop PC, which is a budget-friendly, all-black, no flashing RGBs, no-nonsense – ATX Mid-Tower build.
Yesterday, I wrote this article Building an LLM-Optimized Linux Server on a Budget because I am going to gift my sister (19 years younger) the above rig. But I really have found the 4000d case second-to-none for cooling, so the replacement will be mostly the same rig with just beefed up specs for LLMs.
Commodore VIC-20 in 1982. Built my own 8K RAM extension board for it giving me 13K total.
Next was a Commodore SX-64 (the luggable C64) in 1984. Still wish I’d kept that. Developed and sold a program to Compute! magazine (anyone remember that?) called “DirectoryFiler”.
Then a Packard Bell PC with a 60MB hard drive and a gray scale monitor. Woohoo!
After that, I built all my other systems. All the way from MS-DOS 3.x thru Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 and involved in the Windows 95 beta process. That was a grand experience.
I moved to Windows 7 then to Windows 10 (skipped Windows Vista, 8/8.1). I did upgrade to Windows 11 – with regrets. But that was the final straw.
I’d had enough of MS and moved to Linux for my main system in 2022. Now, all my systems are LinuxMint or CachyOS.
Mine was an Amiga 600 with fantastic 7,14 mhz and 1 MB RAM.
It was a cool experience to change floppy disks all the time It had no harddisk so you needed to have patience. Made me experience Amiga demoscene and that was a cool thing. Was a bit late to the party in 1994 when many people started to shift focus more towards pc.
As kid I was fascinated about Windows 2000, but I discovered many softwares won’t run on it because Windows 2000 is still an old NT kernel. Only with Windows XP MS reunified NT with common 9x series, many softwares were born with Windows XP era and they’re still compatible with Windows.
But yes, in term of stability Windows 2000 was one of best solutions (: nowdays is all about nostalgia.
My first computer experience was on a Commodore 64 playing Flight Simulator. The only thing I remembered from that was I couldn’t recover the Cessna from 10,000 feet and crashed.
My first home computer was a IBM 8088, if I remember correctly. It had in two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, 512K was the size of the disk if I remember correctly. MS DOS 3.0 was the first OS. Ah, the days of an entire OS on a 512K disk. This would have been around 1988.
In fact just before the computer came I was learning to type on those good old fashioned typewriters, where my mom was teaching me finger strength. You had to place your fingers just above the keys and STRIKE with all your might. It was an interesting transition to a keyboard.
After the 8088, I remember the 286, 386, 486 etc. It has been a long journey.
My first computer was a Micron P100, a 100 Mhz 32-bit desktop system; I bought it primarily to run Slackware, but I also wanted to learn how to dual boot, so I did so on my very first system.
Vista was on my first Laptop after 30 min it was replaced with Xubuntu
I had to deal with windows 8 professionally for touchcomputers (building automation), no fun
Back in 2007 - 2008 I was trying Vista on my AMD Athlon 64 3400+ with only 1 core and 2gb ram … it was nightmare, OS was extremely slow Lol…
In 2013 - 2014 before Windows 10 era I was having a bit fun using Windows 8.1, I remember I updated my Phenom II x4 from Windows 7 to Windows 8, and then 8.1 … it was decent OS in terms of stability, but God only knows what happens to M$ engineers for having that indecent idea to modify Windows for touch compatibility… such a Frankestein OS!
For a home user it “might make sense”, but for a Windows server environment that touch interface is very un-confortable!
I can understand the pain, thankfully I was using a couple of times at work Windows server 2016 and Windows server 2022, their interface are pretty usable.
The great nostalgia.
My first computer was a HP laptop Intel core 2 Duo with about 4 gigs of RAM.
I remember the first thing I tried to do was to load Ubuntu on there but for the hell of me I could not get the Wi-Fi drivers to work at all so I was stuck by ethernet. One of my neighbors was actually fairly technology advanced, so he actually helped me find the Wi-Fi drivers and install them through cli.
But it was really buggy and I said screw it. But that’s my first experience with Linux. I think in 2011 I loaded hackintosh on the laptop and then I just got rid of it
I mostly was using this computer for daily activities, for that time games and for software development.
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