Off Topic Discussions

[quentincrews]

What was your first CPU? Our first family computer was an Apple Macintosh SE/30 with its 16 MHz 68030 Motorola processor, and the first computer I personally owned was a Mac laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo (P7350) 2.0 GHz processor.

(My first AMD processor was an Athlon 800 MHz, from what is probably my favorite PC build I’ve done, for our home gaming PC). Cheap and great value.

[BigAl01]

I had one of the slot-A 1 GHz Athlon CPUs, the one that beat the Pentium III to the 1 GHz speed.

[ThreeDee]

I used to play Monster Truck Madness 2 online on dial-up 20+ years ago .. an online friend got the that CPU and he was a beast trying to move/knock off the platform in Rumble's  .. I was running a Slot 1 866mhz P3 at the time .. I would bounce off of him trying to ram him with whatever truck I'd run and he'd go .. "The poweh of 1GHZ!!!"

[ardankyaosen]

I can't remember if it was an 8086 or an 8088.

[OriginalGreyWolf]

now thats going back in time right there LOL

[plaidygami]

I don't remember the first CPU I ever used - probably a Pentium, maybe? I had an old PC with DOS running on it when I was young. Couldn't for the life of me remember any of the specs, lol.

But my first "gaming" CPU that I can remember is an AMD FX-8350. That thing was both great and terrible at the same time, and now that I have a 5800X3D, I feel like I've come a long way.

[BigAl01]

I had an FX-8150 Bulldozer running for many years (since 2011) but I took it apart this year to repurpose the Lian Li case into my Lian-Li-X3D using the 5600X3D CPU.  It required a lot of power and ran around 4 GHz, but it wasn't much of an improvement over the previous AMD generation.  

The FX series had a cool metal box.

[OriginalGreyWolf]

oldest was an Apple II GS WOZ, and owned a 286 laptop(if that is what you wanted to call that thing), first build was an 486DX2-66

[ardankyaosen]

It's interesting that CPUs don't viscerally smack us in the head (I wonder how anything could "
viscerally" smack us in the "head") for the now vs then differences.  It's the change to disk drives that hit me the hardest.  On that old 8086/8088 I mentioned, above, we had 360KB floppies.  Then we graduated to 1.44MB floppies.  But, the thing that gob-smacked us the most at the time was our first work PC with a 5MB hard drive.  FIVE MB!!!  Hokey-smokes!  We'd never run out of that much space.  My phone takes photos that take up more space these days.

[OriginalGreyWolf]

My wife does electronic recycling and they came across drives that were as big as my computer case and they were platters and I think when we looked them up they were 20mb 8" hard drives.

[BigAl01]

Late 1970's or early 1980's tech?

[OriginalGreyWolf]

From time to time they come across older stuff like that but mainly it is corporate refresh that they do. They had to destroy the hard drive as they had no way to wipe it and that is one of the things is they have to wipe every drive or destroy them. I was so sad as I wanted one of them.

[ardankyaosen]

This was a long time ago (1980s), so it's a bit fuzzy.  But, I think the hard drives (DASDs) on the mainframe system we were developing at the time were something on the order of 5GB.  They were big honkin' multi-platter removable drive systems (14 inch platters (I believe)) about the size of a large cake carrier.  Referring to my phone again, it currently has 128GB of solid state storage.

[Nevyns]

I think it was a 286 or something to that effect, I grew up in africa, we were just happy we had TVs at that time.

[ThreeDee]

My personal first CPU was the Intel P2 300mhz Slot 1 on an ASUS P2B variant motherboard with 128mb of PC100 SDRAM and a Matrox Millennium G200 8mb AGP video card, 8GB IDE HDD with Win98 installed on it.

I cut my gaming teeth on that beast with the help of Lara Croft and her triangular figure 😍

[Awol]

Cant remember my first CPU however my first trip to team RED was an Athlon XP, then FX4200, then Ryzen 5 5600X and now Ryzen 9 5900X

X570 Aorus Elite / Ryzen 9 5900X / Sapphire Nitro+ RX6900 XT SE / 64GB Quad Kit Kingston Fury Black 3600MHZ CL16 / RM1000 X PSU

[mike71]

My first CPU was a 68008 of a sinclair QL.

First AMD CPU, I think it was an Am386, but at the time the processor brand wasn't so important.

[cpurpe91]

My first processor was the AMD FX 6100. It served me well for years. I think it was a triple core with hyperthreading. I loved it, even though I had no idea what I was doing. It came in a prebuilt where the tower cooler broke the mounting brackets in shipping, so I had to get another cooler that didn't require the brackets, to replace it. I didn't understand how to build a PC at the time or the importance of fresh thermal paste, at the time that I replaced the cooler.

Eventually I learned that I needed to apply new paste and took care of it, but I was just was not very knowledgeable in the tech sphere.

Before I learned the few things I know now, I pushed that thing past 70c which was 10c past the max temp for the chip. It should have failed, but that thing ran on dreams and me willing it to not die. If I hadn't scrapped the old rig, I bet it would still be chugging along today.

[jonconda]

Thanks to this post, I learned something new today.  My brothers and I had a Commodore 64 which, I had no idea until today, has a MOS Technology 6510 apparently running at 1.02MHz.  Didn't know such a thing existed, thanks quentincrews!

That lasted until Mario, Zelda and Samus kept me up at night on the Nintendo.  Not to long after my mind was blown when I found out Samus was really a bad a$$ chick, I got an IBM PS1 with a 486 for Christmas.  Don't remember which version but I weirdly remember reading on the "Intel Inside" sticker that it had an integrated math co-processor.  Didn't know what that meant at the time but it impressed me nonetheless, albeit not quite as much as using a mouse with Windows 3.1 for the first time. 

I learned a lot about computers tinkering with that thing for years, which led up to my first pc build with an Athlon T-Bird and I believe a Foxconn mobo.  Been happily stuck on Red Team ever since.

[BigAl01]

My first computer project in school used a 6502 microprocessor.  I built it up on a proto board.

[Vynski]

My first was a Commodore 64 in 1982. 

Although my first use of computers was on the university mainframe and I have no idea what they had in 1980.  Started programming in SAS and SPSS and became very proficient.  Had to punch cards for data input.  

I stepped up to the Commodore 128 about 1984 and then added a 128D around 1986.  My first MS-DOS machine was my first build, an AM80386 (386 SX, 20 MHz) on a Supermicro motherboard around 1988-89.