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what is your personal computer history in periods?
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lucinos Dec 10, 2017
Here is mine

A: spectrum (80s)
Spoiler, click me
computer: zx spectrum
arch: 8 bit
monitor: TV (with color)
storage: tapes
some games:
manic miner
jet set willy II
enduro racer
cauldron II

noone else I knew had a computer!
also learned some programming in sinclair basic

B: ms-dos (90s)
Spoiler, click me
This actually subdivides in two periods

B1: early 90s (late 80s? honestly do not remember, the pc was older but I had no access)
computer: 80286 (pc-compatible)
os: ms-dos
arch: 16 bit
monitor: CGA/Hercules (horrible orange)
storage:
floppy discs 5.25''
floppy discs 3.5''
hard discs

very few people had computer. not everybody had hard disc. some had much better computer with color and sound.
And I have to say that I had no color, no sound except the beeps and no mouse.

B2: middle 90s
computer: 80386
arch: 32 bit
os: ms-dos (windows 3.1 were available but pointless to me)
monitor: VGA (with color)
mouse: yes
sound blaster: yes
storage:
floppy discs 3.5''
hard disc
cd-rom

(B2) was actually much briefer for me than (B1). The computer was already old. But at last I had beatiful graphics and sound!

some of my games (B1+B2):
castle (this is the first game I remember playing on the pc)
the secret of monkey island (yes I played that on the old 286, first think I did when I could play on the 386 was play again that game)
hero's quest (also known as quest for glory I, but it was the old edition)
test drive
outrun
prince of persia
golden axe
chess, I do not remember the actual name but had 3d board and was pretty strong on the 286
battle chess
civilization
chessmaster (2000?)
day of the tentacle
dune
dune II
warcraft II

C: windows (late 90s, 00s)
Spoiler, click me
This also subdivides in two periods

C1: windows 9x (late 90s, early 00s)
computer: pentium (mainly pentium 1)
arch: 32 bit
os: windows 95 and later windows 98.
os: also continued to use ms-dos more than most people.
storage:
floppy discs 3.5'' (very depreciated now)
hard disc
cd-rom
cd-writer? (I do not remember honestly when probably not on the pentium 1)
dvd-rom? (I also do not remember)
usb-sticks (strangely my old pentium 1 has usb)
internet: yes modem 56K with beautiful spectrum-like sound.

C2: windows XP (middle 00s)
computer: pentium IV
arch 32 bit
os: windows XP
os: linux (as secondary)
distro: mandrake, pclinuxos
storage:
floppy discs 3.5'' (absolutelly depreciated now)
hard disc
cd-rom
cd-rw
dvd-rom
dvd-rw?
usb-sticks
internet: still slow :(

The first linux I saw was mandrake 8.1, the first linux I had on my computer was mandrake 10.0 (I remember both because I still have the cds)

some games (C1+C2):
age of empires
age of empires II
civilization II
starcraft
theme hospital
dungeon keeper II
riven
the curse of monkey island
escape from monkey island
grim fandango
need for speed underground
cossacks
warcraft III
rome total war
games on emulators

also linux games from back then I was playing tux racer and ksokoban.

D: linux (late 00s - )
Spoiler, click me
only linux, no windows :P
This devides to three periods

D1: 2008-2010
Still had the same computer.
monitor: changed from CRT, takes less space, not better in other ways.
internet: fast at last
os: linux
distro: ubuntu

initially the choice to go linux-only was not conscious. I just had problems with windows that I were too lazy to solve. (usually a reinstallation of windows was what most people do)
at the same time I had an ubuntu installation that had every software I needed and also I was not playing new games anyway. (last new game I was playing was rome total war and I already had played it a lot)

D2: 2010-2013
bought new computer :)
arch: 64 bit
os: linux
distro: hopping
storage:
hard disc
cd/dvd-rw
usb-sticks

some games (D1+D2):
supertuxkart
battle for wesnoth
various old games with dosbox and scummvm: monkey island 2, loom
various browser games

windown only, I only played tales of monkey island with a friend on his computer.

D3: 2013-
os: linux
distro: manjaro/arch
computer: also a laptop (2014) and a new desktop (2018)

I have no idea how I am already having just on my steam library 344 linux games (433 total, although I never bought any non linux game just activating all games from humble bundles)

some games:
Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal
Race The Sun
Turmoil
Mini Metro
Deponia: The Complete Journey
The Talos Principle
Human Resource Machine
140
LIMBO
Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten
Sid Meier's Civilization V
Age of Wonders III
The Book of Unwritten Tales
The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles
Escape Goat 2
FEZ
Stacking
A Virus Named TOM
Don't Starve
Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes
VVVVVV
Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok
The Journey Down: Chapter Two
The Journey Down: Chapter One


(in every case I only named a few games, the biggest percentage is by far the windows list as I actually named most of my windows games)
Xpander Dec 10, 2017
Uhh nice. thats a lot of info :D

i will post mine, but a lot shorter.

1991-1993 nintendo player, so not really a computer

1993-1995 My friend got 286 PC.He was the only one with a PC in our village. Every saturday i went there to play games. Stunts, Lotus Racing, wolfenstein and similar games.

1995/96-1999 got my own PC 486DX with a turbo button. initially had only DOS there, Norton Commander was used. Tried win 3.1 also but it was meh. Windows 95 got installed later on. Games: Age of Empires, Quake, Doom, Cannon Fodder.

1999-2002 Next PC. AMD k6-2 533mhz, Trident Blade 64MB integrated videocard. Win98 was used. Games: Colin Mcrae 1 and 2. Age of Empires II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein etc

2002-2005 AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1,7Ghz with Geforce MX440, Windows XP
Later videocard was swapped to ATI radeon 9550XT. Lots of Games, cant remember exactly what but First FarCry comes to my mind from that era, as well as sone Need for speed games. Tried Linux first time, OpenSuse, didnt last long, too much problems

2005-2006 Upgraded CPU to Athlon XP 2600+ 2,1ghz and GPU to 6600GT. At some point switched to Windows Vista which was terrible. Can't remember any memorable games from that period

2006-2010 AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3,0Ghz, paired with 8800GT. First time Installed Linux, Cause when i was coming back from Army my Vista constantly BSOD on me and friend gave me Ubuntu 6.10 CD to get me into the internet. Played wine games mostly. World of Warcraft and Flatout 1/2. Some natives like Savage 1 and Doom 3 as well. Later switched GPU to AMD Radeon 5770, biggest mistake in my purchase history. Drivers under linux were so bad that i had to make a Windows 7 Dualboot to play some games. Until i got GTX 560Ti.

2010-2013 Again PC upgrade, AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz, Switched from Ubuntu to Mint, removed Windows Completely which i rarely used anyway.GPU's GTX 560Ti and GTX 660Ti. Lots of wine gaming, mostly again World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online (which was quite painful in wine), Some native games also: Trine, Portal, Serious Sam 3 etc.

2013-2017 Upgrade to FX8320 3,5Ghz Oc'd all the way up to 4.5 later, no motherboard switch was needed. GPU upgraded from 660Ti to GTX 970 and later GTX1070. Lots of Native gaming, very few games under wine.Switched to Arch Linux also at the beginning of 2013.

2017-present, New upgrade again, Ryzen 7 1700X which is clocked at 3.9Ghz atm, GTX 1070. Still Arch Linux (the same install).. Lots of Native gaming. Mostly sucker of Survival Sandbox games and some really good Story games.
razing32 Dec 10, 2017
I have vague recollections about my PCs through the years.
I recall my first was a 486 when I was little , it had DOS and I played Prehystorik

There is a huge gap until later in my life as I did not really care about PCs as one of my dad's friends was building them up for us. All i cared about were games when i was younger , not the hardware behind them. :(

Around 2011
I had a Toshiba Laptop. I gave it to my dad and forgot the specs. I used windows 7 on it and on occasion Ubuntu or OpenSuse when a bad case of Torrented-game crack-file-virus proved terminal to my PC.

Around 2012

I built my own PC and went almost broke (20$ left in bank):
Processor INTEL Core i7-3820
Motherboard ASROCK X79 Extreme4
Graphic Card ASUS NVIDIA GTX 570
Was still on Windows 7 and maybe a bit of 8.1 . I recall playing all Risen games on this thing. As well as Company of heroes and WOT and some others.
I did use Ubuntu when again the virus showed up.

Eventually my motherboard died and stopped booting. (was reflashed , tried turning it on when i visited home and it caught fire)

Around 2015

Replaced with a ASUS M5A99X EVO R2.0 and AMD FX-8350. I continued using Windows 8.1 but was looking heavily at PCIPASSTHROUGH as I was getting very bad vibes from Win10's EULA. Played Assasin;s creed , Witcher 3 , HOTS. It was on this PC i kept experimenting with Distros including Mint, Debian and eventually Arch which would be my go to for more than a year.

Around 2016
Once on Linux i think the first thing I played and completed was the Eschalon book series.
Well, I feel old now...

Before I knew anything, and older friend had a ZX80

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80

and then a BBC-Acorn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

My first machine was the legendary VIC-20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20

Ah, that massive RAM!
Hamish Feb 3, 2018
My first experience with a computer was a honking great tower case that my father had which ran Windows 95 on it. After that one got fried in a power surge we picked up an eMachine with Windows 98, featuring a huge Y2K compliance sticker despite the fact we bought it just after the turn of the century.

Our school then loaned us a bunch of Windows 95 IBM computers for home schooling, and we also got a few more Windows 98 machines for that purpose. My brother also set up an older machine with MS DOS and Windows 3.1.1 which helped start my love for retro gaming.

In a manner of speaking the computer I am using now is derived from one of those old Windows 98 machines, although considering every part in it has been replaced at least twice it can not really be said to be the same computer. It was later upgraded to Windows XP and then dual booted with Fedora Core until the XP partition finally died. I then moved it all over to Fedora in 2007, before jumping to Arch in 2013.

My first Linux experience was briefly with Red Hat 6, before spending quite a bit of time with Red Hat 8. I also played with Knoppix a whole lot as a child, back when it was still using KDE 3.
GustyGhost Feb 10, 2018
Hmm this is an interesting one as I have carefully documented my personal machines through their iterations. For the sake of keeping things brief I will jump ahead to where my computers were actually owned by me personally and will only focus on the towers themselves, no peripherals.

<RealName>-PC (2004-2008): Stock Dell Dimension 3000, Windows XP Home, 2.8Ghz P4, 512MB DDR, Intel "Extreme" (lol) Graphics, 80GB HDD.
I had received this as my first machine. It was the environment where I first learned about the relationship between drivers and hardware. Used it for some gaming and video editing in the painful Windows Movie Maker.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
StarCraft
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
Halo Combat Evolved
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas


Mute-City (2008-2011): Upgraded Dell Dimension 3000 with 2GB DDR, 320GB HDD, nVidia GeForce 8400GS.
I was in high school at the time, hence broke. I actually walked to the store where I bought the upgrades. At this point I was discovering hardware configurations; PCI vs PCIe (Damn you Dell, for not soldering in that PCIe slot!), proprietary vs industry standards. The thing sounded like a jet engine.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
Grand Theft Auto IV
Flight Simulator X
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War
Robot Wars Arenas of Destruction

Brilliance (2011-2013): Windows 7 Home, Biostar TH67B, Intel Core i7-2600, 16GB DDR3, Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 TI, 1TB HDD, all in a Silverstone SUGO SG03.
This was my first custom build. One of the goals was to fit as much power in as small a space as possible. I had finally come around to using Steam and really learned a lot from the whole process.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
Minecraft
Tribes: Ascend
Crysis 2, 1
Planetside 2
Call of Duty MW3 (I know...)

Solaris (2013-2014): Rebuild of Brilliance into a new chassis; NZXT Vulcan, 512GB SSD, Windows 8 Pro, bigger PSU.
At this point I had reached max peasant status using Windows SkyDrive and online accounts, Chrome... everything absolutely proprietary. However this was also when I began to experiment with Batch scripting and truly learning how to program.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
(More) Tribes: Ascend, Minecraft
(Revisiting) Empire Earth
Dungeon Defenders
Planet Explorers
Saints Row 2, Third, IV
Kerbal Space Program

Minmus (2014-2016): Thermaltake SD101, Windows 8.1 Pro, AMD A10-7850K, FM2A88X-ITX+, 8GB DDR3, 240GB SSD.
Originally built as an experiment side project, I liked it so much I adopted Minmus as my main PC. Significant because I would later upgrade it with Linux Mint 17.1, an A10-7870K and faster RAM. By now the Snowden revelations had happened and I was using all sorts of software and service alternatives.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
Dreamfall The Longest Journey
Megabyte Punch
The Talos Principle
Deadcore
Robot Roller Derby Disco Dodgeball
Crypt of the Necrodancer
Drox Operative
Loadout

Romulus (2016-2017): Rebuilt Minmus into a new chassis; AeroCool Aero-1000, Linux Mint 17.3, AMD Radeon R9 285, 480GB SSD, bigger PSU.
I wanted to keep going smaller but I discovered ARK Survival Evolved early in 2016 which necessitated an "upgrade". By now I would consider myself very knowledgeable with computers, joined Github... Gitlab, found work in the field.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
ARK Survival Evolved
Ballistic Overkill
Tomb Raider
Minetest
Barony Cursed Edition
Rocket League

StarCommand (2017-Present): Rebuilt Romulus; Debian 9 Stable, MSI X370 Gaming Plus, AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, 32GB DDR4, Radeon RX 580, 480GB PCI/NGFF SSD, solid state PSU.
Definitely overbuilt for my needs. This is the "freest" PC I have owned so far. Sadly the Ryzen hardware Linux bug affects my early production CPU. The thing is a charm otherwise. The software side of things is very much hand-customized by me these days. Some rather over engineered Bash scripts for encrypted backups, system hardening and such.

My memorable games from this period:
Spoiler, click me
(More) Minetest, Disco Dodgeball, ARK, Ballistic Overkill
The Talos Principle Road to Gehenna
Yooka-Laylee

unnamed (2018-2019 platform): (Low power APU, VERY compact case, all very TBD)
In development since 2015, note I originally strive for tiny. The technology is finally nearly available to have a gaming "thin client". Had to order a bunch of parts from Shenzen, China since all the western computer gear designers seemingly only care about big 'Murican gaming beast towers.
kaiman Feb 10, 2018
I'll bite, though excuse me if things are a bit hazy at times. Recollecting dates was never a strong ability of mine. (No listing of games for now, but I might come back later and update. But the most memorable and all-time favourite is definitely Ultima VII.)

Unless you want to count the Atari 2600 we had while I was a child, my first real computer was an Amiga 500. I must have gotten that either '88 or '89. (I still have it, actually, but haven't booted it up since 2008). That was the original model with 512k, but I soon got that extended to a freakin' 1MB. Quite a bit later it was retrofitted with a 2.0 Kickstart ROM, a 400MB hard disk and an additional 2MB of RAM. I took an image of the disk back then when Linux still supported the Amiga file system. Running it in an emulator ever since.

The first PC I had access to was an AMD DX4 100 with 8MB RAM, extended to 12MB later, with a CD-ROM and sound card. Likely around '94 or '95. It was my father's, but I imagine I spent more time with it than he. At the time I still made use of the Amiga occasionally.

My first own PC I got when I went to university. A Intel Pentium 200, in the Summer of '96. In early '97 I first installed Linux on it. A version of SuSE before they introduced version numbers. At one time it had Win95, Linux, BeOS and FreeBSD installed next to each other.

That one was eventually upgraded to an Athlon 550, while I was still at University. Guess that must have been around 2000. I got my first DVD drive (a fancy Pioneer Slot-In that I used until 2015, and would still use to day if my board would still have an IDE connector, or if an IDE<->SATA adapter wouldn't cost more than a new drive). I still use the keyboard I got then, though.

In 2003 I bought my first laptop, an iBook with a 800Mhz G3, 14" display, 256MB RAM and built-in Wifi. Ran OSX 10.2 initially and later upgraded to 10.4. Great machine that I still have today. Great for testing that your code runs on big endian architectures. Too bad the Wifi does not support WPA2, so needs to be connected via LAN. Around that time I also bought my first LCD monitor for the PC, a 17" no-name thing with the amazing resolution of 1280x1024, which I replaced last year because many modern games no longer properly support 5:4 aspect ratios and displayed annoying black borders along the top and bottom.

I think I had one more PC upgrade when I started my first job in 2005, though I do not really recall much about that one, except it was an AMD CPU again.

In 2007 I got a 15" MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM and a 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo. That one was actually cheaper than the iBook, but otherwise worse in almost any regard. It came with a rapidly degrading battery, and both a component on the logic board and the DVD writer died within the first 3 years. Luckily I had paid for 3 year warranty and service was great. Replacing the logic board took longest: 3 days. It died again after another 3 years (meaning the backlight of the internal screen does not receive any power), so today I need to hook up a screen to use it (which I hardly do anymore).

In 2008 I actually got a new PC, a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM and a Geforce GT9600. That lasted me until 2015.

After the 2007 MacBook Pro basically became unusable in 2014, I looked into either a Lenovo or Dell laptop to replace it. Actually ordered from Dell as they allowed greater deal customizing the box I wanted, but they kept delaying the delivery on a bi-weekly basis until after about 6 weeks and with an upcoming vacation that I did not want to spend without a laptop I cancelled it, went into a store around the corner and got a 13" MacBook Pro (the last model with a DVD drive), 8GB of RAM and some old Core I5. It only had one defect during the first three years (the HDD cable, of all things) which was replaced within a day. It's finally out of warranty and I am thinking of replacing the disk with an SSD.

In 2015 I spend around €700 for an upgrade of the PC. Got 8GB of RAM, a GTX 950, an i5 4460 and an SSD. That's the first PC where I never ever installed Windows on (aside from the laptops), though I do have a VM around in case I want to check some code for cross-platform compatibility. Barring any catastrophic hardware failures, that one should last me well into the 2020s. If things go according to plan, I'll be switching back to AMD when the next upgrade is due.

Looking back, the best machines I've had are certainly the Amiga and the iBook. The kind of engineering (both hard- and software) that went into these is hardly found nowadays. Featurewise, they were well ahead of their time as well.
Anjune Feb 11, 2018
It's all gotten a bit muddied over the years. I know my first real console after a series of bleepy toys was an orange b&w Pong machine; that is to say, the console was orange, the Pong b&w, and by "real" I mean it connected to the telly.

It was followed by my very own flea market Atari VCS -- the one with the woodgrain. Favourite games to this day: Moonsweeper, H.E.R.O., Pitfall II, Demon Attack, and Missile Command. (Alright, so I didn't actually have H.E.R.O. and Pitfall II at the time.)

The first personal computers I ever experienced were borrowed Apple II variants. Still diggin' the green and amber screens with their ghostly afterglow. Discovered adventure games (The Serpent's Star and Gruds in Space among others); they held their own special magic, loading entire worlds chunk by chunk from those black mystery floppies. Too bad my English wasn't far along enough to go east. Snack Attack was great, too. Myum myum myum. Learned a tiny bit of BASIC.

I also got to play Archon on an Atari 600 XL. Impressed by the nobly dramatic title music.

I didn't have a computer of my own until a supermarket chain sold the Commodore 16 for very cheap. It wasn't the games machine the C64 was -- no sprites, more colour clash, bad sound, only 16K RAM -- but it had pastel colours aplenty, a built-in machine code monitor/simple assembler, and a much-improved BASIC interpreter/screen editor. GSHAPE, SSHAPE, CIRCLE, SOUND, BOX, CHAR, RENUMBER, DRAW, DIRECTORY, HEADER, DO/LOOP/UNTIL/WHILE... I wrote a bunch of idiotically useless "applications" and rather funless games.

Followed it up with a plus/4, which was much the same with an additional user port, 64K RAM, a much less breadbinny case, a relatively fast floppy drive, and a widely maligned suite of built-in office applications. Non-terrible games at the time included Mercenary, Winter/Summer Events, Kikstart, Tom Thumb. Much, much later the system would receive unauthorised conversions of a handful of classics like Elite as well as original homebrews. These often came from Hungary, where the plussy had been used in schools -- or so I've read. Someone even built SID-based soundcards.

There were IBM-compatible PCs in the family, too; initially running MS-DOS and some other DOS (Plus? Pro? DR?) with a graphical shell called GEM on top. Played Hack (the predecessor to Nethack), later Starflight, Elite, The Guild of Thieves, Ultima IV, Starglider. I didn't really form an attachment to this overly businesslike platform, though...

...because I had an Amiga 500, later a 1200. I used that one until 1997, expanded with little more than a multisync monitor, a 2.5" harddisk, 16 MB additional "Fast RAM" and a 68030 clocked at an initially rather impressive 50 MHz. No ethernet, no modem, no anything like that -- I didn't expect going online to ever become affordable (that was largely during the state telecom monopoly). Made graphics for scene demos, wrote terrible unmusic, played a little with Pascal and BASIC but never really got back into programming. As much as I liked the Amiga, the relative complexity of the system intimidated me. Some favourite games: Exile, Populous, Nethack, Zarathrusta, R-Type II, Starflight and The Guild of Thieves again.

Kinda lost interest in games during the 1990s. The 3D games of the time tended to look bland or garish to me -- and everything suddenly wanted to be an FPS. Bang bang you're dead, meh!

I somewhat unenthusiastically adopted the x86/Microsoft platform out of necessity (Adobe, Macromedia). Windows 95, 98, XP, later SuSE and Mandrake Linux but no way to get them online with my software-assisted "Winmodem". Only a few games during this period: Freelancer, Freespace II, more Nethack, then-current interactive fiction/text adventures with several overly ambitious attempts to write my own. Enjoyed Shareware/freeware audio applications like CoolEdit and Fasttracker II but never used my Soundblaster AWE 32 Gold's soundfonts or FM synthesis features (except to make Demonstar sound peculiarly harsh and metallic).

Then: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Arch, Antergos, elementary OS, Ubuntu Gnome, now back on Kubuntu with Windows 7 on the back burner for ESO and Guild Wars 2 (or so I tell myself, never booting the darn thing or playing either of those games). Not sure I played much other than Oblivion until the Humble Indie Bundles happened (Fez, Limbo). It's just more fun when it's on Linux...

On the side for some time I had a Psion 5mx Pro PDA/organiser. It was a cute little thing running an OS called EPOC32. Mostly used it to doodle on the touchscreen and for Nethack, emulation, and Perl. (I gave up the Perl soon after. Talk about write-only code...)

Liked my ASUS EeePC 1215 N netbook, too, at least until Bumblebee stopped working around the time of Ubuntu 16.04. It blew up last year; oh, well.

Also have an Amiga 1200 set up again with a few more upgrades than back in the day, though nothing mindblowing.

Ryzen system soon, I hope.
vlademir1 Feb 11, 2018
Interesting topic...

In the beginning:
TRS-80 Model I
Storage medium was cassette tapes, many of which I now know were questionable copies from my uncle's friends.
Originally bought new by my uncle in '77, my parents bought it from him in '84. Nice example of the Ur Trash 80, had all the hardware upgrades including the gold connectors. Over the years I acquired quite a lot of additional ephemera two of the speakers, replaced cassette deck, extra replacement keyboard, printer, a variety of TRS-80 magazines and books. This was the system I first learned to code on (both BASIC and machine code) and the system I wrote my first game for. No OS in the modern sense, you either loaded software from tape or booted into BASIC. Gaming was mixed but included Frogger, Zaxxon, Zork, Quick Watson, Bedlam, Haunted House, Eliza (not really a game per se, but I was too young to get that). I maintained and used the TRS-80 right up until we get a IBM in '92 and still played with it off and on through the end of the '90s. At one point I wrote a flat database on it to catalog all my NES and SNES carts (where most of my gaming time went).

Immature Era:
IBM PS/2 486-DX, 4MB RAM, SVGA, 2400 Baud Modem, 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, 255MB Maxtor HDD, Win 3.1 & DOS 5
While this was bought as a business machine for my parents' side business in '92, it quickly fell by the wayside as they ended up finding paper and pen faster and easier for them. Within a year of it entering our home I had, for better or worse, taken it over as a gaming box, as an access point for late era BBSs and early era internet access, as a learning machine for coding and related, etc. I upgraded to DOS 6, then Win95, then 386BSD (practically brand new at the time) already multibooting and slowly leaving the MS walls behind. I eventually upgraded the RAM to the max 16MB, installed a Sound Blaster, etc. I mostly kept gaming on the consoles at this point but Wolf3D, Doom, my first foray into emulation on NESticle, etc. I also got into my first real understanding of FOSS playing with DJGPP. I bought Waite Group Press books playing around with ALife and VR (VRView and REND386) for the first time. I played around with procedural terrain gen trying to build a world for a D&D campaign. I dipped into lots of different MUDs. I dithered around with Hamster Republic RPGs and RPG Toolkit. All sorts of fun was had, but eventually in '03 the core hardware started failing and I moved on. All in all, I came of age on this machine.

Learning era:
Over the next couple years ('03 into '05) I went through a hardware experimentation phase as I learned to build my own system, buying all kinds of second hand hardware and building one variation after another, installing various OSs (Win98, WinME, Arch, Slackware, various BSDs) writing less code but learning a lot of FOSS software and how various hardware interacted including (poorly) building my own at times. I switched from dialup to DSL.
Not much gaming was done outside ADOM, Starcraft, everything Bethesda to date and emulation (including a fair bit of ROM hacking, which was the main coding I really did... none of it released and now lost).

First Mature Era:
Win XP/Arch duel boot on a late era Pentium 4 with the best second hand GPU and Sound card I could get
Basically from mid-'05 until late '08 I ran like this. I switched to cable from DSL. About two years of this period was lost playing Dwarf Fortress alone. In '07 I got Portal (having played that team's DigiPen project Narbacular Drop) and that lead to Steam and that... well... that was partially the road into the next era. In early '08 my mom died and I went into a depressive funk for five months and most of the time my computer wasn't even put together as I was diagnosing a hardware issue when that happened and couldn't get together the energy to bother putting the system back together. Late in '08 I finally did track down the issue, but the GPU was dead and I gave my uncle $10 for a WinME era PC he'd repaired from roadside trash and started looking into parts to build a new PC from scratch.

The Now Era:
Athlon II Quad 2.8Ghz, 4GB RAM (later 12GB), Radeon 4850 (later an R9 270X)
2009 may have been among the worst times to randomly decide to roll into the "screw Windows, I'll just run a Linux distro" mindset as a gamer. I played a lot of Dwarf Fortress, tried my damnedest to get stuff running under Wine, Minecraft came out and I bought that... but Wine was a massive bitch to configure for each game I wanted to play from Steam and in early 2010 I went to duel booting Windows so I could play Arkham Asylum and certain other games and by 2011 I was just booting into Win7 and letting my Ubuntu partition languish. Funny enough at this point I had Libre Office and Gedit among other *NIX software as my regular usage stuff under Win7.
That lasted until mid 2014 when Windows, after an update, stopped recognizing my ethernet hardware and kept doing so after I reinstalled drivers then OS and even after I bought a PCI replacement ethernet adapter. It'd been over a year since anything I really cared about kept me tethered to Windows, so I tried Gnome Ubuntu 14.04 and lo, my hardware just worked and I formatted and went back to just Linux. I haven't looked back yet.
Later this year, whenever I take my first vacation time from work I'll be swapping Gnome Ubuntu, which has been dependable and easy, but annoying in many respects, for Antergos because I miss Arch but haven't had the time to really deal with everything a proper Arch install from scratch entails for years now (my last Arch install took me about a week to get everything I wanted working, but that was about 13 years ago when I had more free time to invest).
callcifer Feb 11, 2018
Very interesting thread. I thought I would be one of the older ones, but so far every post is by someone even older :)

The first computer I remember having access to was my father's PC, circa ~1994. It had an Intel 386 CPU running at 16MHz with no fan, a VESA graphics card and an ISA-to-IDE card for the hard disk (8MB if I recall correctly). He used it for work and I played some DOS games.

The next PC was a Pentium MMX 200MHz with 32MB RAM, a massive 800MB hard disk, a 28.8Kbps modem, a Sound Blaster audio card and a 3DFX graphics card that I don't remember the exact model of. I can't tell you how excited I was about this machine. The one game I really wanted to try was Daytona Racing, which I got from some PC magazine CD. It ran like a slideshow on the 386 and seeing it run perfectly on the Pentium was very impressive.

That machine lasted me quite a while, which eventually got replaced with something with a Celeron in it while all the cool kids had Pentium 2s and 3s.

The rest is pretty standard and boring so I'll conclude with my permanent switch to Linux in 2003/2004 with Mandrake Linux. I remember spending a week configuring ALSA to get any sound output. Fun times.
tonR Aug 8, 2018
"Wanderer-ing" on GoL's forum last week, found this thread which caught my interest. FYI, I've never had any video game consoles in my entire life, all computers. So, this is my personal computer history, chronologically.

NOTE: I'm put spoilers because want to save some spaces not because of "spoilers"

Mid 1990’s – Dec 2008

1st PC
Specs : Initial
Spoiler, click me
Pentium III 800 MHz
128MB SD-RAM
10 GB HDD
Windows 98 (Pirated one of course)
M-ATX & Horizontal casing
Onboard VIA-S3 graphics

Specs : Upgrade 1 (Jun 2008)
Spoiler, click me
Windows XP (Pirated, from relative)
256 MB SD-RAM (so became 384MB RAM)
WD 40GB HDD IDE

Note: Family PC, now rot somewhere unknown.

Dec 2008 – June 2012

2nd PC
Specs : Initial
Spoiler, click me
Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz (Prescott)
2x512 MB (1GB) DDR-400 RAM
Casing, DVD-ROM/CD-RW, PSU, etc...

Reuse/"not included in initial" parts
Windows XP (reuse)
Asrock P4VM890 (Used, bought seperately, because wanted SATA ports & PCI-e slots)
WD 40GB HDD IDE (reuse)

Specs : Upgrade 1 (May 2010)
Spoiler, click me
DVD-RW driver
Asus AMD HD 4350 silent GPU (used GPU)
Seagate 500GB HDD SATA

Specs : Upgrade 2 (Jan/Feb 2012)
Spoiler, click me
Philips 222EL 21.5 Inch LED monitor. (bought because old LCD dead for no reason)

Note: Bought from my school friend for RM 200. This PC's where I'm learning Linux/Ubuntu little by little via live CD booting. Upgrade 1 & 2 was done after I'm finished high school. Never went to uni/college, straight went to workforce/find a job.

June 2012 – February 2014

3rd PC with Windows XP
Specs : Initial (Jun 2012)
Spoiler, click me
Intel Core i5-2320 3.0GHz
1x4GB DDR3-1333 RAM
Asus P8H61 M-ATX Motherboard
Cheap Casing + 400w cheap PSU

Reuse/"not included in initial" parts
500GB HDD
DVD-RW drive
AMD HD4350 GPU
All PC cooling fans

Spec Upgrade 1 (Aug 2013)
Spoiler, click me
PSU 550w (250w real power, crap & cheap but surprising very reliable)

Note: Spent for almost RM 1000 initially for my 3rd PC and then upgrade it little by little. Reuse old PC parts to save money.

February 2014 – Today

3rd PC with Ubuntu
Spec : Upgrade 2 (Dec 2015)
Spoiler, click me
WD 500GB HDD (for backup)
WD 1 TB HDD (for Linux)
4ports USB 3.0 PCI-E extension (M-Board doesn't comes with USB 3.0)
4GB DDR3-1333 (so became 8GB RAM)

Spec Upgrade 3 (Nov 2016)
Spoiler, click me
Sapphire AMD R7240 (no money to buy decent GPU, HD4350 over-outdated)

Note: Officially adopting Linux in 2014. With Win XP EOL (even do mine's pirated) and anti-virus subscription ended, better and safer if I migrate to Linux. Linux is hard, but eventually got used to it. FYI, currently I'm running 3 HDD setup (1 Main & 2 Backups. 2TB, total partitions = 8).

Future?
My current PC already 6 years old and feels a bit dated. I’ll probably need new rig next year or so. AMD Ryzen caught my attention right now.

GAMES
Note: I’m only listed those games I am/was frequently played before adopting Linux.
Spoiler, click me
Counter Strike (2004-2010, 2016-Today; bought original copy in 2016 after Linux)
GTA III to GTA San Andreas + Mods (2008-2015, play via wine 2014-2015)
The Sims 2 (2009-2014)
Euro Truck Simulator 1 (2011-2015, play via wine 2014-2015)
All flash game websites (2005-Today, sometimes)
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