Packard Bell Executive Multimedia (1993) - The First IBM PC Compatible I owned
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- Опубліковано 25 вер 2018
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My very first computer was the Packard Bell Executive Multimedia in 1993, so imagine my excitement when I snapped on up on Ebay for £25. It needed some refurbishment and then I was able to relive the first day of PC ownership I ever had. Join me in this video as I show you that experience, and let me know your own!
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Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed the episode. What was your first IBM Compatible, and what was the first thing you ran on it? I'd love to hear your stories. Another CD I remember playing in those early days was Star Wars Rebel Assault, the FMV was pretty impressive for the time if not the gameplay! Neil - RMC
A packard bell system, too, funny enough - but this was a later P1 era one. I was about four at the time; it was my dad's workstation. Dogz and Catz were big regulars, as well as Stunt Track Rally and a lot of the mid-'90s kids software staples.
First PC compatible was Amstrad PC1512DD. I mainly ran terminal software, MS-DOS 5.0, a copy of DR-DOS when I wanted to run GEM Desktop, a handful of games to utilize my Media Vision Thunder Board, some word processing, Prodigy (took advantage of the Amstrad graphics so it wasn't the black-and-white experience other CGA users had), but yeah, mainly dialing into BBSes at 1200 baud and later 2400 baud using Procomm Plus. Oh, the good old days!
My 1st PC was a PC XT noname clone running ms-dos 3.2. It looked exactly like an IBM 5160 minus the badge, but it was for the show. The quality of the plastics (and even the thickness of the metal) was nowhere close to the original. Served me well, though, and it had a beautiful Cherry keyboard.
My first task was actually locating basic. This was in '84, or thereabout, and while it may sound funny, in those days almost all the computers I've had access to before were the likes of ORric or C64 with a rom based interpreter. My teenage self had genuinely no idea the basic interpreter was a program like any other, or what an operating system was. Had to RTFM for the best part of the afternoon just to be able to run my first "hello world!"
I also owned a Packard Bell. It was in a desktop style case, 486SX/25Mhz, 4MB of RAM. Trident VGA card, Soundblaster ISA card. Had a 4X CD-ROM. That was in 1993 too. So you could imagine the SX versions of the 486 were the cheapest units out there. Although my first IBM compatible was a used IBM AT clone my dad bought a couple of years earlier. had a 286-10Mhz, 1MB of RAM both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives and a 40MB hard drive. The worst part was CGA graphics that eventually got upgraded for some random EGA card. I loved that AT clone. It was where I played a lot of my first games. Life and Death, SSI Gold Box titles, SimCity and other random titles.
Of course the 486 was the REAL computer. 14.4K modem and the first computer I ever experienced the internet on. Worldgroup BBS on Windows 3.11. When the local BBS turned on the switch I can remember Telnet and IRC, early WWW stuff. And yes I remember Packard Bell Navigator too. It came with all those Packard Bell computers of the time and it was awful. Stock Windows 3.11 was good enough honestly.
"My" first IBM compatible was an IBM PC. I was fortunate enough that my dad worked at the municipal automation department and he was able to get one on loan to use at home in 1984. It was soon replaced by an IBM PC/XT which started out with something like 256KB of memory but was quickly upgraded to 512 and then 640KB. It had a 10MB (yes megabyte) BASF hard disk.
I don't remember what I did on the first day. PC-DOS 2.0 was all new to me of course, and I probably played around with BASICA for a while. I remember the IBM keyboard drove me nuts: on the Commodore CBM and PET machines at school, the keys were nicely organized for BASIC programming: you didn't have to use the Shift key for hardly anything (oh, except navigating the cursor of course, oddly enough). That was one of the reasons why I didn't like the C64 much either. Who in their right mind puts all the symbols like $ and " on a key that you have to push Shift for?
Ah good ol' Packard Bell. My first computer was a PB Legend 486, many lovely memories.
Oddly enough these _have_ slowly risen in value over the past several years! Will likely never approach IBM money, but I've seen complete Windows 3.1 examples like what you have go for a couple hundred or more.
Yup, although the Packard Bells were and really still are considered crap budget machines, I think the nostalgia is strong with a lot of collectors who had one as their first machine for that very reason. I just bought a PB "MultiMedia" 486SX, which was my first machine and consider the $125 I paid for it + original keyboard to be a pretty good deal
Lol had a similar Packard Bell. Forgot how the computer on bootup would groan and grind to life.
I had a Packard Bell Legend system as well. Ended up upgrading it to a DX2-66 but it only ever had 8MB of memory because 16MB was so expensive at the time. It also had a "multimedia in a box" upgrade with a Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card, Sony 2X CD-ROM drive, and a nice assortment of games. I did a lot of DOS gaming on that machine and even ran Windows 95 on it...amusingly, I also ran Slackware Linux on it...guess which ran better...
I'm surprised you didn't mention Neil's use of canyon.mid at the end of the video. ;)
Mine was a run of the mill PB P133 tower. Might have been garbage by the standards of the day (notorious PB build quality, only 8MB of RAM and a 1.2GB hard drive), but I loved the hell out of it. A couple years later, I got a K-6 Overdrive-style CPU upgrade (not sure what company made it) and put in more RAM, and it held on strong until I built my own about 4 years after I first bought it. Someday I'll shell out the cash to buy one to add to my collection.
I'm glad UA-cam recommended this video because my first computer was a 486 Packard Bell i got from my uncle. Many hours of SimCity 2000 on it.
Love the little animated touch Packard Bell added to their BIOS' POST.
In France Packard-Bell are commonly known as "Placard-poubelle" (which somewhat rhymes), meaning loosely "closet-bin".
I confirm :-)
Sounds accurate.
In the US we called them "Puckered Balls" or sometimes "Puke-erd Blows"
Oh my God, I had that pc. Memories came to my head. I still have those CDs.
9:04 "Their pack leader calls himself Jailbait."
Oh my.
I loved Packard Bell. I certainly miss it. My first Windows 95 experience was on a Packard Bell.
Coincidentally, seeing F1 Grand Prix running on a PC was also the beginning of the end of my loyalty to the Amiga. Seeing DOOM running on a 486DX4-100 was quite the eye opening experience, and made me realise that my A1200 was now (then) obsolete.
Well that wasn't exactly a fair comparison, but I get your point.
My (families) first PC was a generic 286 in the mid/late 80's. But was always jealous of friends 386's in the years after. We eventually upgraded to a 486sx25 and games like Links 386 really came alive.
As much as these old Packard Bell computers can be limited and sometimes buggy, I love them. Can't help but to love them! They were everywhere when I was a kid and 90% of my computing in those young years took place on them!
I've got my first PC back in 2004, it was a not-too-shabby PC-clone AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 256MB of DDR RAM, 40GB IDE WD HDD, Samsung CD-RW and 15" Philips CRT monitor.......... Ahhh yes, the sweet memories on that machine!
Keep the good content comming Neil, really enjoy your channel! :)
I bought my very first online thing on Prodigy, 1 lb of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. $14 plus shipping. Ahh, the memories. Thanks for the flashback.
I got relatively late on board the PC train in 1996. As a Commodore fanboy who did not know much of what really had happened, I blamed PCs for killing Commodore and the Amiga and was quite bitter at my newest purchase. It was a Pentium 75 with all the multimedia essentials but nothing fancy. On the first day, I played the music video bundled with the Windows 95 CD (Buddy Holly by Weezer) using a software MPEG encoder my PC came with. I don't think I had never seen a computer doing that kind of FMV before and it impressed me. I facts, finding one of my favourite bands on that completely alien computer environment was pretty much like meeting a friend in a place you would not expect to see any.
Oh God the memories - pretty much every single piece of software in the video hits home like crazy. My first was a Compaq 486, and the bundle seems nearly identical - it wasn't great, but I have so many fond memories of sitting in front of it playing Transport Tycoon, Dune 2, UFO: Enemy Unknown (as it was called here), Settlers 2 or just messing around learning the ins and outs of MS-DOS and Windows 3.11.
Beautiful video, thank you for preserving a piece of history close to my (and surely many more with me) heart!
For all things Packard Bell you need to get in touch with Billy Core, Roadgeek/The Nostalgia Mall he will probably have the original recovery disk image. 👍
I fondly remember my first smutty mpeg cd playing in all it’s pixelated glory under window 3.11. Boy was I an impressed 14 year old, delivering all those news papers were worth every penny.
God... THAT closing music... so many memories...
This brought back the memories, My first computer was a Packard Bell Legend with a 386sx running at 17mhz, 2mb of ram, and an 80mb hard drive, and 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives. No sound card or modem, looking back it was an objectively mediocre computer for the time, but we had a ton of fun with dos games, and trying out every last program in Windows 3.1
Our first IBM compatible was a Packard bell but a few years after you as our first was the Pentium 66mhz with windows 95. It ran that Packard bell navigator nonsense too. You can imagine the jaw dropping amazement I had with this machine as it was an upgrade from my a1200 that, well, by now was really showing it's age. To be honest I can't remember much in the way of first games or software I ran but I do remember playing a lot of doom and descent. Our machine suffered a power surge though so was kindly replaced with a Pentium 100mhz which I later upgraded to 16mb of a ram and a matrox mystique 2mb graphics card. Maybe one day I'll get that setup back again.
Nice find my good sir and great video as always.
Great to see my fellow Brits reviewing retro tech. Just subscribed to you and belled as well. Thanks for this!
My first PC was a Packard Bell 286. That machine helped me get addicted to the original Civilization! Helped me lose a job because of Civilization taking my time and attention well into the nights and following days!
yes, my friend you are amazing! I just sat down on the couch, cracked a can of suds before checking youtube and boom baby, RMC is on the air with some smooth groves for us faithful to enjoy. perfect.
Good man, I always approve of UA-cam and beer
Now that takes me back, I also had DOTT and 7th guest on exactly the same PC back in the day, I sometimes regret trading in my old machines for newer, luckily I still have my Amiga's and C64's from the day. Ah the memories :-) Awesome vid again!!!!
OMG that packard bell voice... I completely forgot about it. Thanks for that!
I had a slightly newer one, the Packard Bell Executive Multimedia. It was wider and flatter than this one, with grey detailing on the base unit. The monitor also had speakers attached to the side.
The navigator software was replaced by the Workspace and Kidspace interfaces.
Oooh, executive! fancy
My dad brought home some small store built 386 some time around 1991 as I remember and after that just built PC's, memories of sitting at home watching him plug bits together to make a PC. Used to buy a lot in the USA travelling on business because it was so much cheaper for components there in the early-mid 90s, RAM especially.
I enjoyed your video lots! I still have my first computer with me and it still works! Its an old Packard Bell Legend 2440 from 1996. I had lots of fun with it during that time!
Thank you very much for posting this video! My first computer was a Packard Bell Legend 401CD, if I remember correctly. The joys of Megarace, 3D Dinosaur Adventure, and the ubiquitous Undersea Adventure were what I remember the most from that computer, that and having to get a replacement after a week when the PB's motherboard decided to fail. Other than that, it served me quite well up into the 2000's with an upgrade to 32MB, an evergreen processor upgrade to a 233mhz, and the Iomega Zip Drive. Each year I would find something to upgrade in it, trying to get a little bit more each time until I finally built my own. It got me started with bulletin board systems, direct-dial multiplayer games, and kept me interested in computers even today.
Will always remember my first Packard Bell. Paid $1300 from Office Depot. Had a Pentium 133mhz! It was a fascinating experience.
HOLY CRAP, I was trying to find the name of the golf game I used to play constantly as a kid on my old Window 95! Thank you!!
The Animals! was my first application as well. I remember the splash screen and telling my dad at the time about the “awesome graphics”. Thanks for the memory!
PB one of the finest PC quality maker on the 90s.!!! Congrats very good video!!!
This brought me way back to my first PC. I had the 95 models of the Packard Bell, in a multimedia tower. It came shipped with Windows 95 and all the Navigator software on your video. This was the machine that gave me 3 years of fun learning computers and running many of the published software that you have shown. This video was a real blast of nostalgia for me. In my 3rd year of ownership, I braved opening up the case to attempt a CPU overclock and ram, modem, and hard drive upgrades. I had a lot of fun overclocking the CPU to get that extra bit of speed. I learned about operating systems by tearing the config files and windows software libraries down to create my own custom restore disc. I did not get Mist but for me the three pieces of software that made it worth it was Windows 95, Doom, and my favorite.. Journey Man Project Turbo. I played that game over and over again for those 3 years. It was some of the best years of my childhood and learning. This is where my love of computers and technology and learning really grew. I loved watching this video.
the first IBM compatible we had at home was a Packard Bell 386 in the early 90s that came in an "IBM AT" style metal enclosure... still have it! everyone always said horrible things about Packard Bell but I have fond memories of my Packard Bell machines over the years... parents bought it to replace their Apple IIe... to me seeing Windows 3.1 and 16 colors at 640x480 blew me away...
My first PC was a 1st generation IBM Personal Computer with CGA graphics and dual half-height 5.25" floppies. It was a long time ago, but my first games would have been Microsoft Flight Simulator v1 circa 1982, and Microsoft Decathlon in that iconic IBM-branded vinyl folder.
The machine is long gone, but I still have the original model F keyboard. Good times.
Thank you so much for this video, This Packard Bell was the first piece of tech in my household when I was a kid (aside from a 24' Magnavox TV, RCA VCR with corded remote, and a portable RCA boombox). I remember all the hours I spent playing all the built-in games especially chips challenge and rodents revenge. My mega race became so scratched it was unplayable due to my sister taking it out to play audio CDs as it was the only cd player in the house. This PC was a wonderful Trojan horse to have some games I could play seeing as my mom wouldn't allow a proper game console into the home (not that we had the money anyway). One memory, in particular, stands out to me of the day I discovered the BoSD. I was rooting around in the file system because I was a dumb kid and thought I could find something new, with my mother and sister over my shoulder I did something I shouldn't have and hit with it. I began to panic all the while being antagonized by my family, believing I had killed my best friend and gaming buddy was an absolute nightmare. Thankfully the PC rebooted and was no worse off for it.
Haha memories. I remember typing Help, and then working through every DOS command to see what they did. Most commands never used again but it was the start the PC education for sure
The ONE good thing about this era of crappy off-the-shelf PCs is that they made me learn about computers just to keep them running. I once had an eMachines PC running windows ME so I got tons of practice.
I went from the Amiga 500 to a Pentium, and I must confess I wasn't terribly impressed by any of the software until Warcraft II came along, that really was what got me into PC gaming. Love an RTS.
Enjoyed this, Neil!
My first PC was an Apricot XEN-II 486, DX-2 @ 66MHz with 16MB of RAM PC. I got it when the Pentium 2 era was well established, so we were late to the game. We bought it from Cash Converters for £90. It was a Christmas present (my BIG present, for that year) and I was allowed to buy a CD drive and a soundcard for it, which my uncle fitted for me.
It only lasted a year or so, but it paved the way for many hours and days spent on games played from various differing quality CD-Roms, usually with magazines, most notably, a teach yourself at home guide called "PC KnowHow" my Dad subscribed to for a few months when he became an MOT tester - because he became qualified around the time the test machinery was powered by a PC, my parents felt him being familiar with how to write Word documents and use desktop publishing applications would be beneficial...(!)
Great days.
We had an Apple IIe since around 1985, but my first IBM Compatible was an IBM PS/2 486DX-33 with 8MB RAM and a 211MB hard drive around 1990 or 1991 if I remember correctly. It had a 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drive but didn't come with a CD-ROM or Sound card so I talked my Dad into forking over another $400 for a Creative Labs CD-ROM/Sound Blaster 16 combo. It came with Encarta, so I really tried to use that as a selling point. My parents didn't know the first thing about dip switches, IDE cables, slave/master or IRQ settings (and neither did I). There was no internet, just the instruction manual so it took my 12 year old self most of the weekend to get it working. The first game I played on it was Quest for Glory 3.
Awesome video as always! This made my grumpy gloomy evening a lot better. Cheers!
Wonderful memories! I started a little earlier with an Amstrad 286, then the 486 sx25, but followed your path too with the dx4 100. And yes, I played all those very same games - F1GP wasted too many of my precious hours, but I loved it, and DOOM just took over my life for a while! Thanks for a smashing video!
That sound that it makes takes me back that's an awesome computer you have there
My first IBM PC was a CompuAdd 386. My dad bought it and a laptop for himself because he knew I was very interested in technology and he knew computers would be a very big career in the future. I still kind of miss that thing a lot. It was very nice, loved the keyboard and it was fun learning on it.
I regret I only have but one like to give for this video.
My first PC was an Olivetti PCS 386SX with MS-DOS 3.30a and (I guess?) a 3.5" HD floppy drive, 40 MB (???) hard drive, and only very much later Windows (starting from 3.0 and later up to 3.1) and SoundBlaster Pro and caddy-based CD-ROM. That came with some CD-ROM encyclopedia *and* the awesome disc featured in this video, San Diego Zoo's The Animals. There was some cool video of a Galapagos turtle munching plants. It was awesome. 🐢
Edit: also this was my dad's PC. The first PC I had headaches running Ultima VII was my first own PC, a Pentium 166mhz running Windows 95!
Edit 2: as far as PC nostalgia goes, Windows 3.0 has a special place in my heart. Maybe because it looked so distinct compared to the boring Windows releases after it. Susan Kare FTW.
My first PC was the Packard Bell Executive P166 (1997) I remember being well excited. I got F22 Air Dominance Fighter, Monkey Island 3, GTA, Quake as well as a couple of others. A small link to the Amiga I guess with some of the games. Like you, I never bought an off the shelf PC again! Great stuff!
that's some crisp footage
My first IBM PC compatible that I owned was a parts machine 386DX 25MHz with 4MB RAM, 80 Mbyte HDD, and an early Sound Blaster. Guy who worked on it before included Wolfenstein. It was also the first PC I had to learn to self repair as HDD controller card broke but I was able to source a generic IDE + Serial + Parallel card. No manuals no internet. I caught the PC building bug and have been parts building ever since. =)
I remember trying to run X-Wing one evening at around 9pm. I think it was around 2am when I discovered EMM386 and pushing on to at least 3:30 when it finally worked. I had never felt such satisfaction in all my life here I am 25 years later and I've never looked back. I didn't have a sound card or cd-rom drive but other wise twas the same setup as you, only mine was an unbranded monster of a box that had a larger foot print than Sasquatch. Aah... the memories
DOS memory management was an entertaining game in itself!
I built my first PC from second hand parts (was using a C64 till this moment) and family donations back in the mid-90's or so. The only new bit was the £90 14" CRT monitor I bought with my birthday money. It was a 486 DX2 @66MHz with no cache ram and 8MB of RAM stuffed into a IBM XT case alongside a 210MB HDD, VGA card and 1x 5.25 floppy and a 3.5 floppy. Soon after I added a CD-ROM drive.
I mostly spent time in DOS 6.22 and ran windows 3.11 on and off as needed. My parents followed with a more powerful pentium machine. I mostly read text files from CD compilations of BBS content, played games like Duke Nukem and struggled with the tiny 210MB HDD.
I find it amazing that a 15 year old kid with no internet access, at home or at school, never having seen a PC before, managed to put one together in his bedroom on a saturday afternoon. I was into electronics and knew computer hardware (well from a C64 perspective) and of course popped to my library.
I still remember the mix of apprehension/fear and excitement as I reached round to the back of the XT case to flip that large red power switch. The parents were on their way home and I was worried about the power supply, that was older than me, blowing up. Visions of mum and dad coming back to see fire engines ran through my mind as I flicked it on.
Seeing and hearing my creation come to life was quite a profound moment for me. I will never forget seeing that Award BIOS boot and hearing that single beep. Thanks to that I now have a degree in computer science and work in IT.
My dad took home a few PCs when I was a kid, but the first real home computer we had, which he and I built together was just mindblowing. It had a 133MHz processor at first, later upgraded to 166MHz, 16MB Graphics card, 512MB RAM and TWO harddrives, for a total of 5GB storage. It was the best thing ever. I would install my games on the second hard drive. I remember my friend's father explaming "HOLY SHIT, how will you EVER use all that space?!" When dad told him about the storage space. Hehe.. Those were the times. Before all this, I too had an Amiga 500. I still have it too, and it works splendidly.
Fantastic video,btw.late 1970/early 1980’’s was a fantastic time for tech and sci-fi kid to grow up in! So many machines of every sort.
Me and my geeky buddies used to joke to our friends with the packard bells that they come with the "packard bell virus" preinstalled. They were going insane with bloatware before bloatware was a word.
My first computer was a Packard Bell 286 16mhz (purchased Jan 1991) It had 2mb RAM, 40mb RLL HD, 2400 baud modem and ran MS DOS 3.3
Very nice, thank you for sharing. My first PC was a bit more modern than this, I never knew Windows 3.1. My first Windows was 95 and my first games, first person shooters. but still brings a lot of memories from the 90s.
Ah! This really woke up some great memories. E went from a Atari 520 ST FM to the 386 DX 33Mhz PC. Remember that i used to play around to get as much base memory as possible. Used memmaker alot. Was stoked when i manage to reach 600Kb.
I never had the Amiga, but I came from the Commodore 64. My dad bought a 486 DX2-66 which was pretty top end at the time. It had no sound card so I bought the SB16 which brought games to life. I think a year later I bought my own PC since I was eating into his HD space.
My First PC arrived on 27th May 1995 - my 13th Birthday. We went to a computer shop in Hounslow and got an Acer 1170 - which was 2 years old (was all Dad could afford).
It had a 486DX25 and 4MB of Parity RAM, a Sound Blaster Pro II with the 2x Blaster CD drive, 512k Trident 8900 VGA Card and a 14" CRT that could just about do 800x600.
The first game i ever played on it was SimCity 2000 (had to use a boot floppy to free up enough conventional memory), followed by Doom (disguised, of course, as 'homework').
I loved it - upgraded the memory to 8MB on it, and added another 512k to the VGA card, swapped the CD drive for a 4x IDE one later down the line and even had it running with Windows 95 - but in 1997, I ended up building my own around an AMD K5, with 16MB RAM, S3 ViRGE, 3dfx Voodoo1 and a massive 3.2GB Seagate drive that sounded like a truck - man PC's were so much more fun to build back then :(
They're still fun to build, but maybe the hobby has become a little bit too expensive
If you look at the credits on the microprose f1 gp game, you will see Martin brown.... he’s a mate of mine that lived in chipping Sodbury... where microprose were based... Martin was a games tester for them! ... I always envied his job!... great video Neil!
That's cool! I can think of much much worse games to test, bet he loved that.
Love the sound of the machine spinning up.
Mine was an Amstrad PC-1640, they were being sold off cheap with no monitor (which meant no power supply). Lashed up a supply, bought a 20MB MFM hard disk, and rigged the thing up to my Sony TV. Then went through some hand-me-down HP Vectra 286 and 386 machines before building a 486DX66 I think it was. It was when Windows95 came along I think that multimedia PCs really took off.
I remember these at dixons, back then I loved the shape, it was very modern compared to most other pc's
Wow that PB looks really very fancy. A very nice design for the time. This is very similar to my ESCOM setup I bought at around the same time. I did have a Philips PC/XT before that so I did have a pure retro DOS system before that too. Windows 3.xx multimedia was quite jaw dropping back then. It’s amazing how many of the GUI elements we use today are still common.
The Amiga compared to a PC like this was years ahead of its time!
It really was. While some games really showed what the brute force of the hardware could do on the PC, so much felt like a backwards step. Windows, the machine locking up while it read a CD, crashes etc. Commodore really blew a big lead.
Upgraded from (second-hand) Commodore 64c (got it for my 11th birthday in 1992.) with tape and disk drive and USSR black&white TV to second-hand, custom made, 486DX2 66MHz, 8MB RAM, 250MB HDD with 14'' color monitor. It was in October 1996. I had no idea how to use a PC and (almost) the first thing I did was to run "win" (Windows 3.10) and crank up the resolution to max (1280*1024). That, of course, crashed my Windows and I had to wait a couple of days, stuck at the command prompt and Norton Commander, for a guy my dad knew to come and "fix" my computer. He did some edits in "system.ini" and "win.ini" files using DOS built-in editor "edit" and everything was back to normal again.
I'm can still feel the relief and happiness from that day while I'm typing this on my custom made i3 Win10 computer after a long day of doing what I love the most - messing around with computers, working as a system architect, administrator and, occasionally, end-user support technician.
I was working in PC repair in the 90s, and every time a Packard Bell came in we would all try and call our lunch breaks and get out before we had fix it. It was a huge game of not it!
What a great trip down memory lane. My first PC game was links 386 I thought it was amazing 😁. I bought a Packard bell pentium 166mhz and I thought it was fantastic and it came with the demo of MDK I was hooked. I kept that PC well in to the 2000's then started to build my own. I wish I'd still got it. Great VLOG Neil as always 😁😁😁 Kim😁😁😁
Thanks Kim. What was it about golf games? I have absolutely no interest in the sport but both World Class Leaderboard and Links386 had me hooked
Great video. My first PC was a Dan 486/66DX with 8Mb RAM, 420Mb HDD, FDD, 15" Monitor, Full tower case, no sound card and no CDROM. It cost me £1600 in Oct 1994!
I jumped from an Atari ST but had used PCs at work for a few years so knew what I was getting into. Within the next few months, I'd bought a sound card, cd rom and another HDD and the spending never stopped. First games I ever played on it were DOOM and Grand Prix (again the jump from the Atari ST version to this was amazing).
My first PC was a 486 DX2/66 with 8mb of ram, 540gb and DOUBLE speed CD rom.
I was exactly the same with hunting down every single tiny video clip and gasping in awe at the wonder of multimedia. Sadly I was lumbered with Grolier's Encyclopaedia and had to just be jealous of everyone with Encarta.
"Hang on - your next stop: America's most exciting online service!" reminded me of the "Meet the Grandmaster" bit from Thor Ragnarok.
Awesome video :) wonderful trip down memory lane.
My first computer was a Wang Labs PC 260, which is a 286 with 1MB of RAM (640k addressable in DOS obviously heh) and a 20MB hard drive. First game I ran was Space Quest 1 (EGA) and I was hooked straight away.
Still have that machine!
Loving this Journey. My Grandad had two Parkard Bells, back in the day. A win 95 n 98 ones, newer for sure but hours of fun as a kid. 😊👍 loving your Amstrad n Zx81 videos too. Awesome channel. 👍😊😊😊 I remember the navigator too lol
Wow, that's a blast from the past. Multimedia was supposed to be this Utopian future place where everything was... well, something that was as never as good as they made it out to be.
My family's first computer was a 286 with a CGA graphics card that we got second hand in either 1992 or 1993. Most of my time on it was spent playing Hot Rod 2 or playing games on a Q Basic disk we had. A few years later we got a Packard Bell with a 66 MHz. Pentium running Windows 95.
Another great video Neil :) Listening to the Doom soundtrack makes me want to fire up my Playstation and blast away a few demons this evening but I've still got work to do... I never had my own PC until 2000 but had some similar experiences with a friend's Elonex 386 and another's Dan 486.
My family used to have a PB Legend 29TV from 1994 - it had a 486 DX2/66 and a TV Tuner Card - in fact, the display system at Circuit City had a camcorder hooked up to it so you could see yourself on the screen - quite a novelty at the time. Ultimately, the system died (as most Packard Bells do - which might explain their rarity now) about two years later. I still have most of the software that came with it - the recovery CD with Windows 3.11 and Navigator, the Knowledge Adventure games (3D Dino, 3D Body, Sea, Space, Speed, and Kids' Zoo), MS Works, Sports Illustrated 1994 Almanac, and a few others - wish I knew what happened to the Megarace disc. Back then, pre-bundled software was actually decent and provided hours of entertainment - now it's just bloatware and trail software. I spent a good amount of time with that machine and when Dad installed Visual Basic, I learned how to program on it. Other memories included dialing into Prodigy on the 2400 baud modem, upgrading it to Windows 95 and connecting it via a serial cable to our other 486 machine for multiplayer Doom
My first PC compatible dated almost a decade earlier and was the Amstrad PC1512 with dazzling CGA graphics and a massive 20MB hard drive
Wow this is a great video! This exact computer was our family's very first. I remember loving Packard Bell Navigator (as a 7 year old kid lol) and playing all those included games and software. I remember this computer coming with a ton of discs too, like an interactive encyclopedia, the air/space/sea thing and especially Megarace! I just went and skimmed another UA-camr's Megarace play through and wow does that take me back haha. I still remember the pure excitement I had when we got to upgrade the onboard 4MB of RAM to 12MB and install Windows 95! It's certainly geeky, but my Mom actually took me to Staples on launch day to get a copy haha. Wow how things have changed... and come way down in price lol.
So many memories, I used to adore F1 GP after Dad introudced me to it.
Thankyou
My first was a an AMD K6-2 300mhz. We were fairly poor growing up so that was the first time we were able to afford a computer. I had spent time playing with AIO Macintoshes in school but that was about it. I loved that thing.
Our first day of ownership I must've spent hours playing Deer Hunter and this weird interactive Toy Story game we got bundled. I forgot to mention ours came from a local PC builder.
I begged and pleased for a 3dfx card for the longest time and finally got one about a year later in a Voodoo 3. After that it was all NFS 3 and Unreal Tournament. I miss those days.
I believe my first computer was one of the Packard Bell Multimedia PCs that my dad handed down to me as a child in 2000 or so. With no internet of course, I did what most five year olds would do at the time; mess with MS Paint and play computer games, mainly Who Wants to be a Millionaire 2nd Edition and various Humongous Entertainment titles.
Bro, I love retro computing PC restorations. Unfortunately in my country is impossible to find anything older than 2004.
My first PC was a Siemens Nixdorf _something_ that we got from Escom. I remember seeing the Amigas in there at the same time. It was blue and had had speaker 'ears' on the monitors and I loved it. It was a Pentium 75mhz, 8mb of ram 800mb hard drive. It came with Windows 95 but I remember we got it at a time when windows 3.1 machines were still available so we were early adopters really. Funnily it had some similar stuff to yours; a 'Navigator' style overlay for windows (I wish I could find this to see it again), Microsoft Works, The Animals!
I can't really remember what we tried first, but I do remember the Windows 95 setup "this may take some time" screen when we first turned it on. One of the most exciting things really was that feeling of exploring and discovery. These days you can put me in front of virtually any computer; mac, windows, linux, whatever and I'll know what I'm doing immediately. Back then though I remember getting excited when I right clicked on the desktop for the first time and worked out how to change screensavers, or when I looked on the CD for the included Kings Quest VII and found demos for Lode Runner The Legend returns and Sid and Al's Toon Machine.
One very exciting day a year or so later I received a CD-R in the post from a family member. It included DOOM 1&2, SimCity 2000 (the demo of which I was playing a lot of at the time), Heretic, Hexen, Lemmings, Sim Farm and loads more. That was a very exciting day.
I eventually did quite a few upgrades until the power supply exploded including adding more RAM and an Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo 1 card. I think we probably threw the thing away when the PSU exploded which I wince at now as I wish I still had it. I remember excitedly going to a nearby computer fair to procure the parts to build a new one from scratch.
My first PC was a 386DX40. It cost me a fortune at the time, but it was with my first salaries :)
FIrst game run (and the reason for buying the PC in the first place): Wing Commander II + voice extension pack! :)
I took the hand built route for my first PC because necessity dictated it. It was about a year and half after I moved out on my own, I was usually low on funds so I bought parts one at a time mostly from junk bins at a couple of local computer stores. It took about five months but by the summer of 1999 I had a 486 DX2-66. I remember putting in the 16 MB of 30 pin RAM that set me back 100 dollars and then hitting the power switch. The sense of relief when the post screen popped on and the single beep that told everything in that PC was working fine was overwhelming. The first day with that PC was a lot of frustration getting DOS onto the 500 MB hard drive. I eventually figured out how to create a partition in fdisk and format the drive. Within a few days I was able to spring for a copy of Windows 3.11 and get online, even in 1999 the 16 bit version of Netscape Navigator 3 was still useful on the web. That 486 got me through two years when something called Adobe Flash rendered that computer a paperweight.
My first PC was a Packard Bell as well. A Platinum 2240 from 1997purchased by my Mom at Circuit City. 200MHz Pentium MMX with 32MB of EDO RAM, and S3 Virge video accelerator on the board, Running Windows 95. A lot of firsts happened to me using that machine. First video card upgrade: Voodoo 3 3000, CD Burner, and the coup de grace, Windows ME.
Its amazing, if I could only go back in time and save ALL my old computers I upgraded or junked in my childhood. These new computers, and technology in general, just doesn't do it for me like the old stuff did.
Anyhow, great video!
Your voice is so soothing. ASMR.
Great presentarion as usual.
Thank you
Our first IBM PC was the venerable IBM PS/2. I was excited because I'd been introduced to Civilization not too long before that, so that and Master of Orion were the first games I fired up when everything was set. ^^d
Very similar PB machine was my first PC as well. I was always jealous of the Gateway and Compaq machines but my Packard Bell served me well all the way through Windows 95.
Memories
You're welcome and thank you for watching
Those knowledge adventure CD roms took me back! My first PC must have been this one's immediate successor, a Packard Bell Executive Multimedia 486 sx2-50 bought in 1994 it came with an almost identical software package. At the end I upgraded it to 36MB ram and a pentium overdrive (P24T), interposer of course! Great memories!
Looking back and thinking about what my dad told me about his and mom's Packard Bell from back in the day, I feel like some of the multi-program cds I had as a kid were bundled in with it when they got it. Different set of programs, but very similar and I still have a couple of them. One had a demo of the first version of Jumpstart Kindergarten (I had the 1998 version as well), one had a digital storybook with The Tale of Peter Rabbit on it, and another had both Spiderman Cartoon Maker and Knowledge Adventure's My First Encyclopedia. Hard to believe cds like that were even common back in the day. We also had a game (a demo iirc) called Silent Steel and after looking it up, it may have also been part of the bundle. I've never played that though.
Great video, I need to get my old 486 from my folks.
I had an executive but was a multimedia one... my uncle had one exactly the same as this but purchased end of 1994/early 95. Would love to find one again as they were binned about 8 years ago (poor decision!) If I remember rightly the smaller executives didn't come with a secondary IDE bus to plug a CD drive into, so it had to run off a soundcard with IDE bus on it! Thanks for the memories :)
I fixed these at the time in NJ. I would visit people's homes. They'd usually been waiting for 2-4 months before I first showed up. The first visit I'd diagnose what was wrong, and call in the theory to PB dispatch (actually 3rd party contractor). They'd decide what parts to send, and I'd return to the poor users home months later after they actually shipped them to me. If those parts didn't fix it, we'd do it all over again. Some fixes took 6-8 months as a result. They didn't give me any inventory, and the boards and parts they sent to me to fix one person's computer were often the exact known bad parts that I had returned to them from another call. These computers were garbage, but I understand the nostalgia.
Funnily enough the PSU failed on mine and was repaired under warranty. I think I waited 2 weeks and when the engineer came there was an almighty bang, smoke, and then a few weeks later another new PSU and now a new system board. Life was much easier when I knew enough to build my own.
Something about that first boot sound :) I love it
Ahhh the golden age of the PC..... :-)
My first PC was a Packard Bell Legend 100CD, which had a blazing fast Pentium 60 in it. I'm glad I never threw it out, because its a pretty good machine for general DOS gaming. I used the other Navigator setting which had big square buttons in a grid (kind of like windows 8), rather than the house which seemed a bit weird to me. I also played more MegaRace than I would like to admit, but it at least has a great sound track! Great video!
Great video! My first PC was a Packard Bell Pentium 120MHz, 16mb ram,
Funny watching this made me remember my brothers first 486 computer was a packard bell in 1993 and his came bundled with a game called Return To Zork which is my favorite game of the Zork series (I own them all even the text versions) and still play to this day thanks to programs like ScummVM. My Tandy 3200 only took 5 Volt CPUs so he ended putting my AMD 5x86 133 in his computer and it worked like a champ. Thanks again for the video.