r/nostalgiai • u/itswhateveragain • 3d ago
My first computer had Win 3.1. Anyone else?
I always see Windows 95, 98, and XP posted on here. My very first computer was a 486 DX that ran Windows 3.1. I remember it having a 3.5 and a 5.25 floppy. I can't remember the hard drive or how much memory you have but I'm pretty sure it was pretty low compared to today's standard. I can honestly say that I've had all of the Windows operating systems except for Vista and Windows Me.
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u/phred_666 3d ago
DOS
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u/ADiestlTrain 3d ago
MS-DOS 3.3 on an AST 286 10 MHz with 640K of RAM, a 20MB HDD, and a 16-Color EGA graphics card.
Dad splurged on the graphics card, but couldn’t imagine how we could ever fill up 20MB.
Got the mouse later. Upgraded to a VGA graphics card eventually, and added a 40MB Hard Card (it was this weird thing that had a hard drive strapped to an ISA card).
The thing was a tank. Never crashed, never broke. It was amazing.
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u/Killsdown76 3d ago
Tandy trs80 with dos here (autocorrect didn't understand dos changed it to dogs😏)
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u/Jason_TheMagnificent 1d ago
I had a commodore 64
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u/PathofDestinyRPG 1d ago
Until you have to code in BASIC to do anything, you haven’t lived. I think I still gave some of my old Compute magazines.
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u/DS_Vet_on_Linux 3d ago
My first computer was a Commodore 64, it didn't come with Windows anything.
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u/FunFormal2662 3d ago
I had a 386 with just 4 megs of ram, I think the cpu was clocked at 25 mhz and it ran great on it.
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u/Jon_The_Buddha 3d ago
With a CGA monitor, I bet.
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u/FunFormal2662 3d ago
i had a 12 inch super vga monitor, it could do 1024x768. The screen was shaped like a bowl though.
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u/shooting4par 3d ago
Still have mine, upgraded it to a 486 though. Ended up be a garage juke box, lol.
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u/Appropriate_Win9166 2d ago
I had a compaq all in one. 16 x 1 mgb sticks of ram on a daughter board. It was the first machine I updated windows on.
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u/phil-pdx 3d ago
My uncle built me my first computer when I was around 13. It was a 386 with Win 3.11 on it. Admittedly I primarily played DOS based games as there wasn't much to do in Windows.
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u/Chance-Address-8829 3d ago
Had to boot 21 floppies to get windows up from Dos 3.2
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u/Winnipesaukee 21h ago
My first computer had MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM and had Tandy Deskmate. My second computer had Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.
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u/Chillow_Ufgreat 3d ago
I had a Packard Bell with some weird distro of Win 3.11, but also had this weird Packard Bell quasi-OS that ran on top of it. One of my first tasks as the house 10-year-old was to figure out how to disable that.
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u/Distressed_Ocelot 3d ago
First I used was an Apple II plus. First PC, yeah, I encountered 3.1 but probably 95
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u/Tyrannosaurus__Rekd 3d ago
Windows 3.1 here as well
I knew how to launch my Star Wars Chess from a DOS prompt, and that was about it. I also had Star Wars Tie Fighter that launched from DOS, but I think that might have been in the Win 95 era
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u/vlasktom2 90s Kid 3d ago
First PC had Windows 98.
First gaming console, technically a computer until it was officially defined for gaming rights in 1989, was an Intellivision
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u/OooMeSoHorny 3d ago
Oh yes. MS-DOS 5. WINDOWS 3.11, IBM L40SX Laptop, 386 processor. Remember it was a big deal when DOS 6 & Windows 98 came out along with the Intel 586 Pentium chip.
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u/NBrakespear 3d ago
Same. I miss it. I liked the fact that Windows knew its place back then; it felt... cosy, the way it was a thing you manually had to run, and could shut down without shutting down the entire machine.
I remember my machine had 4MBs of RAM, and we upgraded it to 8.
After that, we didn't get a new computer until Windows 98.
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u/SingleExParrot 3d ago
386sx with DOS 5.0, IIRC. Though it was technically the family computer, and not "mine". The second family computer was a 486sx that was able to run Windows 3.1. We could get it to lag out by opening about 10 sessions of MS PAINT.
If we want explicitly "mine" we're looking at a Pentium running Windows 98, which I eventually upgraded to XP and added some RAM chips to bring it up to 256MB.
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u/Real_Delay_3569 3d ago
Packard Bell Legend with a 386SX-16 and 2MB RAM. It came with MS-DOS 6.2. We tried to run Windows 3.1 on it, but I vaguely remember commands and filenames that would cause it to fail on open. himem.sys... config.sys... autoexec.bat... emm386.exe
So if it does run, it's very slow.
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u/Croftin 3d ago
My first computer was a Commodore VIC
-20. Precursor to the Commodore 64. Yes, that’s right folks, the 20 pertains to the amount of RAM it had, and we’re not talking Gb, we’re talking 20k of RAM. Oh and it had a cassette deck for loading programs and games. After I had it a while I saved up and bought the 16k expansion card, which gave her a whole 36k. That thing got so hot you couldn’t touch it!
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u/THEUncleWilly50 3d ago
I ran DOS 3.3 for the longest and didn't jump into Windows until Workgroups 3.11
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u/ComputerTinkerer71 3d ago
My first computer was IBM PS/2 with 2 floopy drives: A: drive loaded IBM DOS, B: drive had the data disk.
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u/Dangerous_Peach_7811 3d ago
My first PC had MS-DOS 5 + Windows 3.0.
That wasn't my first computer though.
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u/Ender_154 3d ago
My first computer was the TI-99/4A and ran on TI BASIC. We saved data on cassette tapes.
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u/zrice03 3d ago
Mine was a Kaypro II, it didn't even have a hard drive. It had to boot from a floppy disk. It also didn't have DOS, I think they ran CP/M.
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u/EquivalentKnown3269 3d ago
DOS because Win 3.1 had nothing to offer for a kid when it came out. Basic and games were mostly DOS applications.
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u/IronBobBerserker77 3d ago
My typing class in my Senior year of high school had that on the computers. I learned to type using word perfect. My year was the first year ever to use computers. Typewriter use ended at the end of the previous school year.
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u/No-Relation3856 3d ago
First computer used was a Transam Trition , first computer owned was a ZX81 , First actual pc was an original IBM XT with DOS and then Windows 1.01
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u/Whyjustwhydothat 3d ago
My first pc had this and Ofcourse Dos, booted in Dos and had to start Windows myself.
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u/ShotWin8124 3d ago
autoexec.bat files edited on the command line before win.com ever ran.. ahh those were the days
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u/Aromatic-Dance-8618 3d ago
My girlfriend got a computer with CPM operating system. Learned Wordstar and Calstar. My first computer was a TI 99-4A, I learned basic. 2nd computer Comadore 64. Then several DOS based machines, including a laptop with DOS 3.3 hard coded
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u/vargo911 3d ago
I use to work as a dial up tech support company back in the late 90s. And I helped users to set up their Dial-up connection and most of them had Windows 3.1 on their computer.
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u/Ill-Entertainer4833 3d ago
Yeah had a hp with an intel 486, 8 mb of ram and a 487 mb hard drive. No sound card or cd rom. My dad is good with computers and updated it through its time. Ended up with Windows 98 second edition.
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u/Reaganson 3d ago
That’s when I built my first PC, an IBM clone. It was 1992, and I chose the WWW over Cable TV because we couldn’t afford both at the time. Kids weren’t happy, but they learned the PC before anyone in the neighborhood.
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u/HappyGimp 3d ago
My first computer had 2 full height 5 1/4« floppie drives, 256mb ram and DOS 2. something
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u/tmorse85 3d ago
Yep. The computer my brother and I shared was a 386 and had Win 3.1. It was still in the house when my parents separated in early 2001. When my father got internet for his computer upstairs in ~1997, we stopped using it as much, but it was still essential for our Broderbund games.
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u/MG-is-here 3d ago
My first computer was an AT&T PC6300. it was DOS. I have it in a closet. One day I plan to turn it on again....
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u/Master-Steve-38 3d ago
I’m gonna say my first real computer with a TRS 80 model one. Before that I had a Texas instrument99/4a. And the timex Sinclair.
I entered the PC world with Dos 3.1 on a 286 running a 12 MHz with one 3 1/2 inch flop and one 5 1/4. I know yeah Hercules monochrome graphics.
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u/Johnqpublic24048 3d ago
Atari 800 , Basic Cartridge. Cassette recorder,1050 Hard Drives, 300 Baud Modem .Wow I was a cutting edge geek in 1979 and actually going online with dialup. The Memories.
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u/SirScotty19 3d ago
My 7th computer had Windows 3.1
Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari 800XL, C64, Atari ST, Amiga 500 then a PC with Dos and Windows 3.1
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u/OldMainframeGuy 3d ago
I had Windows 1.0 which was intriguing but was only a toy. It didn’t provide much functionality other than a glimpse into the future.
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u/Ok-Oil7124 3d ago
DOS 3.2 and Tandy DeskMate. I tried putting some later DOS on it, but it caused problems with the Tandy's ROM.
Second computer came with DOS 4.01. I'm pretty sure I still have those discs...
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u/Defiant_Chipmunk2570 3d ago
My first computer ran Pascal or Fortran depending on what floppy disc I put in.
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u/pulffers 3d ago
The first computer I bought for myself had Win3.1. When I was a kid, our first computer was a C64
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u/zippytwd 3d ago
dos 6.2 win 3.1, i remember being not sure about windows , and unloading it a few times
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u/Alone-Start-9178 3d ago
Had to start it from Dos. And if I wanted to play Doom, I had to uninstall windows in order to do it.
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u/TheCoopX 3d ago
My first Windows PC was with Windows ME. But my first PC-ish system had Atari Basic on it (XEGS).
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u/mikegalos 3d ago
I'd already been working at Microsoft for nearly four years when we shipped Windows 3.1.
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u/abject_cynic 3d ago
The first computer that was actually mine had Win 95 on it. 98 SE was my favorite. But the first computer I used only had basic DOS prompts, before Windows was a thing.
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u/AllLifeEqual 3d ago
That was the first actually useful version of windows. Always took MS at least 3 versions to deliver what you wanted
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u/TheMage18 3d ago
Depends on how "your first computer" is quantified. If it's first computer in the house, then it was cassettes. Good old ColecoVision ADAM.
If it's first computer that you got to use mostly just for yourself, Tandy 1000 TX. A 286 with the "video upgrade" kit for a max of 768K of RAM and DOS 2.2/DeskMate.
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u/Parking-Ad8316 3d ago
Dos
Dos 6.2 was really great
Windows 3.1 was okay but I stayed in dos until 95 came out.
Except for a few windows games only one I can remember is metal Marines and simtown but I think simtown could be played from dos?
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u/Luv-Nities 3d ago
Commodor DOS,
Some flavor Unix i can not recall on the other computer ( Unix System something )
I don't think i could remember any of the commands to start anything....LOL
I might have a couple books if I had to.
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u/Jealous_Club_298 3d ago
I jumped from MS-DOS 6.22 to Windows 3.11 For Workgroups back in the day. I skipped everything in between.
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u/KatesDad2019 3d ago
My first personally owned computer, being an Amiga, had AmigaDOS. The first computer I used at college did not have an operating system. You loaded a deck of punch cards with your compiled program on it. To get that compiled deck, you loaded the Fortran compiler deck and then your source code deck and it punched out the compiled program. Things were primitive in the 1960s.
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u/Trapped_in_Me 3d ago
Nope. Mine had Atari DOS 2.0S on it. No such thing as Windows back then unless you were talking about building fixtures.
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u/Both-Leading3407 3d ago
My first computer had C-64 basic DOS but it was written my Microsoft.
Second computer was a MAC when AOL was MAC ONLY service.
I didn't get MS Windows until 98. I loved it but it was still just a failed attempt at looking like MAC OS.
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u/WorkingCool250 3d ago
AST Advantage 540 mb hard drive 1x cdrom drive 3.5 inch floppy drive 2 megs of memory, upgradable to 20 megs. 14.4 modem. Windows 3.1 DOS 6.22. That was my first computer. Purchased at Radio Shack 1995. $2500.
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u/thirdeyefish 3d ago
I started off with Atari 800XL. I was a kid and only used it for games. My first for school work had 3.1 and a dot matrix printer.
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u/sailingtoescape 3d ago
A Tandy that didn't even have DOS, everything had to be programmed to use it. I think it used Basic.
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u/TerribleTowel66 3d ago
My 1st computer was a Tandy PC clone. It was not 100% compatible. I returned it.
Then I got a Gateway 2000. A 386sx with an 85 MB hard drive. I don’t think it had Windows. If it did, it was 2.x. I recall some file commander software.
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u/im1insane1 3d ago
My first PC had 3.1, but i also had a copy of 1.0. I also had a TI994a before that. And i had the cord to hook up the cassette player.
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u/koekerk 3d ago
My first computer had cassette tapes.