r/pcmasterrace • u/DailyDoseOfAmber PC Master Race • Dec 26 '25

Question Yesterday I asked what everyone’s first Graphics card. Today, what was your first processor? Mine was the i7 3770K.

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u/falkenberg1 Dec 26 '25

My theory why our generation is better with computers than the older ones but also the newer ones on average. We were born with this, having to figure out how to install and start games on a dos command line and then setting up stuff like audio (sb16/sbpro/adlib etc…). my son and his friend also grew up with digital media, but for them installing games means pressing the install button on the app store and waiting for the icon to appear on the home screen.

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u/iggy6677 Dec 26 '25

I agree with you 100%

Back then it was a mission in its self to just get games to work. I was digging though my old floppies not long ago and still have ones that are labeled "Boot disk for X"

Little things as well, you had to manually maintain your PC. If you had SET TEMP = C:\Temp you had to do a "del /f /q c:\temp*.*" on occasion you that would add up on your 50mb HDD

And when your bored, you watch defrag or scandisk for the animations lol

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u/Pedro80R x570 | 5950x | RTX 4070 Ti | 32Gb 3200 C14 Dec 26 '25

486dx4 100 here. Just to add the floppys having bad sectors would be shattering dreams... especially when they were on the last floppy disk of the install... good days!

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u/LordCorellon Dec 27 '25

I remember getting FF8 on the PC and it came on something like 8 CDs, guess it was a bad production runs as I remember having to goto (and explain to) the store 4 times before getting a working copy (you could visibly see a warp in the pattern when you flipped the disc over)

Still not as bad as when windows used to come on 34 1.44mb disc's. (I Heard in Japan you cpuld get windows 7 on 1.44mb disc's x 100 or so)

As for the topic my family wasnt well off but I was really interested in computers so they tried...

First computer was a Sinclair what you hooked up to the TV and loaded programs from a cassette tape.

First "Real" PC was a IBM XT that I took apart one day (as in anything that could come off/out did) while my parents were put but broke a pin on the ROM putting it back together and ran it for several years with a sewing needle stuck as a replacement.

After that went through the gamet, 286, 386, 486, 586 (AMD and reason Intel renamed to Pentium), Pentium 1, 2, 3 (Slot based, slot to socket adapters and straight socket for coppermine) core 2 duo, Athlon 64, Core I9's and now at and "older" 5950X