I know everyone here will tell me to get off their lawn, but I just built a Pentium II computer about 2 months ago. I pulled most of it out of my uncles house when he died about two-ish years ago, and decided that its time to do something with this crap that's lying around. It's not quite the first computer in the house (a Compaq 486[1]), but it runs all the things it could.
[1] it was (what would now be called) an all-in-one, and it came with some Windows 3.1 thing called TabWorks. And before anyone asks, no, I didn't program on the thing. Not every programmer has programmed since he was in diapers. Also, Windows didn't come with a programming environment back then and search engines sucked ass.
A Compaq all-in-one 486 with TabWorks was our family computer when I was a kid. You've evoked some very fond memories. Windows didn't come with a programming environment, but DOS had QBASIC, which is one of the best beginners' programming environments ever made.
That machine had a long lifetime for us. We upgraded the RAM as far as it would go, replaced the HD... even added one of those AMD "586" coprocessors.
Cool! After we had it for a year or so, said uncle put Windows 95 on it. Lost the speakerphone app and Lode Runner Online during the process, but gained the late 90s web. I downloaded that Lode Runner from the creators site around 2004[1], and had my first retro computing moment.
It wasn't upgraded (except possibly RAM), and we had it from about 1995/6 until 1999, when my dad got a Pentium 166 that was surplus from an office move.
http://theandrewbailey.com/article/119/Project-Twentieth-Cen...
http://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Cen...
[1] it was (what would now be called) an all-in-one, and it came with some Windows 3.1 thing called TabWorks. And before anyone asks, no, I didn't program on the thing. Not every programmer has programmed since he was in diapers. Also, Windows didn't come with a programming environment back then and search engines sucked ass.