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My first PC was a Micron. I don't remember the specs at this point but the machine was fast, every component in it was well-chosen and standard, and the case wa

My first PC was a Micron. I don't remember the specs at this point but the machine was fast, every component in it was well-chosen and standard, and the case was roomy and easy enough to get into that I was still using it long after swapping out all of the original components. The best thing about Micron, though, was the support. Micron had no Level 1 "techs" reading replies from a script on staff, no annoying phone trees to navigate, and no obnoxiously long hold times. You'd just call and within a few rings be speaking directly to a Level 2 or 3 tech who knew both hardware and Windows troubleshooting and treated you as a peer. Discovering how aggressively awful support from most tech companies is after working with Micron was disheartening.

elihu 4y ago
My parents got a 486 from Gateway 2000, but the first PC I bought and owned personally was a Micron. Full tower case, Pentium 2-233, 6.4GB hard drive, S3 Virge DX video, USB (that being kind of a new thing at the time), 24x CD-ROM, I think either 16MB or 32MB of RAM, 17 inch CRT monitor. I think it had a mix of ISA and PCI slots. I don't remember if AGP was a thing yet. Zip drive and 3.5" floppy. Actual serial and parallel ports. PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse I think. It probably had one of those MIDI/joystick ports, but maybe things had moved to USB by then. I don't remember if it came with a 56k modem, but if not I think I added that later. Also a 10-baseT ethernet card. Probably an NE-2000. It came with Windows95, but I also dual-booted to Redhat 5.0 and for awhile also ran BeOS. It was quite a machine at the time, and cost me about $3,000. I think the next time I upgraded it was to an AMD system with a clock speed around 1400 MHZ, but I also kept using the Micron case for quite a long time after I had replaced almost all of the original hardware. I don't think I ever had to call Micron support. What a weird time that was. Computers were really terrible, but the amount of rapid progress and competition between big companies and the rise of open source software and the Internet were all really exciting and inspiring. Like there was always something amazing right around the corner. These days I can't really immediately distinguish a computer manufactured yesterday from one that's 10 or 15 years old.

elihu 4y ago

My parents got a 486 from Gateway 2000, but the first PC I bought and owned personally was a Micron. Full tower case, Pentium 2-233, 6.4GB hard drive, S3 Virge DX video, USB (that being kind of a new thing at the time), 24x CD-ROM, I think either 16MB or 32MB of RAM, 17 inch CRT monitor. I think it had a mix of ISA and PCI slots. I don't remember if AGP was a thing yet. Zip drive and 3.5" floppy. Actual serial and parallel ports. PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse I think. It probably had one of those MIDI/joystick ports, but maybe things had moved to USB by then. I don't remember if it came with a 56k modem, but if not I think I added that later. Also a 10-baseT ethernet card. Probably an NE-2000. It came with Windows95, but I also dual-booted to Redhat 5.0 and for awhile also ran BeOS. It was quite a machine at the time, and cost me about $3,000. I think the next time I upgraded it was to an AMD system with a clock speed around 1400 MHZ, but I also kept using the Micron case for quite a long time after I had replaced almost all of the original hardware. I don't think I ever had to call Micron support. What a weird time that was. Computers were really terrible, but the amount of rapid progress and competition between big companies and the rise of open source software and the Internet were all really exciting and inspiring. Like there was always something amazing right around the corner. These days I can't really immediately distinguish a computer manufactured yesterday from one that's 10 or 15 years old.