December 1995: The Month I Got a Computer

This picture was taken (By Me) sometime in 1997 which was about 2 years after we got our first computer. It was a Packard Bell Legend.

That day in December 1995, I was in bed sick (Don't Remember Why). My dad went to the newly opened Best Buy and bought the Packard Bell Legend while I was in bed watching Flintstones reruns.

I already had a little experience becuase my aunt in Winston-Salem and I been playing with her Gateway 2000 which had Windows 3.1.

Our computer featured a 2 gigabyte hard drive, 32 megabytes ram, Windows 95, cd-rom, and floppy drive. It also came with the very cool Packard Bell Navigator along with games like My First Encyclopedia (It really was my first encyclopedia), the Pirate who Wouldn't Wash Interactive Storybook, Milly Fitzwilly's Mouse Catcher Interactive Storybook, and even more.

Through out the years of the Packard Bell, other games were added to it like Freddi Fish, Putt-Putt (Not golf), Fatty Bear, the Incredible Machine (Great Music), and even more. I'll post a few screenshots of those games sometime.

Unfortunately in 1999, we bought a Hewlett-Packard with Windows 98 SE and around 2001, the Packard Bell was given away. :(

But in March of 2005, I bought another Packard Bell off of eBay that's similar to the original one.

As seen in the picture on the left, there are a few differences between my current Packard Bell and the original Packard Bell. The two obvious ones are the cpu design and the monitor. The cpu is a flat one unlike the original Packard Bell which requires the monitor to be ontop of it. The computer came with the original monitor, but due to shipping damages, the monitor was busted. So I went down to the O'Henry Flea Market and bought this $40 Dell monitor. This Packard Bell only has a 1 gigabyte hard drive unlike the original's 2 gigabyte and only 16 megabytes ram unlike the original's 32. Other than that, it is very similar to the one I grew up with. It comes with Windows 95, PB Navigator, My First Encyclapedia, Pirate who Wouldn't Wash, Milly Fitzwilly's Mousecatcher, etc. After all these years, I still have those games like Freddi Fish, Putt-Putt, Fatti Bear, Incredible Machine, etc. Since then, I've had to run those games on my Windows XP computer which is alright, but dosen't have that PB touch. I'll post some screenshots of those games and Navigator soon.

Well, that's all. I hope enjoyed this look into my early computer years.