I had an Amstrad too! The Amstrad lasted until about 1990, when I got the Amiga. The PC (Summer 1996) was a Pentium and I paid too much for it.
What was it like? Expensive!
I bought my first PC in 1991 and it cost twice what I paid for my secondhand car.
By '95 I would have been on my second upgrade (Moore’s Law was a bastard back then) and spent about the same amount for a HUGE increase in speed and storage.
Obsolete before you got it home!
I remember a friend commenting that the reason the English liked warm beer is that they had Lucas Refrigerators
My first computer experience was Sears Pong and then my parents bought an Apple IIe for us.
Sometime in the 80s we had a guy build us a 286 with DOS and then the same guy built us a 386. He came to our house to set it up and teach us how to use it.
After the 386 it was Packard Bell for our first Pentium.
After that I built several with parts from Newegg and computer shows because I was getting into video editing and scsi and capture cards were not standard in store bought stuff.
About 5 years ago I went back to pre built stuff. Microcenter’s brand, Powerspec, is very good stuff at good prices and the stuff inside is easily replaced and added to.
I do miss shopping at computer stores or even aisles of software at Best Buy.
A friend and I used to spend many weekends wandering around huge computer shows. I really miss those shows.
I remember our first computer: the apple iii
I had a commodore 64 in 3rd or 4th grade. I got in trouble and had to write something 100 times. I asked if I could type it and the teacher said okay. I either ctrl-c/ctrl-p the entire document or did it in basic (forget which) - and the teacher accepted it.
I remember going to comp usa and my dad buying our first pc with a cd-rom (it came with a manual pull out disk drawer as it didn’t have a motorized drawer).
I built my first pc in 95 or 96 and by 98 we had wired our first LAN.
I used bbs in grade school and I remember scoffing at aol. Who wanted fancy schmancy graphics on-line when all I needed to do was get monty python scripts and a print out the anarchist cookbook?
In 99 I bought my first 19" viewsonic crt. After about 6 weeks of usage my desk was bowed down in the center where the monitor was sitting.
Now I’m so far out of the loop on building PCs its not even funny! Did my first nas and it took me like 2 weeks to figure out what drives I wanted in there
Both were stupendously better than the ultra-cheap Sinclair beasties. Shall I confess to having written a SPACE WARS game for the ZX-81? Music-cassette-loaded, umma-gumma! Don’t wiggle the audio cable! Oops…
Newcomer. Circa 1981 I soldered-together a Heathkit H8 system (with octal keypad and slow 8080 CPU, H17-3 floppy drives, H19 terminal, and H14 printer). Later came an advanced H89 system (with Z80 CPU and huge 5MB hard disk). Them was the days!
You weren’t a computer nerd then unless your fingers sported soldering-iron burns. No gain without pain, right?
That reminds me of one of my favorite artifacts on this topic of mid-to-late-90s computer nostalgia:
“My new computer’s got the clocks, it rocks, but it was obsolete before I opened the box”…
i needed a loan for my first pc, purchased right then or thereabouts. ive got no idea why the bank approved it for my broke self of a college student.
i guess it all worked out in the end. although some days i still fear the knock on my front door.
The English do not like warm beer. They like cellar temperature beer. Which, in this chilly climate, means “cold”.
I remember when Epcot opened and there was a “traditional pub” in the World Showcase that served cold beer, but you could get a stick you could put in the beer to warm it up. 
You mean like a gun show for computers? /s
In the UK there were dozens if not hundreds of small dealers that assembled PCs to order at low prices as well as selling individual components and peripherals. It probably worked out very well for expert users who knew exactly what they wanted and could fix any problems themselves.
Skipping over my Commodore 64, my first PC I bought at Sears in 1991. I want to say it was a 286 processor, and it came with the rare 20 megabyte internal hard drive. Yes, MB, not GB or TB. Within a year, I was using compression software to double the size of the hard drive to 40 megabytes because there wasn’t enough space for everything. The system might have been a Packard Bell, but I think it was a more generic cheap PC company that long since went out of business.
Hey! In speaking of British computers, I’m absolutely entitled to that too, I was on a one month study trip in UK and spared as much as possible to have enough money to buy it.
The last day I got it and had only enough money left to take the train to Heathrow.
Rather, “would have had”, because I discovered the price had raised in the month I was there.
I had to beg random persons at the station to get the missing 1£ 20p.
Never been so ashamed in my life.
In later years, I also got an Amstrad PC1640. Decent machine for the price, wrote my master thesis on it.
I spent 1993-1997 supporting primarily Mac-based offices, which pretty much put me off them for life. Of course, then they got better!
These were the prime “going to Fry’s” years - putting together a slightly-janky PC from off-brand components was much cheaper than buying the equivalent from a Dell or Gateway… yet. Said janky PC still cost about $1k, which was about a month’s pay in the mid-90s for me.
Don’t forget the cheap ass cases that would slice your hands to ribbons if you weren’t careful.
The only thing that sustained me through the PowerPC/Performa/Centris/whatever years was that my dislike of Windows was so strong that I’d use nothing before I went to that. 
I actually liked XP, for what it’s worth. I wish they’d stuck with that.
