When did you first touch a computer and why?

cacharo

TechJunky wrote:

Doh! That would have saved me hours of learning who America's Presidents were.

I guess it was a good lesson learned.

Yup, that game is the reason I know Spiro Agnew was Nixon's VP

tiersten

cacharo wrote:

TechJunky wrote:

Doh! That would have saved me hours of learning who America's Presidents were.

I guess it was a good lesson learned.

Yup, that game is the reason I know Spiro Agnew was Nixon's VP

This is ending up as a major sidetrack to this thread. Sorry!

The questions were of little use to be honest. Its not like kids couldn't get out a bit of paper and work out the correct answers. Its what everybody else had to do if they weren't in the US

As for first time it was either an Apple ][ or a clone IBM PC. I know both were around when I was growing up. I just don't know which one was first.

Diminutive

My Dad got a Vic-20 sometime in the 80s and I liked playing with the cassette drive. Icopied a couple of programs out of the book but didn't understand them...

10 print "Hi"
20 goto 10

was about all i could come up with on my own.

liven

roswald wrote:

I couldn't remember the name, but I just figured out that it was a TI-99/4A.

I remember playing an awesome game called "Hunt the Wumpus" when I was a little kid. I can still hear the theme song in my head.

After that it was an Apple IIe, then a Macintosh Performa. I loved the Number Munchers, Oregon trail, and after that I was hooked.

That sounds like the game MULE

liven

ok for me...

first was

commodore 64 in like 81, then it was 286, 386, 486..... you know the rest of the story.

royal

Apple III

hypnotoad

1990 (4th grade): got 2x TRS-80 (?) portable model -- 1.1k RAM, ran BASIC. The world's first PDA? (http://www.vintagecalculators.com/assets/images/RadioShackTRS80PC1_2.jpg). Learned BASIC from dad's college text book - a Shelly Cashman book.

1991: VIC-20, 16k RAM, tape drive. 300 baud modem that didn't really work. Had a tape drive and hooked to a TV with an RF modulator -- like the kind you used with an Atari 2600 This was a 10 year old computer, but then again I was only 10.

1992: Apple IIGS ROM 1 - Woz Edition with 4 megs RAM, 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives (360k and 720k, respectively). Apple OS 6 -- the precursor to OS 7 (and ultimately OS 8,9 and X). 320x240 resolution. Ran Hypercard & AppleWorks. Normal mode was 2.8 MHz, but had a compatibility mode at 1 MHz. Learned ASM.

1993: built a 386 SX (16 MHz) that didn't work for 8 months with my dad -- who woulda thought a bad RLL/MFM hard drive cable could kill a mother board? I actually had Windows 95 beta's running on this thing with 4 megs RAM (or was it 8?). AOL 2.0, Windows 3.1, Dos 6, Clicky AT keyboard. Serial mouse. SB16. Okidata Microline and Apple Imagewriter II. 14.4 modem circa 1995. VB 3.0!!! Borland C++ 3.0. Big red power switch. Turbo button. Eventually I think I had a 40 MHz 386DX but it was so powerful the FBI came and took it (wink wink).

remyforbes777

I would say the first time I touched one was around 1982 or 83. It was a Commodore 16. My father bought it for me for x-mas. I was like 11 at the time. I started teaching myself Basic programming but then my computer went on the fritz and I wouldn't get back into it till 2003. Long time I know. I was really side tracked. But now I am in it for life.

scheistermeister

learningtofly22 wrote:

up, down, up, down, b, a, b, a, start.

Don't you mean up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right B, A Start? :P

eMeS

Does the silly "Basic Programming" "game" for the Atari 2600 count? It had these weird keypad controllers that you had to buy for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming

Actually, it might have been a little bit before this...the first one that I remember was an early TRS...we had one in the whole school in 4th grade I think...

The first "computer" that I owned was a TI 99/4A...this was followed pretty quickly by an Apple IIe, which lasted for many years.

Does anyone remember the game "Wavy Navy"?

The first "hard disk" that I ever owned was for the Apple IIe. It had a whopping 10MB of storage space, was 1'x6"x6" in a hard external case, and cost my father somewhere north of $1.5k. This was around 1987-ish....

MS

snadam

either the Apple IIe at school, or some old as machine complete with 12" or even smaller monocrhome screen and dot matrix printer...it was my dads for work, so I seldom touched it. I cant remember which came first. Then he got an IBM compatible, and Joe Montana Football and Carmen Sandiego came into play so you could say I touched PC's for games, but I always liked tinkering around with them.

Paul Boz

My parents were poor as hell but scraped by to send my brother and I to a great elementary school. They had state of the art computers. The Pentium I came out in 1993, when I was eight. They had a whole computer lab of them - enough for every student in a class to be able to use one. We played a lot of educational games but we also learned how computers worked. I was a gamer so I was really interested in how computers functioned. It sort of took off from there.

Talic

My father had a 486 that we didn't use very much until he installed Doom2 then came all the gaming, I mostly watched but it was still very cool. I also remember surfing the net with it using AOL and chatting with people in the AOL chat room, ah those were the days. I also remember it launched AOL so slow and I would get frustrated that it was doing it so slow. I think I was around 10 at this time.

Then we eventually upgraded to a Compaq Athlon machine and thats when I eventually got my own computer from a off brand dealer. I used that to play a lot of Diablo 2 and such. Then I upgraded to an MMO called Dark Age of Camelot and thats when I started to build my own computers. I wanted a extra computer on the cheap to use as a "bot" machine to give my main character buffs to be more effective in pvp and pve.

So I guess I can contribute my IT career to an MMO

RussS

hmmm - does working in a data centre with punch cards count?

That was about 1980. In '82 I started working at a retailer that had a huge data centre and used terminals. We started selling computers in about '84 and sold Sinclair ZX & commodores.
My first owned PC was a Commodore PET. Owned an Apple Lisa along the way but never really was much into them.
When employed as an executive chef I was given a Digital with 3.1 on it - upgraded it to W98 before trashing it. First home PC I really used was a HP box with W95.

pLuhhmm

Err uh? Well I was born 12/31/89, and the first time I used a computer was in kindergarden to play Rescue Rangers dos game so IDK the make of the PC and not the OS Windows 3.1 or eariler i would assume idk but it was windows 95.

sprkymrk

cbigbrick wrote:

High School January 1984

To learn BASIC

I can't remember a thing about the class.

Same here, except I think I beat you by a year, it was 1983. Weren't they Apple 2e or something? Same year one buddy got a C64 and we'd stay up all night playing Jumpman!

jamesp1983

1996, Apple IIe. I played a math game. I was hooked from then on.

binarysoul

Rings a bell?

drainey

Early 80's, I think is was '83 and it was an Apple IIe for school. Then came a C64 in mid eighties, gaming and programming.

Typical geek path after that, 286,486, p1, P3, p4, core2duo, etc.

Mmartin_47

First PC I touched was back when I was 13, I'm currently 20. It was an old Acer PC running Windows 98.

bertieb

Bomber on the Sinclair zx81. How I loved that game. Took 5 mins to load from a tape.

How sad

Still, I'm not from the punch card era I suppose

garv221

95' for P0rn and Geocities website creator.

Igloodude

learningtofly22 wrote:

I thought the first one we had was an apple II Unicorn, but after googling, I think I just made it up. Played Oregon trail and if anyone can remember the name of the oriental trading game with ships, that would be great.

Was it Tai-pan?

I think the first computer I touched was probably a Vic-20, back in maybe 8th grade. Ended up getting a TI-99/4a and cassette tape drive storage, took a computer class in high school that used TRS-80 Model 3/4, and got issued a 286 at USNA; haven't been without a computer since.

henserlj

A VIC-20 from my uncle when he upgraded to a Commodore 64

After that, I inherited his 64 when he again upgarded to the Commodore 128.

Also had an Apple 800XL (?) I think but don't remember.

I remember sitting for hours typing in code from the Commodore 64 magazine and debugging it just to get a lightening bolt to flash on the screen.

Then a 386SX 25MHz with a Turbo button!

I miss my turbo button

JDMurray

henserlj wrote:

Then a 386SX 25MHz with a Turbo button!

I miss my turbo button

That button was a good marketing gimmick. Except for supporting really old games with timing issues, there was never a reason not to run in Turbo Mode.

120nm4n

JDMurray wrote:

henserlj wrote:

Then a 386SX 25MHz with a Turbo button!

I miss my turbo button

That button was a good marketing gimmick. Except for supporting really old games with timing issues, there was never a reason not to run in Turbo Mode.

I used to turn off turbo when I would win at Solitaire so the cards would bounce at a speed I could see.

The first computer I remember using was one that my dad had built from parts from Jameco (I think that was the right company) That would have been around '88.

mamono

I feel owned already considering many response pre-date the 80's.

1986 IBM PC XT 8088, 1Mhz, 512k RAM, 20MB HDD, two 5.25" floppy drives, and VGA CRT screen.

It was the first computer I ever had. It was also the first computer I ever disassembled and reassembled without my dad knowing about it! Cost somewhere over $3k, but my dad's work paid for it. I learned MS DOS and played Hack on it.

nescotorres

I was just thinking about "my first" and searched out a place to post it....

My first was my grandpa's Timex Sinclair 1000, around '82 or '83...I remember him paying $99 and being excited that everyone would one day have a computer. We would spend hours typing up programs in BASIC then saving them to a storage cassette tape. My favorite program, backgammon would take about 8 min. to load haha...it wasn't much, the only storage was cassette tapes, and you had to use a tv as a monitor, but it piqued my interest as a 9 year old. He passed away in early '95, and as I think of the exponential changes in tech since then and think he would be in heaven if he were still around:)

LinuxRacr

My dad was going to College, around 1983 or 1984 (I was like 4 years old), and my older brother and I were visiting him one day. He showed us something called a Commodore 64. We had no idea what all the different keys did, all we cared about is that we could play games. That weekend we also found his roommate's stash of Playboy mags in the bathroom closet...LOL!

I had been used to Macs and such in elementary school for playing cool games like Oregon Trail, Word/Number munchers. In 1995 while in 9th grade, I was at a friend's house one night, and they were playing Doom. It was the first time I had ever seen it. I remember the lights were off, and we were playing the level where the Cyberdemon was chasing you and shooting rockets at you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2_WKzQb388

They told me that it was possible to play online as well. I was hooked. For Christmas that year my dad bought us a Packard Bell computer with only 32 MB or RAM, and a 850MB hard drive. He tasked me with putting it together, and getting it to work. This is when I REALLY started learning about computers, and how they worked.

1998. I had graduated from high school, and was going to a well know tech school. The previous year I had connected to the internet for the first time, and started having conflicts with my dad because I had loaded Linux on his computer, and messed up the master boot record (which I didn't know how easy it was to fix at the time). Obviously it was time for me to get my own machine. There was a guy there who was like a student teacher who would tutor folks, and was pretty smart. I picked his brain whenever I could. I told him that I wanted to build my own system. He recommended some parts, and some stuff. I remember spending large parts of several paychecks on parts, but soon I had my first built computer built around an Iwill XA100 Plus motherboard. 350Mhz AMD processor.

vinbuck

1983 - I was 5 years old and we bought a Texas Instruments TI-99 that hooked up to the TV and used audio cassette tapes for storage. I used it to play Parsec (Kind of like Asteroids) and later to type in game programs in Basic. My dad subscribed to a computer programming magazine that had the entire code for several games and you had to type in each line of code while the tape was recording, once you had finished recording, you could rewind the tape and load the game into memory to play it....Good times

1991 - Our first "PC" was a Packard Bell 386 with Windows 3.0 and DOS 5.something. The rest is history....