When did you first touch a computer and why?

Let's find out the most 'long-term' computer geek. For desert, please also tell us the computer specs and your initital reaction to make it a full meal

. Here is mine.

When: Nov. 1991

Why: To learn WordPerfect 5.0

PC specs: IBM 286, 20 MB HD, a greenish small screen, red power button

Reaction: Love at first sight

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Bokeh

Oct 1982 - DSTE (Digital Subscriber telecommunications Equipment) when I went through tech school in USAF. Could send 5 level ASCII tape and punch cards. My own personal computer was in 84, a Commodore Colt XT. 640k ram, dual floppies, cga monitor. Hard a turbo command that could push it to 5mhz. Paid 350.00 for a 40mb RLL hard drive a year later to install in it. All that and a 2400 baud modem and we thought we were high tech! lol. The long ago days of MajorBBS, TBBS, PCBoard and other BBS software.

tpatt100

bertieb wrote: »

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

I had a Timex Sinclair then a Texas Instruments. When I got older and couldn't count on parents to buy me a computer I sort of got out of computers because they were for "nerds" lol.

swild

1987: Commodore 64 to play Zork. I was 4 and loved it.Then I took a break and played Nintendo for about 8 years.

1995: 386 Win 2.0. Everything. Programming, games, research, you name it. I've pretty much been glued to a gadget since.

odysseyelite

My family couldn't afford a computer. I remember using my friend's gateway computers for duke nuken. My uncle gave us his old 486 and upgrade the ram to 16mb with Windows 95 about 1997. Prior to that we were using WebTv to get on the internet.

When I was 16 I got my friend to build me a new computer. P3 750mhz. From there I wanted to learn how it all came together. I began to upgrade my computer, build computers for others and started to program. Come to think about it, I learned quite a bit in those years in highschool. I was building window 2k domain servers on Pentium 1 boxes with 128 mb of ram in my closet.

Hypntick

I would say 7 or 8, I know a few classes had apple IIe systems in them, mostly they were used for games. Although when I hit 4th grade we had 6 of them in our gifted class, we went through some rather light BASIC stuff. So essentially I spent most of my early years learning qbasic and VB and playing video games. Tried to get into game design actually, before I found out that's not really something i'd like to do for the rest of my life. Just took me a little while to determine that generalized IT was more in like with where I wanted to be, the rest is history.

jmasterj206

Apple II I remember playing Oregon Trail and some of the fraction muncher games with a frog. I remember some other typing game that had a Rabbit chasing a Carrot and the faster you typed the sentence the farther the Rabbit would move. We found out the you only had to get the first couple of words right in the sentence and you could type jibberish for the rest and the computer would think it was still right.

WafflesAndRootbeer

Texas Instruments something or other and it used cartridges. I used to play games like Hunt The Wampus and Pole Position on it. Those were the days my friends. Those were the days.

Bain

My first computer was back in 1981. It was a Commodore Vic-20 and we purchased the cassette tape storage recorder to go along with it.

It was a Christmas gift for my Brother & I. I was 6 years old and that was a significant impact on a small child back in those days.

RomBUS

I remember my parents found some old IBM computer and brought it home (found it in the trash). I was really young then but I remember me and my brother used to always turn it on and just typed random letters and numbers and had no idea what it did, I remember just some black background and green letters everywhere. Actually my first BOUGHT computer my parents got us was an old Packard Bell that ran Windows 95, and I was OBSESSED with the Chessmaster game that came built in, it was the first time using GUI too so I thought the mouse was the most wonderful thing ever! Once we knew how to get onto AOL 4.0, I was hooked!!! I always was searching around and wondering what everything did. I didn't start gaming on the PC online until I discovered Quake 3.

tpatt100

My two year old is going to be spoiled. He is going to grow up and just think the Internet always existed, the iPad is a normal computer device and all mobile phones have internet access.

I joke with my wife that he will think all televisions are supposed to be 50+ inches and flat.

drkat

When: 1988
Type: Macintosh
What for: Art class in elementary school

initial feeling - meh, cool I can draw... next came I wonder what we can do with these things.

Really got into computers in 1995 - Packard Bell Pentium I 1.2gb HDD 2x cd-rom and 8mb of ram windows 3.11

YEAH!

Jayjett90

When: Late 1999
PC Type: Gateway
What for: Just installing simple programs and looking at how the inside of the computer was.

Anything from installing games to installing AOL which i used to get in the mail whenever a new version came out LOL. My dad used to swap out memory and change the hard drives and had external ones so I found that interesting and well yea.

onesaint

When: early 80s

Most of my early on exposure to electronics/computers came from my father. He was a PSU assembler/designer at one point and dabbled with eletronics at home as well. One of the things that stand out was the digital clock kit that had 4 red digits up on L brackets from the bread board. I was 7 or 8 and thought it was the most awesome thing. The next I recall was him putting together an IBM XT with Dos 2.0 in '84/'85. I recall him talking about how ram was 1$ per K. I think I played some KingsQuest on it, but the NES was out sometime around then, and grabbed my interests. Although, I did play a lot of Commander Keen.

As a teen (early 90s), I did some intern work with a computer graphics company that did simultaneous online collaboration between artist (the first of its kind commercially I guess), and they did early CG work for TV shows (why, yes. I live in LA).

Then around the mid 90s, I was home with a cold one weekend and decided to disassemble a Pentium 66 workstation and put it back together. From that point out, I was hooked.

DevilWAH

Early 80 with comodo 64, then the Atria ST!!!! man that was great spent hours with a friend creating games.

Family also had a I BM PC 5150, But we had a duel monitor set up (the moncrome and a 4 colour CGA screen!!!!)

houses of space quest and police quest was spent on this machine.

First PC I Owned was a 266MHZ pentium machine in 1996, which I brought a 2X CD writer for, for a cool £200!!

That was the only PC I ever owned, over the years I upgraded it bit by bit, I gave it to a friend about 2 years ago, the only original part was the floppy drive

I use to do some video editing and lots of gaming, I laved the fact that simply by knowing what you where doing you could get massive increases in proformance simple with a few lines of code or settings. Computers just made seance to me, and for the likes of us who are dyslexic they kind of give us a way to exploit our strengths with our begin help back by weaknesses.

MrXpert

When:1983
What:ZX spectrum 48K
Why:Playing games and learning basic programming

Prior to that I did use BBC computers and Acorns but these were text based games and a couple of really odd ball ones.

I still have the ZX spectrum but its not my original one. It actually was given to me by a friend.

arwes

I think for me it was 1984, a Tandy Color Computer 2. I was 9 years old, and I think what got me interested was either seeing the movie WarGames or Cloak & Dagger for the first time. Played around with it in Radio Shack running something like this to mess with the workers there:

10 PRINT "SYSTEM ERROR";
20 GOTO 10

I even got a "program your own video game" book at the school's book fair, but the whole thing was basically like 10,000 lines of BASIC to make a "choose your own adventure" type game ala Zork. Parents couldn't afford a computer, so I ended up tossing the book not long after I got it.

Didn't ever get a computer until around 1987-1988 though, a DTK 286 with DOS 3.3 and GeoWorks Ensemble. It took forever to convince my dad to pick up a copy of Windows 3.1 LOL.

cvuong1984

1996-1998 between this stretch.

Reason? Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Counter-Strike.

Actually it was probably earlier then that.... 1992? somewhere around there.

old MAC classics at school playing Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, and Reading Rabbit.

also some old IBMs that boots from 3.5 floppy also from school.

cvuong1984

deadpool287 wrote: »

1998

Starcraft

running on a Packard Bell with Juno for my ISP.....all i remember

LOL I was running on Erols for my ISP...and using Netscape instead of IE!

N2IT

1980 my friends father who was a PC tech let me play some games on his PC. In 83 I got a Commodore 64 then a 128. My parents have been in IT since the 60's to some degree. My mother was a programmer since she was early 20's now 50's. Dad is in his 70's he used to program machine language and develop mainframe operating systems. He is retired and she still developes in C#, but had stints with C, C++, COBOL, REXX, and some other crazy one off development languages. She has designed a lot of databases as well. Infact at one time the military had the largest inventory database in the world and she was a lead developer on that project.

WafflesAndRootbeer

cvuong1984 wrote: »

LOL I was running on Erols for my ISP...and using Netscape instead of IE!

I remember Erols PC! They used to have a shop near my house and I used their video store until Blockbuster bought out the company.

ccnxjr

It was many years ago, fully consensual and that computer WANTED to be touched!!!

:P

Think it was sometime around '93-95
It was a friends computer, mostly to play some form of tetris, which I put on a floppy and brought over :P
Very soon I learned how sensitive floppy disks are to environmental conditions, then I went backup CRAZY!
Until the 2000's my computer use was sporadic and spent many afternoons at the internet cafe.
Eventually when I got one of my own the first thing that went on it was StarCraft.

One evening I got my hands on a Red Hat distro and spent almost 3 days trying to get dial up on that to work.
At the end of the second day my so-called friend told me that Linux uses different ports and it wouldn't work.
Which proved to me that just spending time in front of a computer won't necessarily make you an expert at the thing.
In a twisted sort of way it inspired me to learn more.

For the life of me I can't remember the specs.