How old were you when you used your first computer?

[freebird73717]

I don't remember exactly but I do know I was in grade school somewhere between 2nd and 4th grade (I'm 34 now so you do the math). It was at school on an IBM type computer and everything had to be loaded with the large 5 1/4 floppy disks.

[neomaine]

1980, a TRS-80. Casette tape only storage. I want to hear from the punch card or tube folks...

[Verify]

1971 on a mini, the Interdata Model 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdata) with 8K core memory, using an ASR33 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR-33_Teletype) for I/O (including punched paper tape for external storage).

Programmed in Assembly and a bit of Fortran (only had enough memory for the compiler and about a hundred instructions).

Wrote a simulator for a proposed vioce response system.

As I recall, the ASR33 was in short supply at that time and someone decided to corner the market by placing an order for the entire factory output for a few months (so that he could jack-up the price) - unfortunately for him the order was accepted. Teletype Corp. continued normal production and just added an extra shift at the factory to produce his order.

[hech54]

1980, a TRS-80. Casette tape only storage.

Same here. My first PC I ever bought had a 1GB hard drive.

[Moontrash]

between 1984 and 1986...commodore 64

first computer to have? 1987 Apple IIc (still have it upstairs in the attic)

[classfour]

Gateway 486/25, 1989.

First PC that I saw was in HS; 1978 - early IBM, had to stick the phone handset into the modem.

It made me want to be a computer programmer - that didn't happen!

[pstedman]

The first computer I ever touched was Timex Sinclair around 1983 (I was 11). The first computers I regularly used were an Apple II at school and a Commodore 64 the family got a few years after the Sinclair.

[neomaine]

1980, a TRS-80. Casette tape only storage. I want to hear from the punch card or tube folks...

And to stay on topic, 15.

[bendixG15]

No monitor - no cards - just punch holes in a long paper tape

[Baldrick]

I used my older brothers Commodore 64 around 1986 so I was 8 years old. I got my own Amiga 500 around 1990, then a 486/25, pentium, pentium 3...blackout....and now intel i7.

[MJA]

can you call net TV a Computer? lol

[16mmJunkie]

1980, a TRS-80. Casette tape only storage.

Yep got my TRS 80 for a Christmas gift 1977 (17years old) (actually both my brother and I got one each).... Boy that was the day!

[freebird73717]

can you call net TV a Computer? lol

Sure why not!

[edDV]

1967 IBM 360
Fortran with punch card input and line printer output.

[Verify]

This topic seems similar to : https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/295540-What-was-your-first-computer : )

And, back on topic, my age was 39 for my first computer.

[Almost Human]

I was 24 in 1969 when the IBM 9020 was going through it's shakedown parallel tests at the Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC). For home I got one of the first Commodore Vic20's, but don't remember the year.

[fritzi93]

1967 IBM 360
Fortran with punch card input and line printer output.

Same here, only it was 1973, and I was in college. It was an IBM mainframe, dunno the model. Sigh.

[SallyDog]

1967 IBM 360
Fortran with punch card input and line printer output.

Same here, only it was 1973, and I was in college. It was an IBM mainframe, dunno the model. Sigh.

Jeez, me too, same freakin' year at UGA. I never even saw the actual mainframe. It was in some building miles away from the card punch center.

[robjv1]

I'm another Commodore 64 kid. My parents bought it in 1984 (when I was 3) and I was using it pretty regularly by 5 and programming on it by 10. That lasted me the whole decade too, my family didn't get our first PC until 1993 (Packard Bell Legend 2000 with CD-ROM!!!!) although I played with an Apple IIe and some Macs at school.

[Ditka1985]

1976... Prime 300 with a whopping 20MB hard drive system (upgraded from the original 6MB unit)... This particular system also had an 8" floppy drive that was really only used in the booting process, but could also be used for programs and storage. While this wasn't really my first exposure to computers (the first was a Univac 1110) it was the first one that I really began to understand...

Dang... I feel old.

[fritzi93]

Jeez, me too, same freakin' year at UGA. I never even saw the actual mainframe. It was in some building miles away from the card punch center.

Heh, I spent a lot of nights in the "troglodyte cave", AKA the room where all the keypunch stations were in the basement of the library. And late at night I could get the computer guys to crunch my data without a long wait. Assuming the damn thing didn't crash, which was often.

I could look up and see the (really big) room where the mainframe was, it had a long glass partition. Guess they wanted to show off their state-of-the-art gee-whiz computer to the alumni. Entry to authorized personnel only, of course, they thought they were high priests or something. Oh, those were the days.

[lordsmurf]

I still have a bunch of punch cards in the closet, for nostalgia.

The first system I used was an Apple II in the mid 80s, and software was loaded from 5.25 (360k?) floppies.
There was a second drive to save, which we never used. Do the work, print it, done.

I preferred the typewriter at the time.

[Constant Gardener]

I was twentyish when I encountered an IBM 360-50 as part of a math class. Eight disks, four tape drives, and the noisiest line printer I have ever heard. I could submit a job (Fortran or PL/1) and expect to get the results back within a day. Yep, still have some punch cards.

[redwudz]

I started with a VIC20 in 1981. Before that I only personally saw a Radio Shack handheld that a friend had bought for a outrageous price. I upgraded the VIC with a tape drive and some add on cartridges and learned a bit about basic programming. Then a Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000, a PowerMac and a G Mac, then a Intel 400Mhz Celeron Kit PC with W98. Now I have a 6 core AMD I put together running W7 at 3.5Ghz and 1.5TB of on-board storage, along with about twenty other PCs I've assembled for myself and friends.

No comment on age, but I'm on a early retirement now.

[nic2k4]

I got my first computer at 16, it was a Sinclair ZX81. It came as a kit and you had to solder all the components yourself. It had a whopping 1K of RAM and you could save your BASIC programs to cassette. I still have and it still works.

[craigarta]

Using and owning are way different for me.
Use as in play with at K-Mart there was those Atari computers back in the early 80's
Didn't really use one for anything useful until junior year of high school and that was a Apple II. I remember it has two floppy drives and a voice synthesizer.
Although I wasn't prepared for old monster we had in the Army. The whole thing was the size a desk and it used these huge floppy disks and man that thing was loud.

[CogoSWSDS]

I was 10 in 1980 when I wrote my first computer program on the school's TRS-80. My first computer was the 16K TRS-80 Color Computer. Got that in 1982.

My daughter, on the other hand, started using a computer when she was 2. It was a 486DX2/66 with 20Megs of RAM and a 2.5GB HDD. 4 years later, when my son was around 2, he started using our Pentium 533 with 64Megs of RAM and a 10GB HDD.

[lowellriggsiam]

My friend had a comadore vic20 with a tape drive back in 1981. That was the first I used. Nostaligia sure is wonderful. I have a portable mac with a modem & carry case that weighs about 60 pounds. The definition of portable back then.

[cinclodes]

It was during my first year in college in 1977. I'm sure I would have started at a much younger age, but that was a different era. I'm glad that I spent my childhood leisure time outdoors rather than playing video games and surfing the web.

[oldfart13]

Used? Old computer from the university here c. 1970 using Fortran (I still have the book here) and later BASIC. Used punch cards (still have a couple as keepsakes). Used a paper tape unit when I went to college (Poly Tech) in the early 80's because the industrial plants all used them and we needed to be trained on them. 1988 I won an Atari 500 ST which I still have in it's box in the garage. This is what also started me off on the upgrading path since I used a kit to upgrade it's memory to a whopping 1 Megaybyte! Heady old days and not that long ago...