How old were you when you used your first computer?

[usually_quiet]

I was 19 when I used a computer for the first time, but it was either a mainframe or minicomputer, I don't know which. I used a PC for the first time when I was 28.

[mikel]

12 back in 1962.
Built a GE Analog Computer Kit.
It worked like an electric slide rule.

The first knob was set to a number.
The second to a multiplyer or devisor
....And the third dial nulled out a tone at the correct answer...
very cool & much fun for it's time...

http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/GE-Analog-Kit-1961.htm

Later moved on to a single board KIM w/hex pad input...
..then (1977) a Rockwell AIM 65 with an actual QWERTY kybd and dual RC cassette storage!
added eprom burner. bank-switched 3 languages, eprom burner, 30 word speech recognition/response
& A/D D/A converters...a lot of fun...it's still somewhere buried in the garage.

[SatStorm]

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48+
It was the November of 1983 and I was 9 years old.
I remember loading the demo tape from a cassette player and I remember the first time I saw my first game: a variation of breakout, written in Sinclair Basic!

[yoda313]

I don't know for sure on the computer. I was using a betamax vcr was when I was 4. I had watched a tv copy of Star Wars A New Hope zillions of times on that sucker. It was a Sanyo tank with the top loader version.

I think my first real computer was a texas instrument cartridge unit that hooked up to a regular tv and had a cassette you'd use in addition to a cartridge. I remember a mountain climbing game for it that was fun - matterhorn or something like that. And a racing game but not much else.

I did have a 286 but I was not using computers much yet at that point. The first computer that I really used was a dos 386 that got upgraded to 6.2 and had windows 3.1. I still have it and last i checked it still worked. I loved that sucker. Especially playing the 3.5 inch floppy version of the ORIGINAL XWING flight simulator. Has to be one of the greatest pc games ever. Top notch control and was the whole reason I joined the sound blaster camp to get sound for the first time. Albeit 8 bit mono but to hear the sound effects and the synthesized John Williams music for the first time was epic.

Did I ever mention before that I like Star Wars?

Just thought I'd pass that on......




By the way I think I was in middle school when I finally started using a computer on a regular basis - late middle school at that - maybe 8th grade? I was certainly using it by high school (early to mid 90's)

Edit - it was fun to go from pc speaker beeps and boops on wolf 3d to real synthesized soundeffects! That chain gun was great and had good deep bass in whatever speakers I was using at the time. Also Doom was phenomenal and introduced a new world - plus the whole ems memory mess that we had to deal with for xwing.

Plus I'm trying to remember tsr was an issue but I can't remember exactly what the hassle was - terminate and stay resident or some jargon. oh and those boot disks too.... man some things from the old days I DO NOT MISS!

[Chopmeister]

I was 13 or 14, and it was an Apple II clone (or more accurately, a knock off copy from Hong Kong, which even said Apple ][ when it booted up - real apples were scarce and expensive in this country). 48k of ram, plus a 16k language card, and plugged into my parent's TV for glorious colour graphics. Had to load/save programs on a tape recorder for about a year, until I nagged my parents into submission on a disk drive. That was very expensive, and again a clone - less than half what the real ones cost here.

Long since gone to the landfill, but I actually have it fully emulated on my current box, with much of the software I used to run all those years ago. This includes the original Castel Wolfenstein, from waay before 3D graphics, and still surprisingly playable. Also had it emulated it on my work box for a couple of years - the IT guys at my last employers were more tolerant than at my current place. Ahhh....... memories

[MaDmiZe]

Early 80's vic20 with cassette tape drive and 1200 bps modem (not 12k - 1200) used it to send programs to computer lab main frame in basement CS building at GA Tech.... then you had to get the print out of the run of the program from a tray where it and hundred of other jobs got spit out.....I was maybe 16 ?

[hank315]

Guess I was 18, IBM 370 - 158 (NL, Delft University), Fortran66 programming using punch cards and line printers.
That must have been around 1975.

After that, all kind of stuff like:
- Burroughs B7700
- VAX/VMS 11/750 and 11/730 (mini VAX)
- Prime minicomputers running Primos
- Apollo workstations running Aegis OS, very nice stuff

At home a Sinclair ZX81 and a Commodore 64 in the 80's, I still have these relics.

Now using Wintel stuff, Q9450 at home, i5/i7 at work.

[sum_guy]

1980 Radio Shack TRS80 Model 4, two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives, 150 bps modem, first setup and ran a basic accounts receivable and payroll program, first local dialup connection to a bulletin board system in MA. 2nd dialup connection to a bbs in Herndon VA which went onto become AOL. I'm age 47 now.

[ricoman]

My first personal computer was an Apple IIC, 128k of ram, no hard drive, 5 1/4" floppy, early 80's when it first came out. But even before that in my junior year in HS 1967ish, I took up programming with key punch cards and wiring boards that looked like the old time Operator's phone systems with the cables and plugs. The computer was almost the size of a car and all it basically did was school attendance and grades. Ok, now you know that I'm an old bastard.

[Lady Colour]

Oh., I got my first computer when I was 7 years old...and that computer was a second one from my brother...haha, very old...

[ranchhand]

I remember sitting in Vogelback Computer Center at Northwestern U. for hours trying to get my FORTRAN 77 program to run; had to punch my own cards, what a pain. I get a stack of 100 cards, in order by the way!- and drop them on the floor. Try not to cuss in front of all the other users. First computer I owned was an IBM XT. One of the first ones that actually had a hard drive, something like 10 megs or something.

[Sartori]

A Sinclair Spectrum 16K model in 1982 when I was 16 / 17 , upgraded to 48K in 1986 . Loved it to smithereens , even wrote a game involving a horse exploding and a basic drawing program ....

[awhite2600]

I first used a TRS-80 Model I in the summer of 1980 when I was 13 years old. I stood in a long line at the Toronto Science Centre where I was allowed about a minute to play a game.

I started high school that fall and was lucky enough to have access to the 6 or 7 Commodore PET computers that the school owned. I learned to program in BASIC on the PETs and was immediately hooked. That year I saved enough money to buy a TRS-80 Pocket Computer model 1. I spent every available minute writing programs on it's 24 character LCD screen and squeezing things into the 1424 bytes of available memory. I couldn't afford the cassette interface so I would would have to delete each program and then enter another one.

In 1982 my parents bought me a VIC-20 with a cassette drive. They would't buy a monitor so I used a 12" black & white television. I eventually added an 8K expander to increase the internal 5K of RAM.

About a year or two later I got a Commodore 64 and a 5¼" floppy drive. I still used the black & white TV until I got a colour monitor a year later.

I graduated to an Amiga 1000 just after they were released. I had a summer job and saved everything I made to get the computer and monitor.

My first PC was a 12 MHz 286 with a 40 MB hard drive and 1 MB of memory that I purchased in the late 1980's. Additional memory was added, the HD upgraded to 80 MB and then a 120 MB HD added. The computer, made by ALR, was even upgraded via a special card to a 16 MHz 386-SX.

Lots of computers have come and gone since then, all were self built and components moved from one iteration to the next.

[vectorthom]

This first home computers I ever used were at friends' houses (probably around 1983 when I was 11) and were used pretty much just for games - one had a TI-99 and another had the rare Mattel Aquarius, which didn't seem like much more than a glorified Intellivision game system, but fun nonetheless.

In 1984, my family bought an Apple IIe with monochrome monitor, dot matrix printer and dual 5 1/4" floppy drive. We got some pretty good use out of that for programming, word processing, video graphics and gaming. I recently used ADT Pro to extract disk images from our old floppies for use on modern emulators like AppleWin. Shortly after that was the Macintosh SE which was another winner that we used steadily from 1987-1995.