The first time you used a computer!

[WeirdyMcGee]

How old were you-- the first time you touched a computer?


I was 15. In highschool. haha
I think I was the only kid-- aside from the Amish kid in my class; who didn't know how to use a computer already.
The elementary school I'd gone to was too poor to afford a computer lab, so my first time touching a computer was in the library of the highschool- 3rd day of class; I had to use Microsoft word to type up an 'introduction letter'.
There were 'new' Dell computers in pretty much every room of the highschool.

Bought my first computer a few months later with tip money from work.... one of these badboys!:

GLORIOUS!

 

[kihira]

Very first was a Commodore 64 (around 20?), next a Mac, then a PC with Windows 3.1 - I can remember trying to type a letter and failing horribly, also asking to watch over someone's shoulder in the library as they used the fascinating new Internet. I did a short course on basic computer use and later studied computing full-time for 2 years.

 

[MikeyC]

I was in primary school, I think, and we got some AST cube thing. It was great at the time (1994, I believe). My brother and I loved it from the beginning.

 

[mad2rix]

I first touched an old Mac computer about 20+ years ago. Now I use windows version.

 

[twiggle]

I was in primary school too, we were paired up and there was a rota on who could go on the computer to play some logic game thing.
We didn't get a family computer until 1996 and all I used it for was to play my brother's games: Little Big Adventure 2, Duke Nukem, Myst, Carmageddon, Grand Theft Auto (although I only ever liked to drive around listening to the music).
We got the internet in 2000. Back in the days when it was expensive to go on for more than 15 minutes a day; and could interfere with the landline phone.
Good times.

 

[MikeyC]

Duke Nukem

I remember this game being really risque back then.

We got the internet in 2000. Back in the days when it was expensive to go on for more than 15 minutes a day; and could interfere with the landline phone.

Haha yeah, I remember that, too. Pages loading really, really slowly and we had to look at one thing only. That really wasn't that long ago, to be honest...shows how much we have relied on the internet in the last decade.

 

[twiggle]

I remember this game being really risque back then.

It was! A strange game for an 11-year old girl to be playing. I just enjoyed the walking around exploring rather than the actual shooting

Haha yeah, I remember that, too. Pages loading really, really slowly and we had to look at one thing only. That really wasn't that long ago, to be honest...shows how much we have relied on the internet in the last decade.

Yep, wasn't long ago at all. It feels like only yesterday I was discovering the 'open new tab' button. We really do rely on the internet a lot, but it's also opened up hundreds of doors

 

[MikeyC]

It was! A strange game for an 11-year old girl to be playing. I just enjoyed the walking around exploring rather than the actual shooting

Yeah, particularly with the pixellated strippers. I liked Doom and Heretic better.

Yep, wasn't long ago at all. It feels like only yesterday I was discovering the 'open new tab' button. We really do rely on the internet a lot, but it's also opened up hundreds of doors

Yeah, I know. It's been a big jump for the internet. I couldn't imagine using this internet on a computer from the 90's. Haha.

It has opened up hundreds of doors...and they all lead to porn!

 

[Remus]

At my friends house as a kid, it was one of these:

Playing this:

I thought it was the coolest thing ever! lol

 

[MikeyC]

^ I've never even seen a computer like that. How long ago were they out?

 

[Rembrandt Broam]

^ I've never even seen a computer like that. How long ago were they out?

1982:

ZX Spectrum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Rembrandt Broam]

I would have been about 11 or 12.

 

[coyote]

i first used an Apple II - it was 1981, i was a senior in high school. it had been purchased with a special grant for the gifted students program. the only thing i remember using it for was playing video games

i used various computers during military service through the 1980's, but they were mostly for word and/or data processing - we still did most everything on paper. we planned out nuclear airstrikes with felt tip markers, protractors, and compasses on paper maps that we glued together with rubber cement.

i bought my first computer in 1989 - it was a 286 IBM clone that ran on MSDOS and had a huge 15" amber monochrome CRT monitor. used for writing college papers mostly.

got a brand new PC in 1996 - Windows 95 - and hooked up to the interwebs

i've gone through several since then - now i just use a laptop

 

[Iluv]

I was a kid about 4-5 years old. They would let us on to the one computer in our room to play this game.
They looked like Weirdy's picture.

 

[Phoenixx]

I was about 4 - 5 years old too. Our computer looked exactly like the one in Weirdy's picture. (We STILL have that monitor too. :: Hasn't died yet! We're not using it of course, it's just around.) Growing up, we lived in an apartment and it was kind of small. So where I slept was in the office. I got half of it, and the closet, and my dad used the other half for his computer, filing, and maintenance stuff since he loved computers, and worked as maintenance and had his own small business for installing electric and safety systems in homes around the city. My dad was in the room a lot, so I would always watch what he was doing. So at that age, he started teaching me about computers and how they worked. I still sometimes watch what he's doing when he's on the computer, and yes, he still teaches me things every now and then. ::

 

[Newtype]

I had a few encounters at skool with computers when I was 10. I seriously thought that you could tell the computer to make you a sandwich and the sandwich would come out of the CD drive, only because I had seen it in a commercial some time before. I am now a computer science student in university. I have come a long way... but one day I will invent a program that makes you a sandwich.

 

[Hoppy]

In 1980 my father bought an Apple II.I was an expert on Snake Byte.

And then if I remember right, AT, XT, 286, 386, 486, Pentium etc.

At present between the workshop and the house we ran 10 systems, all in daily use, and all in need of an upgrade.

My father used to work for IBM and worked on punch card machines and the first computers.

 

[Silatuyok]

When I was little (maybe 6-ish?) my aunt bought us a Commodore 64 and an IBM Compatible. I used them to play Frogger, Spy vs Spy, Space Taxi, and many more totally awesome games.

 

[Aletheia]

My mother used to bring punch cards home from work for my brother and I to draw on. Those and that dot matrix printer paper with the holes all down the side.

The first home computer I saw was a BBC Micro belonging to a friend of my father and was serious hobbyist only. My parents bought a Commodore 64 not long after that. The 64 referred to it's 64 kilobytes of RAM (my current machine has almost a million times that much, along with 3000 times the clock speed, and it's not even all that flash). If we wanted to play Caterpillar we had to load it from cassette tape.

In my last year of high school my boyfriend and I would play Civilization on his father's Amiga. It loaded from floppy disks yay! (still no hard drive though).

Architecture School had I'm not sure what brand of computers running CAD software (likely Apples). There was a very sophisticated rendering programme running on a very high end machine that could cope with ambient lighting and so on. If you wanted it to render an image, one static image, you'd leave it running overnight.

And then various machines running various flavours of Unix while I was studying CS. I first saw the web in 1995 via Mosaic. It was still largely seen as a tool for scientists or even just a curiosity. And then various machines running various flavours of Unix while I was working, although by the time I got to California people were starting to run Windows on their desktops if not on the development machines.

I bought my first computer at the age of 26.

 

[MikeyC]

Frogger

Hell yeah!