QOTD #72: When did you use your first computer? *poll*

How old were you when you used a computer for the first time?
Do you remember the experience?

 

I first used a computer in 1983 or 1984, in kindergarten. I went to a small town school that was K-12. I remember a couple of high school kids wheeling a cart down to our class room with a computer on it. Probably the first PC I'd ever seen? Might've been a Tandy of some sort, though I can't be certain. I think it was a gray box with the keyboard part of the computer. IIRC, we all got a few minutes to mess around with a game, maybe worm.

The summer before 4th grade we moved to a larger town and I was accepted at a magnet school that had various experimental and accelerated learning techniques in use. One of those was three separate computer labs, each with enough computers for the entire class to be working on computers at the same time. That would've been 1987-88. One lab was Apple PCs, one was IBMs, and the other was Radio Shack or Tandy computers. I remember we did "touch typing", teaching us the proper form to type through various games. That was also my first exposure to the awesomest 80s school computer game ever, Oregon Trail! We did worm/snake on the RS/Tandy computers too. All in all it was fairly unique in our area for students to get that much computer time.

I think we got our first "real" PC at home when I was maybe 13? Very early 90s, and it was a 286 from Radio Shack.

 

I was 15
But this was back in 1983

Computers didn't have hard drives back then. (TRS-80 model III ~$5000 for a 45KB model or more than 10K in today's money)
You had to load every thing into memory by REAL floppy, unless you paid out big chunks of dough for a 5MB HD peripheral ...the same size as the system...(~ $2500 or $6000 in current terms)
RAM was 4 KB default, expandable to 45KB...loading in order... (1 floppy each)
1. Operating System (TRSDOS)
2. Application (dBase)
3. Database (your fields)
4. Data

I learned to program in Basic in HS class and did my first database in dBase II
Created a DnD character storage DB with random stats generator in Basic.


Yep, I'm an old geek
Still can outpace you youngsters...

 

Highly questionable. Hopefully you're not still coding in BASIC at least.

I remember being terribly taken with the Commodore 64s the school library was equipped with in grade school. I'm young enough that having computers at school was expected but old enough that they still were treated as something sort of rare and exotic. I can recall spending time in the computer lab, where they would herd us all in and give us an opportunity to familiarize ourselves on them under close supervision. I remember the woman in charge of the computer lab yelling at me for typing too forcefully. I guess she'd rather hate me now for how I hammer away at my keyboard, but somehow I think her opinion isn't terribly relevant anymore.

I also remember learning to type on a device like this:



Presumably because the lab computers were too rare and valuable to be put to work teaching children how to navigate a keyboard.

When I was about 9 we got our first home computer. My mother was in university at the time and wanted to upgrade from her old electric typewriter. I recall quite a lot about that machine, mostly because I spent a lot of time learning as much as I could about it over the next few years. It was an IBM PS/2 386. 2 MB RAM, 40 MB hard drive, 2400 bps modem. We had a great big old dot matrix printer and it amused my mother quite a lot that she could print out black and white clipart to pin up around the house. It originally shipped with MS-DOS 4.0. That machine was responsible for teaching me the fundamentals of what I have turned into a career today.

I don't recall precisely what age I was when I first used a computer, and I don't recall what it was or what the circumstances were. I assume it must have been a school setting and very early in my life, maybe 5-6 years old. Suffice to say, whenever and however it occurred I was quite taken with the machine and have been ever since.

 

Nope, sorry to disappoint you. Of late, just for the past 6 months...Standard C, C#, ASP, Java, Java Script, XML, T-SQL, PL/SQL, PHP, Drupal, MS-DOS, VB, VBA and more (God knows how many versions and flavors)


But I still recall drips and drabs of Basic. How the hell I got into this shit, I don't know...oh yeah, I delivered pizza to a computer vendor...

 

We had a home Commodore 64 when I was young. I was probably about 5 the first time I remember using it on my own. From there, I took on my first Mac at 8, and my first PC arrived at 15 (gasp). That was late for growing up in the Silicon Forest. But I still outpaced most of the girls--and most everyone--as soon as I could. I built my own computer at 24! after tinkering considerably with other PCs. I'll never do anything else unless it's a laptop.

What has frustrated me throughout my relationship with computers is the sexism. The first time I reformatted my computer and installed a new OS, a dude showed up to try to do it for me (it was already done). Same with the first time I installed a hard drive. Dude offered after it was already done.

When it comes to hardware, I can handle myself.

 

I was 6, maybe 8?


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_f3uIzEIxo

 

I honestly can't recall the *first* time that I used a computer. I was pretty young. We had a game system before we had a real computer: Atari, and a TI something or another. I got to use those every once in a while, when my brother was feeling generous. I remember my dad and brother coming home from a computer show with an Apple IIe, and have many happy memories of learning how to do math quickly by using games on it. I have a smattering of memories of watching my brother write programs and being jealous that I couldn't type yet. My dad saw my interest, and my poor penmanship, and when I was 10 years old he got out his typewriter and put me to work with a typing book. Once I became proficient with the typewriter, they let me use the computer to write journal entries and the like. My dad and brother would go to some computer show once a month and would come home with things to make the computer work faster and better, new disk drives, new whatever... then once they came home with the pieces to build a 286, and they took over our kitchen table while they pieced it together themselves. I wished more than anything that I could help somehow, so they let me hand them the screwdriver and other silly tasks. I wasn't allowed to touch that one. That one was just for my brother. He played and played and worked with it in most of his spare time. Eventually he built a 386, which I was finally old enough to use. I played lemmings and a few other games. That computer had a word processor, too, which was faster and better than the IIe. Eventually our IIe started collecting dust. I would occasionally get out Kings Quest and other fun games, and I used the word processor for school assignments if someone else needed the other computer.

I do recall my first time using Windows. It was so different from the command line. I spent many hours with various tutorials, perfecting my use of the mouse and learning how to do spreadsheets and make pretty posters with the word processor... it was all pretty neat to me. I was hooked.

For my birthday a couple of years ago, I finally built my own computer. It was something that I had been wanting to do for a while, but I was always intimidated by the task. I thought that it would be too expensive or too challenging. I expressed interest to my husband, and he laughed about it. He helped me order a bunch of pieces and I put it together while he watched our baby and told me stories about computers he had built. It was fun.

 

Nerrrrrrrrrd!

 

Was there a choice? Our elementary school had Oregon Trail. We were required to play certain games for a certain time limit... looking back, computer time was a pointless excuse to give the teacher down time to grade papers.
--- merged: Apr 26, 2016 at 4:55 PM ---
Littlegirly has her own little PC laptop. It runs a children's version of Linux. She is 3. We've been messing with it together for a few hours a week since she was 2. She has finally gotten comfortable using the touch pad to navigate her way around the programs. She likes a math program that melts igloos when she gets the wrong answer, which reminds me of Math Blaster. She also really likes a drawing program. It's kinda neat, it has a bunch of "stickers" of birds that make accurate bird calls.

She gets to use Tt's tablet on evenings/weekends. She loves that thing. We're pretty picky about the games that we put on it for her.
There's also the WiiU. She loves playing Mario Kart. She almost always chooses to be Luigi, because "sometimes I like green."

 

Aw, c'mon. Let me have this. @ZombieSquirrel admitted to playing a computer game!

 

No. That was probably the most boring game of the late '80s. (But it doesn't surprise me that you were into that....)