Do you remember your first time with computers?
 

Let's remember how "stupid" or "noobish" WE were when we started use any computer device. As for me i got computer only at highschool age so it won't be anything exciting since by that time people start think before do stuff but yes before that we had DOS laptop for very short time with Norton Commander and i browsed to AntiVirus folder and though it is like medicine for computers. Also i remember i copied some game shortcuts from mothers work in floppy then brought to home to realize they don't work that way. :D I guess if we consider consoles(NES for example on Dandy) computers too aside from calculators then they would be first contact for me and since games require you to think to advance next level i guess that is why i don't have any too stupid stories.

I remember my first time...1999 Win98.....there was a button to push on the computer...that must turn it on...sure enough, it did. I played around for hours, clicking on everything and exploring and experimenting....then it was time to go to bed. Hmmm...no "off" button....so I immediately thought "Try the opposite of what is logical", and clicked on the "On" button [EDIT: I meant "Start"- been so long since I used Win-D'ohs, I forgot what it was called!]...and there was the option to shut down! I knew from that point on, that I'd get along well with computers...but it wasn't until 2010 when I switched to Linux that I started to enjoy them.

It was in high school. An HP mainframe, we used a 300 baud acoustic coupled MODEM connected to a teletype machine.

apple II 's in high school in the 80`s
Amigas were fun
vic 20's and commodore 64's with 128 and 256 k ram ( hand made cards )
a trs80- hand held in 1990

Apple IIe in first grade.

Commodore 64 in the early '80s, but I didn't do much with it and eventually gave it to my daughter.

Then a DOS class in the late '80s when the cat's meow was an IBM-compatible with two floppy drives and the only employees at my company who had computers, aside from the systems folks, were secretaries.

Then a 286 I scrounged at work. That's when I started to really learn DOS.

The first computer I owned for home use was a Tandy 386 with DOS 5.x, Windows 3.1, and an 80 gigs of HDD which I double-spaced, and a 2400 baud modem.

my first exposure to computers was an ibm pc/xt with a 5.25 inch hard drive
then apple IIs at school (one of my first experiences with programming a computer was to write so called 'time bomb' programs on the apple II that after a delay would cause the computer to beep endlessly, fun fun.

Sinclair ZX81 around 1984 and soon after that ZX Spectrum.

Wrote about it in the first exciting ( :rolleyes: ) episode of my LQ blog.

Yeah. We had a cigarette afterwards.

The first I ever had access to was a CP/M thing with 8-inch floppy disks. Anyone remember how to use pip?

The first I ever had all to myself was the IBM PC of 1981, with a deluxe configuration: 2 floppies, colour monitor, 512KB RAM, 10MB HD (in a separate box — no room in the piza case!), and dot-matrix printer. And I had a whole shelf of manuals to read. GWBasic, Wordstar, Lotus123, DBase, backing up on floppies ... I don't think I want to go back!

On the one hand, I wish I'd developed an interest in computers a lot earlier than I did.
On the other, I think I am lucky that I only had about a couple of years with Windows before I discovered Linux, not enough time to get brainwashed into doing things "the Windows way".

It was 1969, and "personal" computers would not be invented for another ten years. I was in elementary school, thumbing the Ci-Cz volume of World Book Encyclopedia until, to this very day, it opens on its own accord to those pages.

Years later, BYTE Magazine came out and I pored over every issue, getting most of my practical know-how from "Professor (Carl) Helmers." I still have a copy of the Popular Electronics (or was it Radio-Electronics?) that described the first personal computer, based on the Intel 8008. (As in, "eight thousand eight," not "eighty.") I coveted the thing, but it would not be for another forty years that I found a way to get my hands on one.

While I sincerely appreciate those of you who "grew up with (personal) computers," I also know that I just can't quite explain to you how ... "you missed it." :D

It was the most "interesting times," with magazines like Creative Computing, and when the title of a certain magazine was, quite unabashedly, Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia. And nobody thought anything of it. Some of the most brilliant people I ever met were in my high school.

It happened. Once. And I don't think it will ever happen again.

This is one of the reasons why I always wanted to be born 20-25 years earlier. When things that matter were happening I wasn't born yet or was too young to remember/experience them.

My first experience was a commodore 64 - putting audio cassette tapes in to play golf, and an airplane game... jezzball jazz rabbit I think with a cartridge..? Idk, I was very young... I wish I could say we had a smoke when I was done...

The first computer experience I can recall is me constantly bugging my parents to let me use Kid Pix (early to mid 90s). That and playing Warcraft 2 on an old Hewlett-Packard running some win95 or earlier version of Windows (had to type gowin to start windows, IIRC).

Good times.

I was in 6th grade I think, in the early 2000s when my school switched all its old PowerPC-era computers over to the new iMacs (the colorful box style without a 3.5" floopy drive). This is when I first really got deep into computers and technology. Sadly I didn't get my own computer til I was 15 or 16, and that was an 800 mhz machine running Windows ME.

old computers
 

pip goes like this :
pip A:=B:*.*
pip C:=*.com
ON SOME DEC system pip could do lots of things
pip /li does a full directory listing
pip /de will delete "filename"
etc

None of you can have my card-saw. I'm a proud member of the "I dropped an entire box" club. I can attest that you really don't need more than 80 columns to do anything, and that the holes make great confetti as long as you don't inhale 'em.

My first experience on a computer was in my pre-algebra class in 7th grade, on an Apple IIc, in the mid-80's. The math programs were pretty lame, but I had to stick around after school a bit to walk my little brother home from the elementary school across the street, and my teacher would let me hang out and play Karateka, and some car driving game whose name escapes me, while I waited.

The first one I ever owned was 386/DX-40, which was a scream machine for its day.

There's a lot of great stories here. :)

I was pretty young when I started out on PCs, mostly because my mother was in college for business systems administration or something like that when I was a kid. My earliest memory of the PC was when my mom brought home our first PC (I was around 4 or 5 years old). She showed DOS to me and explained that using a certain kind of language you could "talk" to the PC and tell it to do various things. I was mystified and impressed and immediately wanted to take the thing apart to see how it worked. Of course she wasn't too crazy about that idea... hehehe.

We bought a Dell xps when I was either 9 or 10. It was running windows me. I remember it always bluescreened after basic tasks. We used AOL as our ISP, and I sincerely believed that that was the only Internet in existence. I had an email address set up with AOL 4kO (4 kidz only) and yes, It was spelled like that. I couldn't do anything except IM my grandma, so it wasn't that interesting to me. We all thought that there was a certain sequence of opening programs that would make the computer run faster. My dad would open word and photoshop first before he would open up tue AOL browser because we thought it made the internet go faster. I still remember what a pain it was to unplug the phone from the wall and stretch a phone cord across our kitchen and living room just to get on the Internet. Good times.

It was about 1972, dialup to a local university. An old teletype on punch tape that you made beforehand. You had to dial up, log on and load your BASIC program and either work or not log out. I think it cost like $30 a minute to use that computer.

Got a MEK6800D2 in 1978 (yes, I'm old).
6800 processor running 0.614MHz. Big 512 bytes RAM. Program from hex keyboard. Taught myself assembler (which I then had to assemble by hand). Still remember counting backwards in hex to do branch offsets. FF, FE, FD, FC,... Taught it to play music, with various algorithms (one note a time, but still fun). It was endlessly fascinating.

A year or so later, found an article in Byte magazine - play lunar lander on a 6800 with an oscilloscope for a display. So I built myself a 1K by 8 memory board and put a couple 8 bit d/a converters on a perfboard, got a scope and played a vector graphics version of lunar lander. Played a lot with vector graphics for a while.

Led me into a career as an embedded systems developer, which looked like it had a great future. By the late 1990's, it was a dying industry. That led me in other directions (web dev, databases, servers, etc), but nothing as satisfying as that first machine.

My father worked in a bank when I was young. They upgraded their machines and nobody knew how to use a computer at that time, so my father got them. This was in late 80ties or something. I think it was a 8086 but I'm not sure as I was only 4-5 at the time. I hardly used it (Duh, I couldn't even read my native language). It had no harddrive but two floppy drives. It's still in my fathers basement, but it isn't working any more.

We got a 80286 and 80386 later on with a huge (both physical and in capacity) harddrive of 5MB. I used to play around with QBasic when I was ~8(?) years old and eventually changed to batch-scripts. It was quite fun. Unfortunately I was introduced to IRC when I was like 12 years old, so my interested changed from programming to system administration. (Unfortunately not linux). I tried C++ but failed miserably as it's easiness couldn't compare to mIRC scripting. I still regret my impatience.

I Started using Suse and Red hat in 1998/1999 but gave up after a few weeks as I couldn't get my modem working. Started with Slackware in 2002 and haven't looked back. :)

I was a self employed business owner and became interested in computers about 20 years ago out of necessity I bought a used pentium 60 with 16 meg of ram. It used windows 95 and after I loaded Quick Books it would freeze every time I tried to work. Those were the days when they said "backup your work often" they meant it. I finally upgraded to 64 meg of ram and then the computer became bearable for a couple of years.

yeah, i remember reading some ms-dos books and makin .bat files which fucked up the computer(286 or 386, dont remember), that was when i was something like 12 yrs old, im 37 now and still noobish :p

i have forgotten everything about ms-dos since, linux/unix ftw.

First time I used a PC was when I was a baby. Yes, I was a noobie. :)
24 now. So I guess I was acquainted with computers for about 22 years... Something like that...

my frist computer is olivetti
windows 3.2 / 95 /98
small hard disk, small memory

generics array