How did you get into computers?

Rym

So how did all of you get into computers? What was the first computer you used? Owned? pwn3d?

La Petit Mort

Damn, I don't remember when.

Rob From the Army

The first computer I ever remember in my house was my father's work laptop that he called a "Tandy" or something like that. This was something like 15 years ago. All I remember is that it had a word processor, and hang-man.

Alan

My parents bought a packard bell with windows 3.1 with an amaising 54mb ram!! I was hooked. Great shareware arcade games Asteroids, pong , and all the other fun games that would play on it. Just recently though it finnaly died when the powersupply burnt up and it caught fire. Pwnd by lightning.

Looked like this one and it is the same model.

Ametto

My first comp would be this huge laptop my father got from work. It was a two tone screen (blue and darker blue). The only thing I would do is play reader rabbit on it. I played until smoke came out of it.

Oro

I used the old Tandy, but I don't recall if we owned it or not. My mom had an old IBM at work with an amber display that I played Star Trek on. The first computer all to myself was a Commodore 64 and I saved my programs out to a generic audio casette. Hahaha. And I hooked the Commodore to the net with a 300 baud modem, later upgraded to 1200 baud - oooooh!

tuttle88

The first computer I ever used was when I was in reception at the age of 4.5 years. I don't know what it was but everyone got to use it for ten minutes every week. There was a board and if your name was on it you could play on the computer that day in play time. It was awesome, I don't rememer much but I do remember moving a turtle around. By "turtle" I mean a collection of green pixels on a black screen.

Now some of the childcare centres I work in have webcams in the room so the parents can log on at work and see their kids.

EsonLinji

The first computer my family had was a good old apple IIc. It had a glorious 128K ram, a mouse, and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. It didn't get replaced until 1996. All I can say is thank god for emulation.

Cremlian

Commodore 64/128 baby. Old schoolz. (well sorta, it's not like I had a computer with 2 kilobytes of Ram or something)

Alex

Commodore 64 hooked up to a tiny black-and-white TV. I learned the distinction between command-line and GUI interfaces on that machine, and played many a game from both 5 1/2 inch floppies (such as the Adventure Construction Set) and cassette tape (such as a dungeon-crawl game whose name I don't remember. Curse you, spiky-headed kobolds!).

Then, many years later, I worked at the local library just long enough to save the money needed to buy a beige PowerPC Mac, which I used through most of high school and my first year of college. That computer inspired the largest software purchase I ever made: $300 for a copy of a 3D modelling suite called Ray Dream Studio. That might sound silly now, but I regret nothing; I got at least as much enjoyment out of that modeller as any six computer games.

blast flame

My parents were fairly computer competent so I was young when first went on the computer. I think I played a "game" in which you made something out of a few premade parts. No goal, just making stuff for no reason.

Kiey

My friends in high school decided to start having LAN parties, and the first one I went to I helped build myself a computer, and that's how I really got into it. But I had always been into computers for the most part, used to always play around on my Apple IIe and the original Mac, then once I got a PC I actually remember reading the MS-DOS manual.

doinkies

My family got a Macintosh Performa computer as a Christmas gift from my grandparents (I forget the model...but the OS was System 7...and it was an all-in-one thing, no tower...), and I was around 6 or 7, and me and my sister would often doink around on it. We also had a CD-ROM drive that did NOT come with the computer, it was a separate thing, it was called "AppleCD". We had that computer for a while, and then my uncle gave an IBM ThinkPad laptop as a gift that ran Windows 95B. We first got on the Internet using that ThinkPad, with a local ISP.

crowe

My dad brought home a Compaq Luggable (I think...) when I was 4. It's screen was orange on black and it played Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and I have not come out of the rabbit hole since. (There's a lot more between now and then, such as the Apple ][es in elementary, the Packard Bell 486s, the first Windows install on my own, early internets through Compuserve, but most of that mirrors what Rym said in the show. It's eerie.)

Starfox

My mom got a Apple IIGS when I was real little. Before then I didn't know what a computer was. The only game I remember from it was this mouse-controlled shooter thing called Crystal Quest.

Kiey

Logowriter was the shit, I made this MST3K animation, where it constructed the room in front of the gear doors, then put in a spirte i made to look like Crow, and then it made this 2 sprite of Tom walk across to the table to a podium. It was cool, my teacher even let me keep the disk it was saved on to take home.

thaneofcawdor

The first PC-esque system I had was an Atari XEGS, which had almost no games except for Battlezone and Lode Runner. Then about '92 I got an Amiga 600, which absolutely rocked my world, the games were awesome (Dune 2, baby!), and I learned to program on that system. My first true PC was an IBM Aptiva P1 133, which was bought in late 1996. Not a bad system, and it definitely improved when I upped the RAM from 16 to 32mb.

Rym

Heh.. I find it interesting that, despite being interested in computers for much of my life and having chosen a career in them, my first computer came much later than most of yours. ^_~

Cremlian

Heh.. I find it interesting that, despite being interested in computers for much of my life and having chosen a career in them, my first computer came much later than most of yours. ^_~

Well Rym, that's probably because they were older then you ^_^ haha!

Oh wait.. that sucks.. that's not funny :-(

phoenix116

I started on a TI 99/4a. I got bored with playing "Hunt the Wumpus" so I started messing around with a programming book that my Dad gave me. My first program was one that I copied verbatim from that book. I believe it was called "Mr. Bojangles" and it showed a little guy dancing. From there I graduated to IBM PC Jr and learned to program in Basic. As far as dial-up, my roots go all the way back to 300 baud modems. I remember I was one of the first people in my area to run a BBS on a 9600 baud modem (US Robotics - a huge external modem bigger than many of today's printers). It seemed to take many years to get from 300 baud to 9600 baud, but after 9600 baud the technology accelerated quite a bit.

I remember Windows 3.11 and the concept of multitasking was quite intriguing. I believe I tried to install Windows 3.11 on an older machine (maybe a 286) and it didn't work too well. I don't think I used it until 486 -- but going from only using one program at a time to having multiple windows open (something the younger folks probably take for granted) was really a significant advancement.

In summary -- God, I'm old.

Jameskun

Phoenix, you are not the only one. The first computer I remember playing with was also a TI 99. My dad had it in the house and I would play with it, loading some programs off of standard cassette tapes and copying others verbatim from a couple of basic programming books he had. I would also get the chance when over at my uncle's to play on his TRS-80 Color Computer I (he had far more interesting game cartridges). One of my grandfathers had (should still have) a commodore 64 but I didn't get to play around with that as much. Eventually my uncle and my other grandfather both had 286 PC's, and while my grandfather was in Florida one winter he left his 286 in my care to play with.

My father brought home a couple interesting computers at times from work. The first were these two giant word-processors. They had no OS built in that I could remember, but they each had two giant 8" floppy drives. I had to put one disk into the first drive that would load the word processing program and the second I could store my file on. There was an impact printer that used a standard typewriter ball for printing out papers, it was slightly broken in that you had to put all your weight on one corner or one of the safety switches would trip off and stop the printer. The second was I think a xerox workstation of sorts. It had a GUI and mouse but ended up being useless without the network (and knowing what I know now about computers probably not a surprise). These were all out-dated machines at the time though, hence how he was able to borrow them from the office.

The first PC that my dad bought was a Gateway 2000 PC with a P133 and windows 95 that set my dad back almost $5000. It was some anniversary edition with a big 17" monitor and a matrox graphics card about the best you could buy at the time. That thing is still running to this day in my dad's basement and is still used.

The sad thing, was that when I left for collage, the TI-99 and the TRS-80 (that I grabbed from my uncle at some point after it stopped getting used) was in a box at my parents house. A few years back I was at home looking for it along with my atari and asked my mother where it went. She said she gave it away to goodwill!! >_< I don't think she realized at the time just how much money all that stuff was worth. I still hope when looking through the piles of junk at home that she didn't actually give it away and just set it somewhere else.

Apreche

I used Commodores at my cousin's houses, but they were pretty much only used for playing games.

Jameskun

Yeah, the commodore at my grandfathers was mainly used by my uncle (who is not much older then I am). My grandfather would go to a lot of auctions and would pick up random stuff, so the two of us would sit by that thing and go through boxes of floppy disks trying to see what they do. Did find some random adventure games and such and there was this midi music program we would play. Mostly my uncle liked to play a drag racing game until my grandfather had to ban him from it for getting mad when he lost and hitting the computer ;p. (My uncle was more the grease monkey and not so much the computer geek that I was turning into)

Jason

Did everybody else miss the joys of the 286 series? My first machine was a 286 16mhz with a 32 mb hard drive and 4 mb RAM. CGI four-color monitor included. Damn, that thing took up teh whole kitchen table. The sucker ran DOS 5.0 but with the graphic OS shell that was a pretty faithful precursor to the modern Windows file system.

Ah *sigh*
Now I kind of miss 1986.

Apreche

Did everybody else miss the joys of the 286 series? My first machine was a 286 16mhz with a 32 mb hard drive and 4 mb RAM. CGI four-color monitor included. Damn, that thing took up teh whole kitchen table. The sucker ran DOS 5.0 but with the graphic OS shell that was a pretty faithful precursor to the modern Windows file system.

Ah *sigh*
Now I kind of miss 1986.

Before I got a computer I spent a lot of time at my friend's house. He had a 386 which got upgraded quite a few times. Let me tell you, that thing was a DOS gaming mofo. It played everything up to Myst and Warcraft II. My 486 played all that and everything else too. I remember the first games it couldn't play were Quake 1 and Jedi Knight 1 because it didn't have the required "PCI Video Card". Heck, it didn't even have a PCI slot.

Jameskun

Not everybody. I got a lot of use out of my uncle's 286 playing golf games and such on it. He had that thing running for a long time, even eventually had windows 1.0 on it ;p

Jason

I worked on a couple of 386s in grade school - it could support Win 3.1, but almost every useful gaming application had to be either disk booted or run from DOS anyway. 3.1 was just about useless except for word processing, themes, a few music applications, and graphics (even those were shoddy).

I was glad to hear R&S mention LOGO because I can remember hooking the LEGOs up to that sucker and making them run mazes and obstacle courses. Then there was QBASIC and all the juicy Goodne$$ of simple variables. I learned more about algebra from farting around in QBASIC than from math class.

Apreche

I learned LOGO in Kindergarten. The next time I learned a programming language, I was in middle school. Know what language it was? PASCAL. Actually, I learned PASCAL and C simutaneously, but ph33r anyway.

tuttle88

I think my turtle thing must have been LOGO but we used it later in school and I thought it was different, but then I can barely remember tomorrow so I wouldn't trust me. Did anyone play Granny's Garden? That was my favourite game in year 3, these pairs of kids got kidnapped and you had to find them by solving puzzles. I remember it being so hard, but I played it later for old times sake and finished in 10 minutes.

HMTKSteve

This is tough...

The first computer in my house was prior to 1980. I know this much because my Dad purchased it and my parents got divorced in 1980...

I had (not in order):
Timex Sinclair
TI-99
TRS_80
C64
IBM XT 4.77 mhz (scratch built)
286
486-25SX
486-100DX
from there it gets too fuzzy as I've burned through many computers

Farragar

I first met a Dos 3.1 my dad got for his work, I must have been around four years old, and all I remember about it was it arriving in a large truck ^^
I also remember a couple games I played on it:

Castle of the Winds (still great) (freeware now)
Commander keen
Crystal caves
Space rocks 3D (My dad and I used to have high-score wars over this game )