How old were you when you first used a computer?

I used my first computer, an Apple III, back in the early to mid 80's. My Grandmother was a schoolteacher, so I had access to the school's computers and even got to take one home every summer. I recall playing games more than anything, especially Number Muncher.

 

I was 14 when I moved to a school where the physics teacher was a computer enthusiast. They had some sort of home-built minicomputer, maybe an IMSAI 8080, hooked up to 10 terminals and I was instantly hooked on programming.

And then Al Gore invented the Internet...

 

I was 51 when I first began using my own computer. I had a passing acquaintance with the computers at our school (I am a retired teacher) but it was evident that many of my students knew far more than I.

 

When I started work on computers the rooms were the size of 2 football pitches to house 3 computers and all the tape decks modems and tape machines. There was also a separate room for the card readers. All programs had to be typed (hole punched)onto these cards. To boot them up in the morning we had to go around switching the binary switches to the correct settings first. The programming language was fortran. When I deciced to get a PC at home a good few years later it was microsoft 3.1. It was also very handy to learn a lot of the DOS (it still can be useful now if you have some rubbish stuck on your disk that you want to get rid of and you can't through windows

 

Water Cooled

If it's not cooled by water it must be just a terminal!

That about says it, I started in 1968 and got my first PC(IBM) in 1981.

We old timers were afraid the PC was going to lower our productivity by 20%. We were wrong it lowered it by 50%,, well for a while anyway.

I worked mostly as a systems programmer until 1992 when i switched to Application development under MVS using DB2, IMS, PL/I, COBOL, and of course Assembler for specialized system routines.

Retired in 2002 and went to farming!!

 

I introduce to computers 40 years ago.
Then we had suitcases full of programming cards and you prayed that they were in order.

 

I started with computer (the big ones) 36 years ago reparing Mainframe from Burroughs. That was a long road to today.

At that time a BIG computer with a LOT of memory used to have 16 Kbytes!!! Actually my machinne to cook hamburger has 10 times that value.

Now I'm running my own business that, of course is connected to computer. My company develop and sales software applications.

Is good to can remember those days...

 

When I was 63, I was rapidly approaching retirement and had decided that I wouldn't try to use a computer until it was so user-friendly that, when I walked into the room, it would cheerfully say: "Hello, Boss. What can I do for you today?" Then I retired and started in a new direction as a consultant. That required research; and that made being able to use a computer absolutely necessary. So.....I took a deep breath and several "How To Use A Computer" courses (even learned a little about HTML and how to set up a web page!). That was at 64....and I never looked back.

 

Wow ! My first was Windows 95 when I was 18

 

The first computer I ever used was a Tandy TRS-80 that used 5-1/4" floppies. I ran VisiCalc for Spreadsheets and Scripsit word processing.

 

My first crack at a computer was a sophomore in high school in 1973. We had a terminal connected to a mainframe at the school district headquarters. We could type programs in in Basic. We stored the programs on punched paper rolls.

My friend wanted to try out the computer. I was going to show him the computer program I had written that played blackjack. (I was very proud of that program -- it took me three months to write.)

But my friend came in, ignored my instructions, sat down at the terminal, and typed in "what is my name?" The computer responded with "syntax error." He said, "stupid thing," and walked out.

So much for my hopeful idea that my computer expertise would make me popular at school. Instead, I quickly learned the concept of computer nerd.

Luckily, that did not stop me, and I've worked on computers ever since.

 

My first computer was a "lugable" Osborne. It had a 5" CRT and 2 5.25 floppy disk drives. The keyboard folded down from the suitcase like case. It weighed about 20 lb. I believe I ran dBase II, Wordstar, Supercalc, and other programs on it.

 

I was 19 when I first started working on the dedicated IBM Displaywriter and IBM's System 32 and System 36. Then I went to Wang (remember them), and onto the PC platform in 1984.

 

When did I first use a computer.

Depends on how you define computer. I was 30 years old before they had the first consumer computers. We used to program navigation and astronomy problems with the old hp 56 calculator ( who knows what they are?). I guess we should be asking what year. Especially when dealing with us old folks:

 

If you want to get technical about it, a slide rule might qualify as a computer. I can remember when some of us engineers used to go around with a slide rule case attached to our belts. "Real" computers needed their own special, air-conditioned rooms. (I guess that dates me, doesn't it.)

 

I'm on the far young end of the scale. I don't remember my exact age, but we had a comidore 64 with quantium-link on it, and I remember sitting on my moms lab as she was moderating a chat room that was playing a quiz game about popular movies or tv shows or something. In my memory the answer was ghost busters, but I don't remember the question.

I was quite short at the time, but I'm not sure if the age is <5 or 6-9, but I choose the later.

 

Yeh, slide rules were good for their day, you could calculate pretty quick. I guess the first programmable calculators like the HP and the TS were basically glorified number crunchers.
It's good to hear about all the old computers I had forgotten about. I guess we've come a long way thanks to DOS and Windows for us amateurs. IU never could quite handle COBOL FORTRAN and the like.

 

I was either 5 or maybe as old as 7. We had a Commodore 64. I grabbed the manual and taught myself how to program it to draw colored circles.

I spent a lot of time on that machine.

 

Early computers

In 1966 I had my first experience with computers in the Air Force. It was huge and had thousands of tubes! You know, tubes, those glass things that glow in the dark and use enormous amonts of power! Then years later was an IBM, Honeywell, Data General, some little known names and finally the IBM desktop PC around 1981/82. The world changed at that point as electronics got smaller and faster as time went on as the Intel 8080, 8088, Z80, CPU's etc began finding there way into peoples homes.
I bought a Radio Shack Color Computer for my son and a Radio Shack Model III for me. WOW 8k of memory. The first Hard Drive I had was a 8 meg monster that weighed about 7 pounds. Gee, what do I need with all that memory. Rocketing to the present I am using a 6 core with only a 32 bit operation system and 4 gig of memory and a 1T hard drive and need another
1T hard drive to handle all the photographic composits I do.
Anyhow, "you ain't seen nothin yet ". Breakthroughs are rapidly approaching that will make our present home systems look like the original PC's back in the 80's.

 

When I was 15 or 16 (~1970) at school there was an option for "computing" which sounded interesting so I signed up - an hour (maybe two?) once a week, filling out coding forms for FORTRAN in pencil and then waiting until next week to get the results back on line printer paper.
All rather different from pressing "make'n'run" (or whatever) nowadays and seeing results almost immediately - the need to wait a week before knowing whether the program would work placed a certain emphasis on getting the bugs out first ...and all under the gaze of a rather strict maths master If there was a bug you knew as soon as the output came back as it would be a h-u-g-e wodge of "core dump" instead! (cringe, embarrassment, cue hoots of derision from the rest of the class)
Even at the time FORTRAN semed tedious (from the little I've seen of COBOL it was even worse); it took until ~1991 before I had a PC of my own at home (Win3) - though I'd borrowed BBC-Bs quite often before that, when I'd had the need to work something out. But I never explored DOS's QBASIC much, because by that point I'd discovered I could run Borland C...