How old were you when you first used a computer?

20-24 years old. I was in the Air Force and got my first taste of a tube system. Each drawer was 1 bit and there were floors of racks. If you stood in the middle of one isle and looked either way you couldn't see the end of the isle. Ah the good old days!

 

When I saw this thread reappear, I got to thinking that the first time I encountered a computer was in about 1959. I was an engineering apprentice at English Electric's Aviation division. It was called "DEUCE ", which I think stood for "Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine ". It took up abouy 2000 square feet of facility space, needed several tons of air conditioning and could do what a $20 scientific computer can do now.

Iy might be equally enlightening to poll the community as to "when" they first started work on computers. My main activity started in 1974 with Boeing's Crew Training organization. We worked with Honeywell DDp-series machines and one Singer-Link GP4.

It had to be programmed in binary and the results came back the same way. We apprentices had the job of converting the binary output into "regular" numbers (by hand!).

 

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair Z80 based computer. I built it from a kit and played with it for about a year or so until the Commodore Vic 20 became available. I was in my late 20's at the time.

 

I was about 20 years old when I become addict.