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I don't remember how old I was, but I remember what it was. My dad brought home an Apple IIc (purchased for the bargain price of $1,000), no hard drive, just a floppy in one side. I remember playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on it. I didn't like it that much, because the keyboard was one of those chicklet style with sticky keys. I'm still kinda picky about my keyboards.
My brother bought a VIC-20 soon after that, and I best remember saving my little animation programs to the tape drive. I remember writing a little program to make a stick figure run across the screen, and being so impressed with myself. I must have been early teens or tweens.
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Depends on what you'd call a computer. I played on an Atari 2600 (console game system) when I was 3. I was introduced to my sister's Atari 800 (computer with keyboard and tape drive) about a year later.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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Loderunner was cool. Someone mentioned Crystal Quest. I played that at my friend's house when I was a kid... and I actually have it and it still works in Classic. There was some website where you could download all kinds of old stuff like that, and I grabbed it.
Certainly the average first computer usage is dropping. I have a bunch of nephews and nieces who were all used computers from 1-4. I have no idea what affect it will have on their computer adoption later in life. Maybe the pendulum will swing the other way and they will reject computers completely. Haha, I doubt it though.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I think I was 5 about 1987 and my father brought home a 286 because my teacher informed him that I was helping the other kids use their computers properly in class. I used it mostly to play frogger and other childrens games that came out.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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September 1984: almost six years old. My parents bought a Macintosh (it was pre-classic, I guess). I remember a tutorial on how to use the mouse -- it involved getting to the center of a maze, where a wedge of swiss cheese awaited (prize for the mouse, of course).
The cat used to like to sit on top of the computer, where it was warm. My dad was concerned that the computer would overheat, so he bought a "chimney" -- an upside-down funnel that sat on top of the computer. Now my parents have a ceramic dragon that sits on top of the monitor with its neck craning down to look at the screen. Now they have a 6500, a G4, and two iBooks in their house.
Posts: 1785 | Registered: May 1999
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I remember seeing my first computer when I was about 6 or 7 in my friend's garage. It was his dad's, and I thought it was cool. Around that time, my dad brought home an Apple IIe for us to use. (I think my friend's dad's comp was a Commodore or something. It wasn't an Apple.)
Another thing I remember is that during that summer I took a summer school class in computers, which were Apple IIes. As I recall, I was one of two girls in the class. We sat by each other. Our teacher was a woman, and I remember her taking an interest in making sure we got the procedure of turning the computer on and off and using it. She kept wanting to make sure we weren't scared of the computer. I don't know how the other little girl was, but I had no problems. I even remember the steps. I didn't really use any other type of computer for years after that.
When I started at my local community college, one of the requirements was taking an introductory computer course. For some reason I was so apprehensive that I put it off for an entire semester. When I finally took the course, I was surprised at how easy a time I had working with them - my first PCs. In fact, those steps I had learned so long ago for my Apple IIe, with its bootable disk based operating system, helped me to visualize the inner workings of the DOS operating system. Good memories.
Oh, did anybody ever use those computer programs in the back of the 3-2-1 Contact magazines? I remember they used to have them for the Apple II series and then one day they switched to DOS. I would have fun typing those in and modifying them.
Posts: 822 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:My daughter has already used our computer. She's 2.
Wow, that's really young!
Has anyone heard or seen any recent technological development and been impressed by it? The last bit that had me interested was that female android and that "mech" suit they had in Japan (I think).
I'm still holding out for hovercars though. I mean, it's the year 2000, I was promised hovercars by then. Where are my hovercars!?
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Grisha's son types ims to me often. He just turned 1. His ims say things like zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzwl/ or iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii but he recognizes his name when I type "Hi Aaron!" because he will point to it.
My niece Mary loved a Micky Mouse computer game when she was two. She learned her alphabet from it, and would press the K key over and over because she loved it when the kitty peeked out and mewed. Later, when she could hold a pencil and move it around, when she was about three, she wrote by making writey-looking motions with the pencil on a page, then looking at what she wrote and deciding which letter it most resembled. I've never seen anyone learn to write like that before.
I think age one or two will be the standard age for first exposure to computers in the future. I would have been exposed to them sooner myself, had they existed in readily-available form back then. My dad worked with computers in the 60s, but I never played with them then. They were room-sized in those days, and too delicate and expensive to allow children to mess with.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I was seven years old, and it was 1982.
I was born in the same year as Tom, but I think it was 1984 when my dad brought one of these home from work. So I guess I was 9 or 10. (Apparently he had to be talked into taking it, which is ironic considering he eventually wrote articles for multiple computer magazines, and three computer books. But that was much later.)
I still remember the game that came with the computer. With Compaq briefcases . . .
And the excitement when we finally got a computer with a COLOR monitor! (That didn't happen until computer #3 or 4.)
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I used to write programs on the TRS-80, which used a black and white tv as the monitor, and a cassette tape recorder to store the programs.
Man, that was fun. I still miss that a little bit. That was kindergarten, so however old you are then.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I'm 21, and we had a computer in the house since I could remember, as my parents are publishers, and at they time they were running a design company out of the house.
The first I can remember was the Macintosh 2.0, but we also got a mac 2 se, which was an early split design, which my parents bought with a very large (so it seemed at the time) screen. We actually got online in about 1994 with an 8-bod modem, which was just the most pointless thing ever, but fun for a 9 year old.
By the time we bought a Power Macintosh performa 6330, the computer revolution was on the way, and we had our first net browser (netscape). By 2002, everyone in the family had a computer except my dad, and now he has one as well.
I remember raving to my family about this new thing that was going to come out in 2003 called "itunes." I swore it was going to be amazing, and I looked forward to the day it was released. They all of course, forgot that I had discovered it several years before they jumped on board (my mom JUST got itunes and an ipod, and my dad still won't look at it, because he is a copyright lawyer and refuses to believe that they actually SELL music online now).
Actually I always had an instinct for the new hot thing- I was saying the ipod would be huge way back when I first heard about it, and I was telling people about blue tooth and camera phones years before they were commonplace. I also predicted the DVD revolution, (which didn't stop my parents from buying a tape player in the late 90s), and then made the pronouncement to my friends and family that Ipods would soon come with video, to which they scoffed loudly. (It was released about 6 weeks later).
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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They weren't PC's, but, I remember the (what ever we used to call geeks) running around campus with shoe boxes full of cards under their arms. Twice I saw a box dropped and the guy (it was always a guy) burst into tears. I took a stastics class in grad school. We had some work to do with 8 factor regression analisis. Each student had 2 hours of computer time on the University's main frame, paid for as part of the class fee. That wasn't enough time to finish the assignments. So, we pooled time to finish. The goal, as I remember, was to find a hot partner to pool time with! I lost.
Posts: 1167 | Registered: Oct 2005
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We've always had computers around. My dad apparently used to lug home the PET to play with every weekend from the school where he worked, but he got a Commodore 64 just after I was born (in 82) and a 128 when it was released a few years later, so I mostly remember those. I could write Commodore programs before I started kindergarten. I also remember many hours playing Jumpman, Mission: Impossible, and various other games. I miss the old Commodore.
The cable TV company here actually still uses a Commodore 64 for the local news channel on TV. My sister had to re-learn how to program it when she started working there last year. I find this hilarious.
Posts: 624 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Seriously! Isn't that hilarious? Channel... sixty-something? on TV here is just a blue Commodore screen with a series of typed community announcements that change every fifteen seconds or so, and no sound.
And my dad offered several times to update it for them, but the boss lady knows how to program the Commodore, so doesn't want to change it. Her philosophy is very "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I think their other office computers are a little more up to date... by which I mean running things in DOS mode.
Posts: 624 | Registered: Mar 2005
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we had an Apple II in the house since around when I was born (82) and I was a huge fan of loderunner as well as moon rover at the time. we also had Apples of some sort in gradeschool which I loved playing the original Oregon Trail on.
The best recollection of archaic computer tech that I have however is the combination of cobol punch cards my dad had that we used as scratch paper, as well as the tape drive we had that was about 12 x 18" if I remmeber correctly.
Posts: 1038 | Registered: Feb 2006
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My history of computers has been defined by the games I've played.
We had an Apple Macintosh when I was growing up back in 1992/93--I was about four or five when I first had fun with it. Kid Pix rocked, I can tell you.
Then I met Glider Pro, followed by Oregon Trail and this really bizarre puzzle game called Heaven & Earth. I can remember a few Humungous Entertainment titles scattered around in there.
My final favorite Mac game had to be this one bizarre space shooter called Shadowwraith. It placed you in a winding, abstract maze while you blasted enemy after enemy away with such weapons as magnum grenades and .50 caliber machine guns. And it had great music tracks, too.
But I first hooked up with a PC when my dad bought one for the family in 1998--a Dell with WIN98. It came with a couple demos: one for Descent: Freespace, and another for an arcade shooter called Expendable. Kind of heavy stuff for a 10-year-old!
I met Roller Coaster Tycoon shortly thereafter, followed by Starcraft in 2000.
Posts: 292 | Registered: Jun 2006
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Depends on what you count as "a computer" (as someone else said.
I didn't really have any encounters with them at all until after high school (there was rumors of ONE "computer" in a special, small, dark room at the school that only a couple these geeky guys at school were allowed to mess with because 'none of the rest of you would understand it')
Worked typesetting machines, though, by age 20, that showed you like one line of type at a time as you typed, then spit it all out in a nice column to paste in the newspaper layout. Then worked on some mainframe systems.
But probably didn't get really into personal computing until my mid-20s or later. Didn't own a computer in my own home until I was mid-30s. Got my degree in computers when I hit age 40.
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I don't remember the name of the thing I worked on. It was the size of a typewriter and had specific function keys. I don't think it had a set of alphabetic keys. IIRC you had the ability to enter 512 commands. In order to perform a loop you had to use a command to place a "flag," so for example, you could enter
Call 0 flag 01 + 1 enter print 01 jump 01
This program would print numbers from 1 until the computer ran out of memory. It was also my introduction to the infinite loop. You had to turn off the computer in order to stop it.
If you wanted to print words you had to create letters out of 1s and 8s, like ascii art.
The year was 1976, and I was 11.
Later in the same year I ran a program on an IBM thing. I think it was called a "system 10." It asked my name and then printed out a bunch of "Hello Glenn! How are you, Glenn?" kind of call and response stuff.
A couple of years later we got TRS-80's (black and white) and I wrote a program in BASIC to calculate pi that increased in accuracy as you increased the number of sides in the regular polygon that was intended to approximate a circle. I don't remember if I had any way to determine how many digits were within spec.
It was probably 1980 before a friend of mine actually owned a TRS-80 color computer. That was my first experience with games. There was one kind of like ZORK, but I can't remember the name.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I'm 24 now and I first used a computer when I was... about 6 I think.
My Dad wrote my a birthday program for my 7th birthday that I thought was *amazing*. It sung (well, blipped) happy birthday to me, and my name appeared on the screen!
(I remember the program was saved on an old floppy - the ones that actually were floppy - and I replayed it for at least a year after my birthday. I was very impressed.)
I didn't get into games until I was 10 or 11 - and then it was Police Quest all the way!
I did get introduced to the internet relatively early (relatively because I'm a whipper-snapper) and remember having a hotmail account in late '96 - so only a few months after it was launched. I was using it to email home (I was on exchange to South Africa) and having to explain this concept of web-based email to people.
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I also remember many hours playing Jumpman, Mission: Impossible, and various other games. I miss the old Commodore.
