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Thread title says it all. How old were you when you had your "first contact" of sorts with a computer? What was it like for you?
I was five years old when I first used a computer and I was simply amazed by it. Video games are what drew me to computers initially, but as I've grown up my love for video games has faded a bit but my interest in computers has only increased.
In addition, I have noticed lately that I have never been as amazed by technology as I was when I was first introduced to computers. There has been such a large amount of technological progress made since then and yet I have not even come close to being impressed. We went from tapes to CD's to MP3's and all the while my only thoughts were "oh, I guess I need to buy a CD player if I want to get more music now". The internet itself has grown to an amazing level of commercialism. What used to be a novelty when I was 12 has grown into something that everyone is familiar with and has essentially become part of everyday life.
I just think it's really weird how I throughout all these major developments I haven't even considered just how big they were, I've always just taken them for granted and accepted them as part of daily life.
Does anyone continue to be fazed less and less by technology just like me or do you marvel at these major developments as they present themselves in your lives? It's just one of those things I always find myself wondering about and finally decided to ask people to see if it's just me or if it's a more widespread phenomenon.
Posts: 459 | Registered: Mar 2005
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One should state how old they are now as well.
I'm 25, and first used a computer when I was 7. One of those first home based ones where computer games were stored on cassette tapes.
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I was 5. It was the school's computer lab. But I didn't want to go that year because I was afraid of the computer teacher. I faked a headache every week, and finally my kindergarten teacher noticed, and called my mom in, and when I broke down crying and told the truth, my teacher said that I could stay and have double free time instead. So I didn't have regular contact with a computer until I was 6, and then when I was 7 my dad got our first pc. I'm 23 now.
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I am almost 30, and I was 8 when I encountered my first computer. I wrote a program in BASIC to make a dot blink on and off, and to create a picture that was an astonishing 25 x 25 pixels.
This was my first and last foray into programming.
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The first PC I used was a Mac 512K. I was probably 4-5 years old when my dad bought it. I continued using it through my Freshman year at college (1995). My sister related that when she was a Freshman (1992) she had seen one featured in a "technological archaeology" exhibit featuring "ancient" computer technology; then she went back to her dorm and wrote a term paper on one.
My favorite game for the 512K was Loderunner.
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We had a Tandy 1000 DOS based computer. Has to put in the 5 ¼ inch disks to boot and then each time you wanted to run something. Not much memory and no hard drive. It didn’t do too much, but it was neat to try any write programs in Basic and see what you could do. I remember this program that you could write that would draw an outline of the Statue of Liberty and play the National Anthem. I was in elementary school. So I guess that was early 80’s.
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My first was a TRS-80, purchased in 1978. I'd have been 7 at the time. 4 K of RAM (later upgraded to 8, and then 16 K) and a cassette drive for data storage.
Stephan, what was your machine?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I was 5 or 6 when I first used a computer. It was an old IBM PC running DOS. I played Commander Keen and the Hoyle (I think that was the name) card games. Man, it's been a really long time since then. *sigh* Where does the time go?
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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I was about 48. My friend was bragging that his daughter had something called a "home page". When I asked what that was, he offered to show it to me. We went to her room and he directed me through some entry activities. Then we waited. I grabbed a book off her shelf and read three chapters. Then his daughters picture appeared on the screen. I asked what good that was and he discribed "links" to all her favorite web sites. I clicked on one and read three more chapters in the book. The book wasn't holding my interest so he showed me how to turn the machine off and we went downstairs to barbercue. I had computers in my office at that time but they were not PC.s, they were attached to a "mini" frame sperry. I was not impressed with my first PC.
Posts: 1167 | Registered: Oct 2005
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I don't know when it was, sometime between 2 and 7, because I know where I lived, not how old I was. It was an Apple 2c and it was freaking cool. I don't know if that was the computer where we got to play the first Kings Quest or if that was a later computer. Good game.
Oh yeah, I'm 23.
*Tear* I remember the old girl like it was yesterday...
Posts: 2596 | Registered: Jan 2006
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I was 14 before I managed to get a real computer into the house. (I was raised by rednecks).
Before that we had a colecovision (imagine a console game with 3 games and they were all variations of Pong) and a Telex machine (yellow paper tape anyone?)
I was 10 the first time I touched a "real" computer. It was a TI.
quote:Originally posted by Noemon: My first was a TRS-80, purchased in 1978. I'd have been 7 at the time. 4 K of RAM (later upgraded to 8, and then 16 K) and a cassette drive for data storage.
Stephan, what was your machine?
I couldn't tell you, and I think I was even younger then 8. I recall it having a controller I was able to plug into my Atari 2600 when that controller broke. The controller had a joystick at the top, two buttons on the sides, and a number pad.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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I was 16 or 17. My father (who did not live with us) owned a Radio Shack PC. We played a Star Trek game on it. No graphics, just dots and *s on the screen. This was in the late '70's (sorry I really can't pinpoint it better than that) and NOBODY had home computers.
My ex and I bought our first computer in 1982. It was a Texas Instruments. Since then, I've always had access to at least one computer, every day.
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Geez, it is hard for me to remember. It was probably in 1982 or early 1983, so I would have been 7. I am 30 now.
Posts: 264 | Registered: Nov 2005
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If my young memory is correct, my first contact with a computer was in my dad's classroom. He had an early Apple computer. I vaguely remember playing some game with a rabbit and a maze. Whenever the rabbit ran into a wall, he would stop, cross his arms, and tap his foot in exasperation. Since I was only about 5 or 6 years old at this point, I don't remember much. I Only used that computer a couple of times, so aside from the rabbit game, it was entirely forgettable.
My grandpa tried to hook us with computer lessons on a Tandy 1000EX, but failed. We resisted falling for the computer revolution until he passed away and we inherited ye olde Tandy. We still have that computer in the basement, and last I checked, it ran fine.
Hmmm. Probably 11 or 12 (1981 or 82), most likely the Commodore64.
----
Edited to add: Aha, I'd just turned 12 (I'm now 36). My brother insisted on going to the mall to see it.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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5th grade, 10 years old, TRS-80 model I level 1 (you thought dial-up was slow? Try CLOAD). Though two years before my 3rd grade teacher had something called a "System 80," which was used in part to teach French. I don't know that it qualifies as a personal computer.
The first computer we owned was a Sanyo MBC-1000 (with optional second external 5-1/2" floppy drive, of course). But I more often used my friend Paul's TRS-80 level II or Altos CP/M machine.
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: The first PC I used was a Mac 512K. I was probably 4-5 years old when my dad bought it.
That was almost exactly my experience -- not the rest of your post, just this sentence. My games of choice were Dark Castle, Brickles, Dungeon of Doom (which I finally finished recently, but on my G5 tower), Crystal Quest, and Moriarty's Revenge.
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Oooh, Crystal Quest! I distinctly remember how cool the color version was after playing B&W for so long.
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I'm 20, and I was 4, my mom was in a computer Ed class and I got sat in the lab one day with Turtle, I forget what it was other than the arrow keys.
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I guess it was about 1990. So, I lied on my age, I was only 46. I do remember that the friend lived in Canyon Country CA, which no longer exists. It's Santa Clarita now.
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I was 8 or 9, and it was a Hewlett Packard of some variety. My parents got me one of my own when I was...12? I think. I'm 22 now.
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quote:Originally posted by twinky: Dungeon of Doom (which I finally finished recently, but on my G5 tower)
Was there some sort of orb? I remember you had to fight through like 25 levels and then fight back to the beginning. Chain mail, plate armor, paladin armor, broadsword, battleaxe...ah, the memories. Those scrolls! Those were awesome. And schweinhunds. Hah!
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I was between 5-7. My father brought one for Christmas and hid it in the storeroom. I remember it being very exciting- it was a 286. By the time I was nine we had two or three computers, one of them a 486. It must have been about 1992?
As far as I know, I was the first of my friends to have a computer in the house.
I'm twenty now and we have *counts* eight-ish in various states of use.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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My first memory of a computer is about 3 years old (which is as far back as my memory goes, so I probably was around them before then). It was an Apple+ I inherited from my university professor parents. I used to play missile command and paratrooper on it (I loved paratrooper cause it opened with The Ride of the Valkries ). Some time around 7 or 8 I upgraded to a IIVX which I used for some of Bungie's first games Pathways into Darkness and Marathon. It was right about then I decided I should learn to code
And I'll be... good god... 20 in a month. Yeah yeah, I know most of you are older than that, but it feels old for me. I'm definately not ready to be in my twenties.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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I think it was in 1987 (or '86). My cousin had a Commodore 64. He must have had 300 games on floppy disc. Most of the time we played Gianna Sisters and Quest of Tyres. Oh, and I'll be 27 next month. (Hey, Alcon: which day? )
Posts: 262 | Registered: Feb 2006
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My first computer was the PowerBook I bought six months ago. You really can't call the things before that computers, back in the dark days of Gates and Windows... I vaguely recall a series of massive gray boxes, each worse than the last, being updated with a more hole filled OS and a shinny new series of viri.
I'm only 15, so I've grown up with computers, so I never really had a moment were I was just amazed by the technology, although there have been lots of little individual moments.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Oct 2005
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I am 27 and I was 7 years old. We had a Tandy EX1000, and I remember playing a text-only Star Trek game. It had a little map with coordinates and ships were marked by X's and other symbols. I always remember that dang Kelvin Doomsday Machine blasting across the screen and praying I wasn't in its path.
I loved that game.
Posts: 684 | Registered: Aug 2001
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This is an interesting thread... Anyway, I'm 16 now, I was about 6 I think I first used a computer, at school. They had this program thing called Type to Learn that taught us how to type, and as a result I can type about twice as fast as my mom, even though technically she's been doing it for much longer than I have. Kinda scary, things you can learn what you start that young... I actually remember the first time I sent an email, I was 11.
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I am 16, and I was like 5 probably. I don't remember ever not being able to use one. I used to just play crappy games like Play House and some Loony Toons game. The first time I went on the internet I was 8. I was all excited. But my access was extremely limited. I really couldn't do anything on it.
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Dude, Alcon you have the same birthday as my mom, obviously she's quite a bit older, being my mom and all.
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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It was around 1990, I was 29. My first PC experience was with an IBM 386, and we used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. I had worked with Wangs at that job prior to that, but they were switching to PCs.
Before that my computer experience was Wang, of course, and those glorified electric typewriters with a tiny scrolling screen (can't remember what they were called - I don't care if you call me old. )
I bought my own first computer when I was 35, and my daughters were 2 1/2 years and 3 months old. So, they've had computer exposure from very young ages. I'm currently on my fourth personally owned computer and we still have two of the others. We're going to give away the HP Pavilion that is about 6 years old, and the other Compaq is 1 year old. This one is a Compaq laptop and I'm very happy with it. Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Did anyone else ever use the PET computers, by Commadore, I think? we had them at my elementary school. We were one of the first schools to get a grant for computers in the Detroit area, and I was really good at them. Sometime in 3rd grade, so I was about 8-9.
I had to choose between computers and music in Middle School though, because you could only use the computers if you were in the classes for them, and the classes were the same periods as Band and Choir.
I chose music.
The first home computer I ever used was an Apple IIe, and right about the same time the Commodore 61. Both belonged to friends though. My family never had one.
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My first programming experience was in 1977 on an HP 2000 Basic interpreter, when I was 19. There was no monitor, only a dot matrix printer. It was sort of like a typewriter. When you typed in a line of code, it printed the line on the printer. I was enthralled, and changed my major to Computer Engineering for a while.
Then I did Fortran and Cobol by submitting card decks and running batch jobs and waiting for printouts. It was quite interesting. We didn't have but 2 monitors in our computer room at the time. They were always taken.
My dad brought home an 8086 based PC with two floppy drives and no hard disk some time around 1981. I loved it. I remember doing Basic programming on the thing. One morning I started messing with it around 7am and got so engrossed that I forgot the passage of time, came back to myself about midnight, and realized I had forgotten to eat or drink that day.
Later I programmed in Cobol several DEC Vaxish type computers as well as mainframe IBMs, and so on. I was an applications and systems programmer for about 11 years.
I remember going to a computer fair around 1982 or something and boggling at a personal computer with 1MB of memory. We ran a whole insurance company at that time on a minicomputer with about 1MB of memory.
One computer I remember thinking was very cool that I had during that phase was an 80286 based PC with 512k of memory and a CGA monitor. It also had a 20Mb hard disk. Boy was that a hot machine! Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I'm 39 now... my dad was into computers, and back in the '70s he wrote articles and a book about the potential of what became the Internet; I remember writing an email in his office ~'77, though I can't remember what the computer was.
In '80, we had a computer lab class in 8th grade, but I can't remember the computer; 2 years later, when I was in 10th grade, we got an Apple II+ for home. (48K, mmmm...)
I'm both impressed and unimpressed by computers. I like the Internet, and I use computers as I need to for writing and work... but I've never cared enough about computers to own one. I tend to regard computers and AV stuff as expensive toys, and to let people who like to spend money buy the first-generation and second-generation laptops, digital cameras, MP3 players, etc. -- let THEM spend all the money on the expensive prototypes with all their problems, and then someday maybe I'll get one of those things when it's a lot cheaper and the bugs are all figured out and I decide that even though I've lived just fine up until now without one that I'd like one of those things.
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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I'm 25, and I think my first computer contact was when I was 8 or 9, so in 1989/1990-ish. It was at school - for part of the "Challenge" program, I got to play Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? on a Macintosh of some sort, I can't remember exactly which. I thought they were the coolest things ever, and I remember being especially impressed when the color version of Oregon Trail came out.
There may have been fleeting brushes earlier than that, possibly with something like an Apple IIe, but that was the definitely the first time I got to use a computer regularly.
I was in 7th grade (1993-94) when my family got our first computer, which was also a Mac since I was absolutely convinced I'd have no idea how to use a PC. (Now I think the opposite is true.) My parents tend to be rather slow to acquire new technology - I've still never had any kind of video game system, our house only had one tv until I got one for my college dorm room, and my parents didn't have a DVD player until I gave them one for Christmas about 4 years ago. And they still have (and never use) the gigantic clunky video camera that takes standard-size VHS tapes. Posts: 952 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Hmm. I must have been around 6, I think. Though I remember seeing pretty screensavers on a computer when I was probably 3 or so. The first computer that I used with any regularity ran Windows 3.1, if I recall correctly.
Oh, and Alcon, you're very old.
[Edit: the Alcon comment was in response to Alcon's post about feeling old, which was at the bottom of the page the last time I refreshed, which was hours ago]
Posts: 1466 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Probably 1980 or 1981 (6 or 7). It was either the Vic-20 or Atari 400. I remember typing in many games from Compute magazine and others, mostly in machine language. I also wrote a stupid game. And I spent a lot of time on BBS'es with the 300 baud modem (my first alias/handle was Speed Demon--because I liked Ferrari's)!
The first computer that was "mine" was a hand-me-down from my other brothers: a Vic-20. It was old when I inherited it, but I played on it for a few weeks at least before taking it apart.
From 1990 until 1995 I rarely used computers ever. Starting in 1995, I started using them again on a regular basis, and am now an adminstrator/programmer.
I'm not surprised by technology. To me, they are just toys to play games, draw pictures, make music/movies/animations/webpages, whatever.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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we got it in '91, I was 2. It was a DOS system, that we later upgraded to DOS 6 and then Win3.1 at some point. We used it all the way up into the mid-nineties-- I remember when they installed AOL 2.0 on it.
I remember my uncle coming over and installing all the games from my grandma's old computer here--Paratroopers, a PacMan clone, Captain Comic and some others. Later we got Reader Rabbit, Outnumbered, and some Disney-made educational game.
But my favorite was the original SimCity; my dad got it free with a copy of Turbotax or Quicken. Started coding Ti83s at 12 or so, then QBasic, then FreeBasic, then pretty much stopped. Probably should learn C++ at some point, meh.
quote:Originally posted by twinky: Dungeon of Doom (which I finally finished recently, but on my G5 tower)
Was there some sort of orb? I remember you had to fight through like 25 levels and then fight back to the beginning. Chain mail, plate armor, paladin armor, broadsword, battleaxe...ah, the memories. Those scrolls! Those were awesome. And schweinhunds. Hah!
That's the one, only it was 40 levels. As a kid I never even got to level 40, though. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I'm surprised by the number of replies to this thread!
So far they've all been very interesting. It seems that the majority of the people who have posted here got their start with computers somewhere around ages 4 - 8 on average. That's another thing that interests me about this whole thing as well. Do you think that as computers become more and more connected to our daily lives that the average age for people's "first use" of a computer decreases? Will there be a point where someone would get acquainted with them at age 1 so to say?
I wonder if someone raised around technology from such a young age would appreciate it as much as someone who wasn't.
Oh and yeah, I LOVED Loderunner! I still do!
Posts: 459 | Registered: Mar 2005
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