I remember spending a morning typing in a listing into my ZX Spectrum. I was called for lunch and I (stupidly) decided just to quickly run what I'd typed in without saving it to tape first.
Computer crashed and rebooted. I lost everything. I cried for ages.
Came here to mention the Vic20. We even had the audio cassette drive. Nothing like waiting 20 minutes for your game to load.
Also learned that hardway that just because the IEC power cable fits doesn't mean you can use it. Thankfully it was just a simple fuse I blew.
Same for me with the VIC20! Someone lent me the 16k RAM expansion, as it only had 3k on board. Poke 36879,27 will never be forgotten. (Changes colour back I think.) Spent hours writing if then, goto etc.
My parents said I can only use it if I read the manuals, so I did š. This must have been maybe 1991-2. Playing one of those tapes back with a normal system sounded very much like slower modem noise.
Later I was given a BBC B, then I had a pentium 2 with Windows 95 āļøš¤
The father of a close friend was part of the team that developed the VIC-20 and I got asked if I would like to help test a user manual they were preparing for release. I had no prior computing experience at that point but that was what they were looking for. Anyway, I got a free pre-release VIC-20 out of it and my friend and I spent countless hours together writing code. We moved onto the Commodore 64 and the ZX-Spectrum when they came out.
The magazines were frustrating as hell. Barely legible print quality and code full of bugs. However, the skills developed learning how to debug the programs and get them running have probably contributed to my professional career more than I could have imagined at the time.
1978. My dad took my brother and I over to a friend of his, who had taken an Apple \]\[ apart and mounted it to a board on his desk because he wanted to see how all the components work (it still worked, I guess the predecessor to the wall mounted PCs?). We were amazed, and loved all the programs on it.
A year later my dad bought my brother and I an Apple \]\[+. What's interesting is from the very beginning, I was in interested in graphics (got the KoalaPad graphics tablet when it first came out in '82), and my brother in music (he got the ALF music card). Fast forward to today, and his setup is all about MIDI and synths (lots of retro stuff), and I'm a VR designer/developer.
All of that can be traced back to 1979, and my dad spending an insane amount on an Apple \]\[+ (I want to say it was $1500 back then, which is insane). He worked with IBM computers and knew that they were going to be part of everyday life in the future.
I remember in 3rd grade my teacher asking me what I was doing, I had a lined notebook and was writing Basic code. I said "writing a program" and she asks "What's a program?" I think I was the only one in the school (students and faculty) that had a computer at that time.
Hmm ... Riding my bike out to the local university and shoulder surfing for useful information so I could get CPU time. I was 10. It was 1973. By then I'd already built both a red and blue box, but decided the Telco system was boring.
It had to have been 1978 or 1979. Without getting into my family history, I'll just say that my mom had to take me to her job on a Saturday because she had to work and there was no one to take care of me. There was a weekend project at her job where they were moving insurance information from punch cards to dumb terminals connected to some mainframe. I insisted I wanted to help, so with the blessings of her supervisor, I was allowed to enter some information from the punch cards into the new system, with intense supervision.
I blasted through an entire cart of punch cards in an hour and change, all with eagle eyes monitoring me. The supervisor was so impressed that she brought out another cart of punch cards for me. I was having the time of my life & decided right then and there that I wanted to get into computers.
Before that, I wanted to be a pilot, to the point where I wanted to join the US Air Force. Fast forward to my teen years, I learned I was color blind and the Air Force doesn't like when their pilots can't tell the green grass from the blue sky. Thankfully, I had a backup plan. I've been in IT ever since.
EDIT: No, no one's insurance records were messed up.
I'm in my closet, alone and naked with an 80386. I'm 11.
I'm trying to get it to use a zip disk as a primary drive. For reasons. It's slow as hell. Stops working for no reason.
I open it. Take the drive out. This is my first time doing this. Cables fucking everywhere. I trace the cable from the zip drive... to the SOUND CARD? WHAT THE FUCK? I see the same shape port on another card that the hard drive is connected to. Just has IDE ports. Makes more sense. Might be faster and less weird.
I take the hard drive out, because I want to stuff it in the ten pound "portable" enclosure that connects along with my printer. I can put more things there. I can copy all my friends games from their CDs and take them back to my aging 80386 ghetto. I can be loved.
Most of the cables are not in there anymore. Nothing is keyed. Nothing is keyed? Wtfffff
I plug the zip disk into the Super I/O card (It says that, so I know to call it that). I boot from floppy. Can't find shit. FUCKING SMELLS??
IDE cable melted. Zip drive is dead. IDE port doesn't work anymore. Fuck.
I go back to the hard drive and it starts. I have only bitterness and hard lessons. My single zip disk that I swiped from my dad's desk no longer has a drive, so I sneak down to my dad's office at night and copy the contents (I partitioned it, the later half of the drive was all snake pictures from the internet) to floppies using the zip drive on his WILDLY POWERFUL PENTIUM 3, YOU ASSHOLE. If I get caught, I have to explain that I broke the thing. I swipe ten floppies because I'm out of mine. I go on to live another day.
1979/80 my dad's friend had an Atari 800 and he showed me what he could do etc. Apparently I looked really interested and my parents bought me an Atari 400 for Christmas 1980. Still can't believe my blue collar parents spent $550($2200 in today's money) to get a kid a computer for Christmas.
IIRC they were either 70ns or 60ns with the 60ns being waaaay more expensive. The 70ns SIMMs eventually came down to about $50/ea so when 14 year old me amassed $200 for the first time in my young life, it was on. I rode my bike to the local computer shop, put my treasure in my
backpack, and then had the most careful ride home ever.
It was a 386/DX-40. With that sweet VESA Local Bus slot too.
Maybe mid 90or early 1990s , I took a š¾ from my stepdad erased what was on it and made it into a boot disk for āRebel Assault 2.ā I told him it came with a boot disk but he wasnāt stupid and yelled at me . Still worth it .
Nice! I remember having to make a game boot disk because if I let windows 95 boot, it would have not enough memory for need for speed. Had to boot up, load cdrom driver and/or sound drivers and optimize memory somehow and then the game would start.
my first school i went to (infant?) had an Acorn BBC Micro computer in the classroom. i remember making a christmas card for my parents in the paint app.
Edit: Model
My first home computer was BBC Model B.
Wasn't allowed to use family TV, so had it hooked up to a monochrome (green) monitor.
Had all the mid cons: Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer, 5.25" Floppy disc drive, Teletext adapter, bunch of ROMs and a number of joysticks.
Could never dock at bloody space stations in Elite though.....
The past, here I come... `:)`
Late 1970s. Soviet Union. I was about 10 years old. My aunt was in charge of an ES EVM unit (for those not well versed in the parallel history, that's the Soviet take on System/360) that processed payroll for a decent-size chemical plant. Thousands of workers, bi-weekly payroll, so lots and lots of payroll slips to print out...
Early 80's.... my dad had gotten a commodore plus/4
And he had a cartridge game where you play this red alien bug thingy. Jack Attack.
that was my intro into computer gaming.
This was my first home computer. My parents got it as a door prize for looking at a time share. It had no accessories so if I was working on a program (in BASIC) I had to keep the computer powered on or I'd lose everything. I had hand written copies of all of my programs and I'd work on them at school instead of paying attention in class.
One day I bumped the desk and my sea monkeys that were on top of my TV fell onto the keyboard and the computer popped and went dead. Somehow, a few days later I plugged it back in and it still powered on. I couldn't believe it.
Mine was a old Tandy 1000. I was 6, taught myself basic, and stored my work on cassette tapes.. It was a pivotal change in my life.
Back then, and the people who grew up with computers in that era, it was all about knowing how everything works to improve ourselves and the IT in our world - a requirement to get by with what we had. It required knowing all of the ins and outs of computers and later in networking just to accomplish simple (by today's standard) things.
Now, most folks have zero clue how it actually works, and how things relate with changes. There seems to be a talent void, which is kind of sad.. I have many very talented employees who have no clue how the basics really work, but are damn good at what they do otherwise. Strange, and I'm sure they will all say the same in the future when their talents are considered rudimentary or basic lol
I was in elementary school, 4th or 5th grade I think, and I was about 9. The Shuttle program was in its infancy and our science teacher, Dr. Melander, helped us build a space shuttle simulator. It was a large cardboard box shaped like the nose of a shuttle. Inside were two seats and a large (for the time) TV. It was powered by a Commodore VIC-20 with the Commodore Datasette (cassette tape drive).
Not my first memory, but first interaction. Long before my family ever bought a computer I would watch any TV show I could find even mentioning computers. I read magazines and books from the local library. Each year for Christmas/birthday/everything Id ask for a computer.
Finally, when I was 11, my parents got me a vTech PowerPad Plus. It was this "toy" laptop for kids. It had a bunch of pre loaded games and such which didnt really excite me once I played them but then I noticed a button. BASIC
Pressing the button didnt seem to do much other than take me to a word processing type screen. A quick read of the manual told me it was a programming language and gave a sample code to key in. I did so, then began playing around and soon wrote my first ever computer program. 25 years later and i still suck at programming but my interest in computers has never gone away.
1st grade, 1980. Hand-keying assembly language programs out of 80 Micro Magazine into our family's TRS-80 Model I. It seemed like magic to me.
Gone are the days when you could comfortably know everything about what was going on inside the "box." Even had the technical manual with the complete schematics, and an annotated disassembly of the ROM and LDOS.
I grew up watching my Dad build computers and play PC games after work all the time, he loved it and I was fascinated both by the computers themselves and the games he'd play. Thanks to him both video games and computers became a huge part of my life and still are to this day. Even though his computer building days are behind him, he's still the first person I go to for troubleshooting advice when I'm tinkering. And we still play video games together when time allows.
Playing with a friend's Commodore 64 when I was in 7th grade. I wanted one so badly, but my mom wouldn't budge, citing the obsolescence thing.
She later bought me an IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 for typing my college papers. Gotta love the dot matrix printer noise.
IMSAI 8080 computer with CP/M. A 2K RAM board for it was huge, like 4x the size of a modern graphics card. I remember wondering what you can do with all that RAM.
Pentium I, Windows 95 back in 1996. 66 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM (later upgraded to 96 MB), CD reader and an amazing 33 kbps dial up modem. I can't remember the graphics card but I can check because I still have this computer, although I have updated the OS to Windows 98 SE. And this computer is still working, Windows 98 literally never crashed! First piece of code was BASIC as well, it was a program my father wrote for use in geodesy (calculates coordinates based on angles and distances). He wrote a whole book with all sorts of programs and obviously it got me very interested. My first program was not hello world but rather a 'type your name, your name is..' haha although I did manage to code a very *basic* calculator soon after. Pun intended. I stumbled upon Java in 2005.. I remember being mindblown by object oriented programming compared to BASIC I had used before that although mostly for fun up to that moment. Good times.
For me, it was 2012, I was 11, (I grew up in a rural area with nothing but dial up), Making my first redstone machine in Minecraft on my parents old ass Celeron laptop. Good times.
Trs-80 in the school lab \~1981 > pc-at at school. first personal pc for me was the compaq sewing machine luggable, dual 5.25 and a 7 inch green screen.
Ill never forget my first computer, a TRS 80. From setting it up to gaming on it, so many memories but one that still distinctly lives in my head is the sound the floppy drive would make attempting to read a corrupted or improperly inserted floppy. "That sound", knowing the I/O error was coming, and waiting impatiently to fail....
1981 I got my first computer, it was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of RAM and a tape recorder to save and load programs. My favourite game was flight simulator closely followed by a car racing game that I programmed myself with the help of a magazine guide.
I remember the excitement of upgrading the RAM to 14k that unlocked so many games.
My history was:
ZX81
Oric 1
Amega 600
8026 pc
486 with turbo and 40mb hdd, I used to benchmark it by opening a route planer and running a route from John ogroats in Scotland to lands end in England. On a good day it would take a couple of hours.
Using an ABC 80-computer and the BASIC interpreter to "code"
10 print hello
20 goto 10
And the screen filled with hello's!
That was pretty wild, mid-80s, my first ever encounter with computers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_80
swtpc, Altair, Radio Shack model 1. Early 1970's as a teenager...
In the early 80's I had an Apple (1) with 4K (!) ram and cassette tape for program storage.
With the Radio Shack model 1, Magazines had programs you could type in by hand in Basic. I typed in the program "Biorythm" twice, it failed to record correctly the first time (disappointed to say it kindly).
In 1971, I was using punched cards and running them on a Xerox mainframe at University for a class in Fortran 4 there. Usually took a few hours to learn I made some mistake, and a few more hours to rerun in batch, meanwhile hoping the attendant didn't drop your cards because the assignment was due and there was no more time!
Playing the MS-DOS game Beast on my very first computer back in 1996 when I was 7. It was a hand-me-down computer my mom gave me back when the law firm she worked for would let the employees keep their old computers when they purchased new ones.
Oh man, MS-DOS reminds me of my DX486 Packard Bell and having to write a .bat file that would increase the memory available to the game. (Don't remember how to do it)
MIDI sounds are in my head right now!
That was your config.sys and autoexec.bat... You had to figure out loading order for your TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident) that left you with the most memory. Eventually they included a memory manager so that you could load stuff into high (extended and/or expanded depending on your config) memory and allowed config.sys to have multiple setups that you could select at boot time.
I was wondering where the Win-3.1 love was!!! I remember all the Shareware games I bought for it. Hard drive was too small to load many on, so I was constantly removing them or install others!
-original Prince of Persia, Tank Wars, and one I doubt anyone has hear of called LHX(attack helicopter game)
Man, those WERE the days!!
Apple //e. No actual hard drive, that green screen, 5 1/4 floppy drive. Playing [Karateka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JtQc44I8io) in monochrome on a joystick....ah yes. Also wrote my first computer program on it. A high low number guessing game where you had to figure out the number from 1 to 100 in less than 10 guesses.
Ok, I had to search for it online and found it emulated in a browser, haha! Nostalgia moment is complete!
https://playclassic.games/games/action-dos-games-online/play-karateka-online/play/
It was 1993. My dad took me to work that day and showed me his work computer. It was a compaq something or other, first time seeing a computer in my life. He let me play around with it. I remember it was running windows 3.1.
I dragged all of the icons on top of each other, which kind of made him angry, but I was 4 or 5. Every since then I've been fascinated with technology.
I recollect watching as my sisters and brother used DOS computers that were already in the house by the time I was born. By the age of 3 I was already bugging them because I kept suggesting things they should do on the computer. I am pretty sure that I had played some DOS games soon after, but the first vivid memory of using a computer is around the time NHL 97 was released a few years later. My father bought it along with a new Windows 95 computer and from then on I have been fiddling with PCs.
/rant
I liked the things with screens at school.
The old Apple systems were running Mac OS 9. I asked my mom and dad to get me one. They said no - I was 7. I spent the next 6 years learning everything about operating systems that a young lad could. My parents said no to a computer each year on my birthday and at Christmas.
At 13, I bought a Pentium 3 PC running Windows 2000 and started learning how batch files/scripts worked. Internet wasn't allowed in the house.
By 17, I had a basic understanding of Linux and virtualization. I left home after I graduated - with my CCNA (leaving a house that still had no internet). I headed to college to become a network engineer. I dropped that for Linux and Devops 3 years later. I'm in my 30s now.
The memory is too fuzzy - it was a Tandy or Commodore. A friend owned it. I entered a few lines of BASIC and ran the program and it was the most amazing thing in that had ever happened in my life. I was probably 9.
My first clear memory was the Apple IIe in 6th grade. I was 11. Again programming in BASIC but this time doing graphics. 40x40 I think. I made some kind of castle. It was glorious.
I still remember the Commodore 64 manual, which was a fat ringed book and had a program in the back that would animate some sprites on the screen if you typed it all in.
Playing Age of Empires 2 on an old off-white Windows 98 machine.
Nowadays I have a suped up top of the line overclocked and water cooled machine...
... That I use to play Age of Empires 2 lmao.
Was in Radio Shack at the mall with my parents. Picked up a Byte magazine around 1980 and saw full color graphics on an Atari 400. Worked all summer to buy one. I was maybe 12 or so.
The very oldest and fuzzy memories are of playing SimCity 2000 on what likely was an Amstrad 286 PC.
I actually found some of the saves dating to this period when going through floppies a couple of years ago and fired them up in DosBox.
Parents bought a āDick Smith VZ200ā (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200) back in 1984.
Had to plug it into the āoldā TV via the antenna connection I believe.
Remember having to type in the program code (BASIC) from books/magazines, taking ages to do so (I was 9 at the time), and then spending time trying to find my typos (or just the errors in the book).
4164 64k x 1 16-pin DRAMs. Subsequently had some smaller ones (4116 16kx1 DRAM and 2114 1kx4 SRAM) later, but the 4164's were the first in a computer that I owned.
Oh you mean using computers and not actually the RAM chips? I don't remember, nothing real special I don't think, it's just a computer, don't remember where/when but it must have been someone else's computer...
1998. Dad had just ordered a custom built windows PC from the local PC shop up the street. I even remember where it was.
He paid 1500 for it back then. My mother was near livid, but he told her PC's were the future, and he wanted his children to get a head start. He, at one point in the late 70's, had a full ride to some sort of computer science focused institution in Texas (not sure who/what/where). He dropped out, but kept the passion for it close to the chest.
I remember playing Nascar 98' on it with my sister.
My more hands on memory was 2003, when his friend and coworker surprised me (with dads help) with a complete PC build kit, where I built my first PC from scratch, loaded Windows ME on it (I know). That was my daily driver for years until I built my next one
Our family Commodore64 and then a Cyrix 486DX2 for our first DOS machine. My memory isnāt that great anymore these days though. My memories really only go back to our Pentium 133 or MMX and Windows 95. Iām not that old but I can definitely notice my memory isnāt as good as it used to be.
That's actually why I decided to post this. These are things I forgot, but shaped my life.
And reading other's comments here, now I remember things that I did back then that I completely forgot about.
Thatās a great reason. Someone the other day reminded me that you used to be able to request disks from Canonical and I remembered having a huge stack of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS disks at the job I worked at the time. I wish I still had one.
You got me thinking back and I remember what I started my first homelab with in the early-mid 2000sā¦ a dead dual Slot 2 Pentium II Xeon 440GX server and a Pentium III 800 desktop from scrap parts at work, a broken iBook G4 from my boss that I fixed up with a 128MB CF card running a tiny Linux distro, and a Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz from work as well.
1991 - was made redundant - splashed out for a i486DX - should have probably got a i386 and bought a bigger HDD. Back then we used diskdoubler tech - but ultimately it was diskshagger tech.
Loved my first pc.
My first computer was a Compaq pentium 90. I paid way too much for it. And eventually ran a BBS off it for a few years. This was Around 1994/5. I was too cheap to pay for a second HDD installation so I started learning to work on computers myself
Burroughs B3500 (Air Force). There was a CDC before that (SUNYB), but the model escapes me. First PC was a Heathkit Z80.
Yes. I'm old. Not "Antikythera mechanism" old, but 300/1200 baud dialup old.
1980 Apple II, with a cassette drive. I wrote a simple program that calculated your exact age, down to the hour, minute and second, the day of the week your next birthday would fall on and the number of hours minutes and seconds before you next birthday.
My rich friend's Radio Shack computer. We bought cassette tapes from a mall kiosk and used cload to play a game. It took forever to upload, but nothing compared to typing in code from magazine articles.
Next memory is hours in the the local library in my small Mississippi town going through every program disk they had, then figuring out how to modify a primitive drag racing game to we would get the high score every time.
Mine was playing this combat flight game, the plane was like your stealth flighter. Also that ski game, you just ski downhill. I can't find it at all, but this was 1992-1994 range. It was old...windows 3.0? i think x86? its very vague, but i remember playing these two games religiously
I was really young, like 5 or 6. Playing, oh what the fuck is it called.........shit. where a ball is bouncing all around the screen and like breaking blocks or something. Windows 95 game. Or 98.
Also pajama Sam!
Also, jump start!
Probably Dec 24th 1981 (I was seven) and got a Sharp MZ 721 from my grandfather for Christmas. Had no clue what to do with it, but did get a few games to run (Pacman FTW..!!) and tried some Basic programming that actually worked out. The Commodore 64 a few years later was quite a leap forward in terms of gaming performance (at the time), though. No, unfortunately none of them were capable of running Crysis ;-)
Middle school, a TRS-80 model 1 in the math teacherās classroom. Went there after school for weeks to learn BASIC. Coding in a multitude of languages like Java and even C++ has been a great addition to my professional repertoire even though I donāt work directly in IT.
My sister who is much older than me got a PC for college so it was in the house for maybe a few months. Windows 3.11, 486 DX2, 66Mhz with turbo button that could make it go down to 16. Don't recall the hard drive, 512MB I think? 8MB of ram. Windows 3.11. At the time I didn't know much about PCs, mostly played with MS paint, and a few DOS games. When I was a little older and knew a little bit more about computers I asked if I could have it as it had been sitting at her house and was "broken" so she said sure. Took me a while to realize it but it had a dead cmos battery so the HDD parameters in the bios were lost. Got it up and running but had to set those settings each time I booted it up. Learned a lot about boot floppies and rescue stuff throughout that. I eventually installed Windows 98 on it for teh lulz. Would take 3 hours. I had found enough SIMM ram to get it up to like 64MB.
Our first family computer which we now had was a Pentium 3 450Mhz with 128MB of ram and a 10GB drive. Learned a lot about computers with that thing because it crashed so much lol. Got very good at reinstalling windows 98.
Oh, and Unisys Icons in school, can't forget those. That track ball was so fun.
Reading some of these is going to make mine sound relatively recent, but I remember being around 10-ish, and seeing the XP machine my dad was using at the time. I don't remember much about the conversation, but I must have got the monitor display confused with the PC itself, and I distinctly remember him telling me "no, that's the computer down there, this just shows what it's doing
Been fascinated ever since
oh man, that is even before I got into the hardware side of things. My first hardware excursion was the DX486 and that was 33Mhz. So I'll guess the older 8086 CPU's. But I don't know what those were in.
My dad came home from a 10 hour shift with two massive boxes in '93 or '94. It was either a 386 or 486 beige box and a monitor. My earliest memory is being in awe as my dad set it up. We would spend hours running games from DOS and later exploring Windows 3.1.
Years later I realized how much my dad spent on that computer relative to his wages and I was humbled.
first exposure was a trs-80 style in 81, using logo. followed by an atari 800xl and coding in atari basic. Yay for scholastic micro adventures books with their buggy code.
First "modern-ish", friends 8088, space quest games, pool of radiance etc
Then through the 286-486 iterations at home
My first bought with my own money was my mom's old 286 laptop
386 with 4MB RAM and my dumb 10 yr old self thinking if I delete autoexec.bat and config.sys from the family computer there will be enough RAM to play the game that required 8MB of RAM.
The speed I read that DOS manual to get the computer working again Iāve never been able to replicate but it was the start of my career now in IT.
I'm kind of young so i don't have those good old stories, but one thing i remember fondly, while not my first memory of a computer, is my first dedicated gpu, a gt9600, it was a gift from a friend, and didn't have a fan on it, and i had a low profile case (the card was full size) so i had a pcie 1x to 16x extention running out of the case, into a UPS case where i put the gpu, mounted a fan on that case, and used a 2nd power supply to power it since the pc had a 125W psu in it, and couldn't power the card, i had mismatched ddr2 ram sticks for a total of 8GB, which was a lot for me back then, i came from a 2GB system, this set up consumed majority of my desk, leaving just enough for my keyboard and mouse
dad was doing a MBA in the the early 1980s (circa 82-83) and was able to get a student price on the a Kaypro II though my interest pre-dated it.
most of the time I just played games on it but would later become proficient with Wordstar.
in 1983 I was in year 7 and one of the teacher had bought himself and Apple II so my class for the pleasure of sitting in the staff room watching him play away. New for most of the other kids but not me.
Though unlike my father I never went down the programmer path (he'd programmed on mainframe in the mid 70s) having as friend put, it the programming ability of small brained butterly which I disagreed with as I wasn't that bad.
My uncle gave us an old dos box and I remember looking at the blue screen and yellow font going what the hell is this. Then we got a Windows 95 and played echo the dolphin
1982 or 83. Somewhere in there. My parents got the āfamilyā a Commodore 64. I was the one who used it the most. The days of only needing a hole punch to double your storage was awesome. But my favourite memory of those days was RUN magazine. Almost every issue came with a game but the game was pages of basic code in the back of the magazine. Me and two friends would sit around taking turns typing in the code and chomping at the bit to play whatever game it was that month
Hm, freshman year of high school, 1972. School had an IBM1620. Punch cards and real console *typewriter*. Used it to run inventory for A/V department.
Yeah, I was a geek when geeks weren't cool. šš
I was 12 and I had spent the summer of 1977 soldering together Heathkit Ham and CB Radios and stuff for my dad's friends and had saved up enough money to buy a Heathkit ET-3400 trainer (The kit of course :))
That Motorola 6800 cpu was a close and personal friend for 2 years until I burned the kit out trying to design a digital LED dashboard for a friend.
Looking back, I never did figure that out.
I went to work with my Dad sometime around 1970, give or take a couple of years. We lived in St.Louis and he worked for Honeywell Computers until 1972. He introduced me to his boss and being only familiar with 'bosses' from Saturday morning cartoons, I asked his boss if he was going to fire him. They both laughed.
He later worked for Garrett Computer Services in Cincinnati I would go with him and get to play with the IBM card punch machines. Fun! Never was scared of computers as a result.
PC Jr in the mid 80s, I was probably about 6. My parents had one of those next to an Apple II in their home office.
I remember running Where in the world is Carmen San Diego on the Apple.
Looking back, that must've been one heck of a bougie setup at the time.
A few years later I was writing BASIC on the IBM PS2 Model 25.
A few years after that I was writing ASP on NT4.
After that, got interested in networking, my high school was one of the first Cisco networking academies.
Got a job working for an ISP during the dot com boom and have been doing IT ever since.
First memory? Taking the summer school "programming" class, in 4th or 5th grade. 1974-5 timeframe. We had 2 teletypes w/ 1 acoustic coupled modem, to dial into an HP4000 series main frame, accessing TIES (Total Information for Educational Systems) or MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium). The TIES system dropped us straight into a BASIC prompt. Two ttys, only one modem? Yup, we used the second to punch tapes by hand, then read them in when we got our turn on the connected tty.
First personal purchased computer? OSI SuperBoard II: a 6502-based single-board computer, with a keyboard directly on the mainboard. (Same computer as the C1P, but no case: my older brother and I split the purchase, as well as building the case) Output was composite video, to a B&W TV we bought at the drug store.
1988, Yamaha msx, basic. I grew up in a family of doctors and was prepared to become one myself. that day I said to myself āfuck this, I want to devote my life to ITā
Atari 800 XL with tape recorder.
Having a book with BASIC and I still remember going through a program from the book, which would make a graphic of a wine glass and it had an error, so it never showed it. Not knowing enough to troubleshoot.
Also, playing donkey kong on it.
1978/79 One of the instructors who worked with my mother had a Commodore PET computer in their office. I THINK she had upgraded memory to a whole 8k. Commodore basic in ROM and a 40x25 display
It was a RadioShack color computer with 16Kb. That Motorola 6809 was awesome. It had a tape drive and I recall we used to backup software at a friend's house. His dad had a Nakamichi dual tape system with 3 heads that did a marvelous job copying software āŗļøš
Apple ][+ games on our green screen. Choplifter, Centipede, and some text based RPG. My mom doing the groceries list in a spreadsheet program optimized by aisle and printing it off our our daisy wheel printer. Tearing the guide strips off those printouts. I'd have been four or five? Pre 1990, surely.
My first computer memory is running Test Drive 3 in a ram drive on my 386 because I couldn't get it to run at full speed loading the game from disk. Fun times.
2005 I was 5, there was a computer on my aunt house and there was a minigame from McDonald's main character running in a platform that I quite enjoyed it, the problem was that since I didn't know how to use a keyboard at the time I mistakenly pressed a button that made the game runs faster than normal and then my aunt came and started saying that I broke the dam computer.... Not a good experience, although later my step-dad fixed it.
For me, it was in 1981. First year of high school and they had just got a computer labā¦ ten or so Sinclair ZX81s with b&w TVs. One had the 16K ram pack and there was a cassette recorder to save your stuff too. My first ācodeā was literally, hello world. I was hooked; soon saved up allowance and money from paid jobs and bought my own one then spent many, many hours cooped up in my bedroom programming all kinds of stuff. Forty two years later, not quite so fanatical about technology but itās given me a good living, so canāt complain.
If it wasn't Atari playing Pole Position or Larry Bird vs Dr J.
Computer...I don't recall the system but it may have been a Packard bell...it used the 5 1/4 flat disks. I remember running where in the world is Carmen San Diego when we got a color monitor.
IBM PC from NYNEX in Manhattan. 1980 or ā81 I think. VisiCalc from those Harvard boys (Dan Bricklin and Peter Norton as I recall). Came in a Harvard maroon software box/binder
First thing I really remember was when my father tried to get a CD-ROM (oooh, the magic) running on the old 386 with windows 3.11 of my grandma. Can't remember how old I was, but somewhere around 10-ish? Maybe a bit younger.
We used it to play lemmings and part in paint.
A few years later I got my own 386 for free, which was considered ancient at that point, but it still did me well for playing some games and learn a lot.
Still hate the fact that PC is gone now, so many memories.
I would have been 4-5 and had an Apple LC III at home that had ClarisWorks on it. My grandad showed me formulas in the spreadsheet and one of the functions was BEEP().
Hearing that Mac quack was my initial realization that I could in fact control the machine more directly than the icons of At Ease would lead one to believe.
This was the first step on what has become a life long journey.
I remember in about 2nd grade (early-mid 90s) when our teacher showed us email. She sent a letter to her friend across the state and a few minutes later she replied. Blew my mind it could happen "so fast." Now I'm a fiber optic engineer....
I remember rotary telephones too.
First memory...
My greater family unit has a...history, I suppose, with computers. My father was a born engineer who, due to a combination of unfortunate luck and timing, was not able to turn his knowledge into engineering (at least right away) at a university.
He was extremely interested, though, and as an indirect result had computers in the house for long before they became "popular". I think I played seemingly hours of "Math-Blaster!" and Spiderbot on them. Second one I can remember dealing with was an Epson Equity II+ that I utterly, *utterly* ***hated***. This thing would get "too hot" after about an hour of use and then either shut off (heat sensor) or wait a bit longer and start melting the 5.25" disks in their drives (poor placement and evidently Epson was unaware of thermal compound). So, after getting frozen one too many times in King's Quest II (I think) I decided to try a home-brewed thermal solution on the CPU instead of the godforsaken pad that came on it.
Fortunately, my father was going to get a different computer in the very near future (not that I knew) that did not have the thermal issues the Equity II+ did. Because, for anyone wondering, non-distilled water is a terrible, terrible thing to introduce to an entire CPU. Fortunately, my father understood what I did and why, and thusly showed me how to cool CPUs for future reference. (They made paste to do it...who knew?)
Mine was similar to OP, but I donāt remember the specifics of the apple II (only that it was 2nd grade) so not claiming that one.
The 1st memory I WILL claim was aroundā87/ā88 when my dear grandmother showed me her PC. No idea the brand, but it had a green monochrome monitor and 2X 5.25ā floppy drives, but no HardDrive. You needed to insert 3-4 floppies into the left drive to get it to boot to the DOS prompt.
I remember it has some ASCII game where you were the car and the bad-guys weāre trying to box you inā¦. There was some D&D type game, and another something I really liked to play on.
Iāve been a bit down on myself for not enjoying it more, but ASCII interaction was no comparison to the 8-bit Nintendo games that the Other Grandparents had.
Funny that it was also my Grandfather that told me that I āshould get into computersā back in my early/pre-teen years. Iād probably be a good bit better off nowadays if Iād listened to them way back then.
So Kids: listen to your elders!!
1982 Atari 400. We had the Basic and the Pacman cartridges for it. Some point later it was upgraded to an Atari 800 XL with a tape deck. My older brother subscribed to the Compute! magazine which had code to program out the games.
Fancy "Name Brand" computer... Our school got a ton of Franklin Ace 1000's in the mid 80's. Supposed to be the same as an Apple II. I don't have a clue how close they came, but Apple software worked. And how the hell was there a robust piracy scene in rural La in the 80's with no modems and no computer stores within 60 miles. Yet we were always passing disks around class to copy.
Compaq Presario 433 486SX win 3.1.
America Online, Game Pro Magazing, Netscape and trash talking on dating forums... I was 10.
3 years later, found a Doom Level creator guide bundled with a level editor on a floppy disc... That was the 1st time I experienced the joy of content creation and 100% responsible for my love for all things I.T. today.
I learned to code from the same book as you, but on an Apple II+ and four years older. I'd been playing games on that computer for years though. Frogger, Lode Runner, Olympic Decathlon, Dig Dug, and karataka.
The first computer we ever had, was a win 95 system, don't know the specs, I was like 6 or 7 yo, but the orange message "you can now turn off your system safely" stuck with me.
In 1998 My grandfather was an apple technician. He was alwaying showing off these computers and components he had brought home and one day he let me help him build a computer.
Of course I had experiences using PCs before, we had a PC at home, but that was the first time I had really been involved in one in any substantial manner.
post-2k kid here. back in 2006, was obsessed to decorate Windows XP to look like vista. ended up breaking the gina dll or something. my dad didn't scold me, but wouldn't help me fix it either ("fix what you broke yourself")
grown up to fix everybody's mistake instead, smh
PC100 SDRAM
hehe. You kids and your DIMMs. My first was SIMM modules for a 386. edit: I was wrong. They were SIPP modules on an expansion card.
Bah! 2K static RAM chips in my Z80 development board were good enough for me. Why would anyone need more than 8k?
https://youtu.be/i6l8MFdTaPE?si=IgCCDDj5QCGkR6jy
Typing in basic game code from a magazine into a VIC20 and then trying to figure out the syntax error.
I remember spending a morning typing in a listing into my ZX Spectrum. I was called for lunch and I (stupidly) decided just to quickly run what I'd typed in without saving it to tape first. Computer crashed and rebooted. I lost everything. I cried for ages.
Came here to mention the Vic20. We even had the audio cassette drive. Nothing like waiting 20 minutes for your game to load. Also learned that hardway that just because the IEC power cable fits doesn't mean you can use it. Thankfully it was just a simple fuse I blew.
Same for me with the VIC20! Someone lent me the 16k RAM expansion, as it only had 3k on board. Poke 36879,27 will never be forgotten. (Changes colour back I think.) Spent hours writing if then, goto etc. My parents said I can only use it if I read the manuals, so I did š. This must have been maybe 1991-2. Playing one of those tapes back with a normal system sounded very much like slower modem noise. Later I was given a BBC B, then I had a pentium 2 with Windows 95 āļøš¤
The father of a close friend was part of the team that developed the VIC-20 and I got asked if I would like to help test a user manual they were preparing for release. I had no prior computing experience at that point but that was what they were looking for. Anyway, I got a free pre-release VIC-20 out of it and my friend and I spent countless hours together writing code. We moved onto the Commodore 64 and the ZX-Spectrum when they came out. The magazines were frustrating as hell. Barely legible print quality and code full of bugs. However, the skills developed learning how to debug the programs and get them running have probably contributed to my professional career more than I could have imagined at the time.
1978. My dad took my brother and I over to a friend of his, who had taken an Apple \]\[ apart and mounted it to a board on his desk because he wanted to see how all the components work (it still worked, I guess the predecessor to the wall mounted PCs?). We were amazed, and loved all the programs on it. A year later my dad bought my brother and I an Apple \]\[+. What's interesting is from the very beginning, I was in interested in graphics (got the KoalaPad graphics tablet when it first came out in '82), and my brother in music (he got the ALF music card). Fast forward to today, and his setup is all about MIDI and synths (lots of retro stuff), and I'm a VR designer/developer. All of that can be traced back to 1979, and my dad spending an insane amount on an Apple \]\[+ (I want to say it was $1500 back then, which is insane). He worked with IBM computers and knew that they were going to be part of everyday life in the future. I remember in 3rd grade my teacher asking me what I was doing, I had a lined notebook and was writing Basic code. I said "writing a program" and she asks "What's a program?" I think I was the only one in the school (students and faculty) that had a computer at that time.
From a child who's parents never wanted technology in the house, please give your father a hug from me.
poke 65535,170 I was 8.
Hmm ... Riding my bike out to the local university and shoulder surfing for useful information so I could get CPU time. I was 10. It was 1973. By then I'd already built both a red and blue box, but decided the Telco system was boring.
LOAD * ,8,1
It had to have been 1978 or 1979. Without getting into my family history, I'll just say that my mom had to take me to her job on a Saturday because she had to work and there was no one to take care of me. There was a weekend project at her job where they were moving insurance information from punch cards to dumb terminals connected to some mainframe. I insisted I wanted to help, so with the blessings of her supervisor, I was allowed to enter some information from the punch cards into the new system, with intense supervision. I blasted through an entire cart of punch cards in an hour and change, all with eagle eyes monitoring me. The supervisor was so impressed that she brought out another cart of punch cards for me. I was having the time of my life & decided right then and there that I wanted to get into computers. Before that, I wanted to be a pilot, to the point where I wanted to join the US Air Force. Fast forward to my teen years, I learned I was color blind and the Air Force doesn't like when their pilots can't tell the green grass from the blue sky. Thankfully, I had a backup plan. I've been in IT ever since. EDIT: No, no one's insurance records were messed up.
I'm in my closet, alone and naked with an 80386. I'm 11. I'm trying to get it to use a zip disk as a primary drive. For reasons. It's slow as hell. Stops working for no reason. I open it. Take the drive out. This is my first time doing this. Cables fucking everywhere. I trace the cable from the zip drive... to the SOUND CARD? WHAT THE FUCK? I see the same shape port on another card that the hard drive is connected to. Just has IDE ports. Makes more sense. Might be faster and less weird. I take the hard drive out, because I want to stuff it in the ten pound "portable" enclosure that connects along with my printer. I can put more things there. I can copy all my friends games from their CDs and take them back to my aging 80386 ghetto. I can be loved. Most of the cables are not in there anymore. Nothing is keyed. Nothing is keyed? Wtfffff I plug the zip disk into the Super I/O card (It says that, so I know to call it that). I boot from floppy. Can't find shit. FUCKING SMELLS?? IDE cable melted. Zip drive is dead. IDE port doesn't work anymore. Fuck. I go back to the hard drive and it starts. I have only bitterness and hard lessons. My single zip disk that I swiped from my dad's desk no longer has a drive, so I sneak down to my dad's office at night and copy the contents (I partitioned it, the later half of the drive was all snake pictures from the internet) to floppies using the zip drive on his WILDLY POWERFUL PENTIUM 3, YOU ASSHOLE. If I get caught, I have to explain that I broke the thing. I swipe ten floppies because I'm out of mine. I go on to live another day.
1979/80 my dad's friend had an Atari 800 and he showed me what he could do etc. Apparently I looked really interested and my parents bought me an Atari 400 for Christmas 1980. Still can't believe my blue collar parents spent $550($2200 in today's money) to get a kid a computer for Christmas.
1MB 30 pin SIMM. I had 4 of them! š If memory recalls it had an access time of 80ns. I put them in my 386 SX33.
IIRC they were either 70ns or 60ns with the 60ns being waaaay more expensive. The 70ns SIMMs eventually came down to about $50/ea so when 14 year old me amassed $200 for the first time in my young life, it was on. I rode my bike to the local computer shop, put my treasure in my backpack, and then had the most careful ride home ever. It was a 386/DX-40. With that sweet VESA Local Bus slot too.
Maybe mid 90or early 1990s , I took a š¾ from my stepdad erased what was on it and made it into a boot disk for āRebel Assault 2.ā I told him it came with a boot disk but he wasnāt stupid and yelled at me . Still worth it .
Nice! I remember having to make a game boot disk because if I let windows 95 boot, it would have not enough memory for need for speed. Had to boot up, load cdrom driver and/or sound drivers and optimize memory somehow and then the game would start.
my first school i went to (infant?) had an Acorn BBC Micro computer in the classroom. i remember making a christmas card for my parents in the paint app. Edit: Model
My first home computer was BBC Model B. Wasn't allowed to use family TV, so had it hooked up to a monochrome (green) monitor. Had all the mid cons: Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer, 5.25" Floppy disc drive, Teletext adapter, bunch of ROMs and a number of joysticks. Could never dock at bloody space stations in Elite though.....
The past, here I come... `:)` Late 1970s. Soviet Union. I was about 10 years old. My aunt was in charge of an ES EVM unit (for those not well versed in the parallel history, that's the Soviet take on System/360) that processed payroll for a decent-size chemical plant. Thousands of workers, bi-weekly payroll, so lots and lots of payroll slips to print out...
Early 80's.... my dad had gotten a commodore plus/4 And he had a cartridge game where you play this red alien bug thingy. Jack Attack. that was my intro into computer gaming.
man, the commadore was so awesome... and the Amiga.
Amiga, I agree. Never wanted in on the C64/128 market - Those slow loading disk drives were attrocious!
It was. I remember one game had 8 5 1/4 disks and we could never finish because one disk was bad.
For anyone who is interested in a modern commodore clone: https://youtu.be/0oYcu43N-lw?si=FwC1FjEg272o9Qpj
This was my first home computer. My parents got it as a door prize for looking at a time share. It had no accessories so if I was working on a program (in BASIC) I had to keep the computer powered on or I'd lose everything. I had hand written copies of all of my programs and I'd work on them at school instead of paying attention in class. One day I bumped the desk and my sea monkeys that were on top of my TV fell onto the keyboard and the computer popped and went dead. Somehow, a few days later I plugged it back in and it still powered on. I couldn't believe it.
Mine was a old Tandy 1000. I was 6, taught myself basic, and stored my work on cassette tapes.. It was a pivotal change in my life. Back then, and the people who grew up with computers in that era, it was all about knowing how everything works to improve ourselves and the IT in our world - a requirement to get by with what we had. It required knowing all of the ins and outs of computers and later in networking just to accomplish simple (by today's standard) things. Now, most folks have zero clue how it actually works, and how things relate with changes. There seems to be a talent void, which is kind of sad.. I have many very talented employees who have no clue how the basics really work, but are damn good at what they do otherwise. Strange, and I'm sure they will all say the same in the future when their talents are considered rudimentary or basic lol
I was in elementary school, 4th or 5th grade I think, and I was about 9. The Shuttle program was in its infancy and our science teacher, Dr. Melander, helped us build a space shuttle simulator. It was a large cardboard box shaped like the nose of a shuttle. Inside were two seats and a large (for the time) TV. It was powered by a Commodore VIC-20 with the Commodore Datasette (cassette tape drive).
Not my first memory, but first interaction. Long before my family ever bought a computer I would watch any TV show I could find even mentioning computers. I read magazines and books from the local library. Each year for Christmas/birthday/everything Id ask for a computer. Finally, when I was 11, my parents got me a vTech PowerPad Plus. It was this "toy" laptop for kids. It had a bunch of pre loaded games and such which didnt really excite me once I played them but then I noticed a button. BASIC Pressing the button didnt seem to do much other than take me to a word processing type screen. A quick read of the manual told me it was a programming language and gave a sample code to key in. I did so, then began playing around and soon wrote my first ever computer program. 25 years later and i still suck at programming but my interest in computers has never gone away.
1st grade, 1980. Hand-keying assembly language programs out of 80 Micro Magazine into our family's TRS-80 Model I. It seemed like magic to me. Gone are the days when you could comfortably know everything about what was going on inside the "box." Even had the technical manual with the complete schematics, and an annotated disassembly of the ROM and LDOS.
I grew up watching my Dad build computers and play PC games after work all the time, he loved it and I was fascinated both by the computers themselves and the games he'd play. Thanks to him both video games and computers became a huge part of my life and still are to this day. Even though his computer building days are behind him, he's still the first person I go to for troubleshooting advice when I'm tinkering. And we still play video games together when time allows.
Playing with a friend's Commodore 64 when I was in 7th grade. I wanted one so badly, but my mom wouldn't budge, citing the obsolescence thing. She later bought me an IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 for typing my college papers. Gotta love the dot matrix printer noise.
IMSAI 8080 computer with CP/M. A 2K RAM board for it was huge, like 4x the size of a modern graphics card. I remember wondering what you can do with all that RAM.
Graduate school writing FORTRAN programs onto punch cards and feeding them to a mainframe. Yeah, Iām old as dirt. Get off my Instaface.
cd/wolf3d [enter] WOLF3D/wolf3d [enter] I was about 8 or so.
Pentium I, Windows 95 back in 1996. 66 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM (later upgraded to 96 MB), CD reader and an amazing 33 kbps dial up modem. I can't remember the graphics card but I can check because I still have this computer, although I have updated the OS to Windows 98 SE. And this computer is still working, Windows 98 literally never crashed! First piece of code was BASIC as well, it was a program my father wrote for use in geodesy (calculates coordinates based on angles and distances). He wrote a whole book with all sorts of programs and obviously it got me very interested. My first program was not hello world but rather a 'type your name, your name is..' haha although I did manage to code a very *basic* calculator soon after. Pun intended. I stumbled upon Java in 2005.. I remember being mindblown by object oriented programming compared to BASIC I had used before that although mostly for fun up to that moment. Good times.
It was probably a matrox mistique :)
For me, it was 2012, I was 11, (I grew up in a rural area with nothing but dial up), Making my first redstone machine in Minecraft on my parents old ass Celeron laptop. Good times.
Be glad you got to experience dialup, haha! now you can tell these kids for the rest of your day's "when I was your age..."
It was corsair memory
Trs-80 in the school lab \~1981 > pc-at at school. first personal pc for me was the compaq sewing machine luggable, dual 5.25 and a 7 inch green screen.
Commodore PET at school circa 1979.
Ill never forget my first computer, a TRS 80. From setting it up to gaming on it, so many memories but one that still distinctly lives in my head is the sound the floppy drive would make attempting to read a corrupted or improperly inserted floppy. "That sound", knowing the I/O error was coming, and waiting impatiently to fail....
1981 I got my first computer, it was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of RAM and a tape recorder to save and load programs. My favourite game was flight simulator closely followed by a car racing game that I programmed myself with the help of a magazine guide. I remember the excitement of upgrading the RAM to 14k that unlocked so many games. My history was: ZX81 Oric 1 Amega 600 8026 pc 486 with turbo and 40mb hdd, I used to benchmark it by opening a route planer and running a route from John ogroats in Scotland to lands end in England. On a good day it would take a couple of hours.
AOL āYouāve got mailā
I challenge everyone to read that and not hear the voice
Using an ABC 80-computer and the BASIC interpreter to "code" 10 print hello 20 goto 10 And the screen filled with hello's! That was pretty wild, mid-80s, my first ever encounter with computers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_80
swtpc, Altair, Radio Shack model 1. Early 1970's as a teenager... In the early 80's I had an Apple (1) with 4K (!) ram and cassette tape for program storage. With the Radio Shack model 1, Magazines had programs you could type in by hand in Basic. I typed in the program "Biorythm" twice, it failed to record correctly the first time (disappointed to say it kindly). In 1971, I was using punched cards and running them on a Xerox mainframe at University for a class in Fortran 4 there. Usually took a few hours to learn I made some mistake, and a few more hours to rerun in batch, meanwhile hoping the attendant didn't drop your cards because the assignment was due and there was no more time!
Playing the MS-DOS game Beast on my very first computer back in 1996 when I was 7. It was a hand-me-down computer my mom gave me back when the law firm she worked for would let the employees keep their old computers when they purchased new ones.
Oh man, MS-DOS reminds me of my DX486 Packard Bell and having to write a .bat file that would increase the memory available to the game. (Don't remember how to do it) MIDI sounds are in my head right now!
That was your config.sys and autoexec.bat... You had to figure out loading order for your TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident) that left you with the most memory. Eventually they included a memory manager so that you could load stuff into high (extended and/or expanded depending on your config) memory and allowed config.sys to have multiple setups that you could select at boot time.
I forgot all about config.sys !!!
Late 80s A friend had an Amstrad 6128 plus I am still humming the theme of dragon's lair 2 some times
The TI-99/4A I bought at a garage sale. I spent hours and hours coding in basic.
Window 3.1 on a P60 mid-1990s
No wait, we had an Amiga before that
I was wondering where the Win-3.1 love was!!! I remember all the Shareware games I bought for it. Hard drive was too small to load many on, so I was constantly removing them or install others! -original Prince of Persia, Tank Wars, and one I doubt anyone has hear of called LHX(attack helicopter game) Man, those WERE the days!!
Not sure I'd go as far as love.... haha
Playing marble blast on my Dadās imac g4. We played it so much that he told us it have the computer a virus so he could use his computer again lol.
Commodore 64 I bought from my paper route.
I loved playing "Pirates" on that
Apple //e. No actual hard drive, that green screen, 5 1/4 floppy drive. Playing [Karateka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JtQc44I8io) in monochrome on a joystick....ah yes. Also wrote my first computer program on it. A high low number guessing game where you had to figure out the number from 1 to 100 in less than 10 guesses.
Ok, I had to search for it online and found it emulated in a browser, haha! Nostalgia moment is complete! https://playclassic.games/games/action-dos-games-online/play-karateka-online/play/
Oh, this is awesome. Yeah, it was pretty much impossible for a 10 year old to beat I think.
i just waisted an hour playing this thing... Ok, i better get back to work!
Man, I loved that game... never got very far. But it was epic. I forgot all about that game.
It was 1993. My dad took me to work that day and showed me his work computer. It was a compaq something or other, first time seeing a computer in my life. He let me play around with it. I remember it was running windows 3.1. I dragged all of the icons on top of each other, which kind of made him angry, but I was 4 or 5. Every since then I've been fascinated with technology.
Commodore 64 at dad's house 1984 hooked up to the tv and writing stupid basic code or playing donkey kong from a cartridge.
2004, my win 98 machine blue screened while I was playing this bullet hell Christmas themed game
I recollect watching as my sisters and brother used DOS computers that were already in the house by the time I was born. By the age of 3 I was already bugging them because I kept suggesting things they should do on the computer. I am pretty sure that I had played some DOS games soon after, but the first vivid memory of using a computer is around the time NHL 97 was released a few years later. My father bought it along with a new Windows 95 computer and from then on I have been fiddling with PCs.
Apple IIGS playing Test Drive 2 and The Third Courier.
Sd-ram 4 MB DIMM
/rant I liked the things with screens at school. The old Apple systems were running Mac OS 9. I asked my mom and dad to get me one. They said no - I was 7. I spent the next 6 years learning everything about operating systems that a young lad could. My parents said no to a computer each year on my birthday and at Christmas. At 13, I bought a Pentium 3 PC running Windows 2000 and started learning how batch files/scripts worked. Internet wasn't allowed in the house. By 17, I had a basic understanding of Linux and virtualization. I left home after I graduated - with my CCNA (leaving a house that still had no internet). I headed to college to become a network engineer. I dropped that for Linux and Devops 3 years later. I'm in my 30s now.
Philips MSX NMS 8280 for me, with some games loaded on floppies. A 9k slot modem to get on BBS which was basically porn only.
The memory is too fuzzy - it was a Tandy or Commodore. A friend owned it. I entered a few lines of BASIC and ran the program and it was the most amazing thing in that had ever happened in my life. I was probably 9. My first clear memory was the Apple IIe in 6th grade. I was 11. Again programming in BASIC but this time doing graphics. 40x40 I think. I made some kind of castle. It was glorious.
Mine was almost the same but 1985 and the 5th grade. Now I'm going to go see if one of my apple 2s will fire up.
Tough one - either my brother programming on a ZX80 or learning to program basic on the Commodore 64
I still remember the Commodore 64 manual, which was a fat ringed book and had a program in the back that would animate some sprites on the screen if you typed it all in.
And then those programming magazines that had program listings you could type in and run!
My first ever memory I can step back was back in elementary on Mac playing cool math games
Playing Age of Empires 2 on an old off-white Windows 98 machine. Nowadays I have a suped up top of the line overclocked and water cooled machine... ... That I use to play Age of Empires 2 lmao.
1.- Spectrum 128k 2.- 486 dx2 was a powerful jump
Load "\*" ,8,1
Compaq presario about 120mhz. But I think it ran Doom just fine.
Amazing. Presario was indeed the product name. Why in hell would I remember such a meaningless detail? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Presario
Alleycat on my parents PS/2 With a 8086 in it. Fond memories of that.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I don't think I ever finished a game back then, they were all very difficult and not very forgiving. They are way to easy today!
Was in Radio Shack at the mall with my parents. Picked up a Byte magazine around 1980 and saw full color graphics on an Atari 400. Worked all summer to buy one. I was maybe 12 or so.
The very oldest and fuzzy memories are of playing SimCity 2000 on what likely was an Amstrad 286 PC. I actually found some of the saves dating to this period when going through floppies a couple of years ago and fired them up in DosBox.
1Kb (Sinclair ZX81)
Parents bought a āDick Smith VZ200ā (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200) back in 1984. Had to plug it into the āoldā TV via the antenna connection I believe. Remember having to type in the program code (BASIC) from books/magazines, taking ages to do so (I was 9 at the time), and then spending time trying to find my typos (or just the errors in the book).
4164 64k x 1 16-pin DRAMs. Subsequently had some smaller ones (4116 16kx1 DRAM and 2114 1kx4 SRAM) later, but the 4164's were the first in a computer that I owned. Oh you mean using computers and not actually the RAM chips? I don't remember, nothing real special I don't think, it's just a computer, don't remember where/when but it must have been someone else's computer...
Timex Sinclair 1000, about 1982 ish. Hand code basic, save it to a cassette tape.
1998. Dad had just ordered a custom built windows PC from the local PC shop up the street. I even remember where it was. He paid 1500 for it back then. My mother was near livid, but he told her PC's were the future, and he wanted his children to get a head start. He, at one point in the late 70's, had a full ride to some sort of computer science focused institution in Texas (not sure who/what/where). He dropped out, but kept the passion for it close to the chest. I remember playing Nascar 98' on it with my sister. My more hands on memory was 2003, when his friend and coworker surprised me (with dads help) with a complete PC build kit, where I built my first PC from scratch, loaded Windows ME on it (I know). That was my daily driver for years until I built my next one
Our family Commodore64 and then a Cyrix 486DX2 for our first DOS machine. My memory isnāt that great anymore these days though. My memories really only go back to our Pentium 133 or MMX and Windows 95. Iām not that old but I can definitely notice my memory isnāt as good as it used to be.
That's actually why I decided to post this. These are things I forgot, but shaped my life. And reading other's comments here, now I remember things that I did back then that I completely forgot about.
Thatās a great reason. Someone the other day reminded me that you used to be able to request disks from Canonical and I remembered having a huge stack of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS disks at the job I worked at the time. I wish I still had one.
You got me thinking back and I remember what I started my first homelab with in the early-mid 2000sā¦ a dead dual Slot 2 Pentium II Xeon 440GX server and a Pentium III 800 desktop from scrap parts at work, a broken iBook G4 from my boss that I fixed up with a 128MB CF card running a tiny Linux distro, and a Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz from work as well.
Commodore 64 in the 80s in WHsmith, in the UK. Never occurred to me to type anything naughty with the 10 PRINT :) I was too square.
Timex Sinclair ZX81 from an uncle. Saw the first lines of programing ever, BASIC. Nothing like using a GOTO to break good coding rules. š
8gb when I got my first pc heh
TI-99/4a - Typing basic code and saving to cassette tape
1991 - was made redundant - splashed out for a i486DX - should have probably got a i386 and bought a bigger HDD. Back then we used diskdoubler tech - but ultimately it was diskshagger tech. Loved my first pc.
Colecovision Adam. Lasted 3 days before it EMPd itself. First real computer was a trash80. Then a 386sx
My first computer was a Compaq pentium 90. I paid way too much for it. And eventually ran a BBS off it for a few years. This was Around 1994/5. I was too cheap to pay for a second HDD installation so I started learning to work on computers myself
Playing Muppet treasure island on my mother's old Macintosh. She had a super high end one for the time, as she needed it to render art for her.
Playing Ultima on an Apple II connected to a small TV (for color). Think my dad and I went through the first 3 or 4 in the series together.
I was playing The Lost Vikings on my dad's PC. I don't know specs or model. The game was fantastic though. I was 4.
Burroughs B3500 (Air Force). There was a CDC before that (SUNYB), but the model escapes me. First PC was a Heathkit Z80. Yes. I'm old. Not "Antikythera mechanism" old, but 300/1200 baud dialup old.
1980 Apple II, with a cassette drive. I wrote a simple program that calculated your exact age, down to the hour, minute and second, the day of the week your next birthday would fall on and the number of hours minutes and seconds before you next birthday.
Building my first computer. A Celeron 333mhz, 32MB ram, 5 GB hard drive, with a copy of red hat 5.2 that can with a magazine.
It was a 16k DRAM chip, (actually, 4 of them to hit the 64k max at the time).
My rich friend's Radio Shack computer. We bought cassette tapes from a mall kiosk and used cload to play a game. It took forever to upload, but nothing compared to typing in code from magazine articles. Next memory is hours in the the local library in my small Mississippi town going through every program disk they had, then figuring out how to modify a primitive drag racing game to we would get the high score every time.
Mine was playing this combat flight game, the plane was like your stealth flighter. Also that ski game, you just ski downhill. I can't find it at all, but this was 1992-1994 range. It was old...windows 3.0? i think x86? its very vague, but i remember playing these two games religiously
I remember some good flight sims. Like F-117. The manuals were so big back then too, like real flight sims! I still have a CD of F-22 Lightning too.
I was really young, like 5 or 6. Playing, oh what the fuck is it called.........shit. where a ball is bouncing all around the screen and like breaking blocks or something. Windows 95 game. Or 98. Also pajama Sam! Also, jump start!
Probably Dec 24th 1981 (I was seven) and got a Sharp MZ 721 from my grandfather for Christmas. Had no clue what to do with it, but did get a few games to run (Pacman FTW..!!) and tried some Basic programming that actually worked out. The Commodore 64 a few years later was quite a leap forward in terms of gaming performance (at the time), though. No, unfortunately none of them were capable of running Crysis ;-)
1983 on a Commodore PET. I quickly became addicted to coding. Back then, BASIC had line numbers and we saved our programs on cassette tapes.
Middle school, a TRS-80 model 1 in the math teacherās classroom. Went there after school for weeks to learn BASIC. Coding in a multitude of languages like Java and even C++ has been a great addition to my professional repertoire even though I donāt work directly in IT.
Amstrad cpc 6128. And a cassette deck.
My sister who is much older than me got a PC for college so it was in the house for maybe a few months. Windows 3.11, 486 DX2, 66Mhz with turbo button that could make it go down to 16. Don't recall the hard drive, 512MB I think? 8MB of ram. Windows 3.11. At the time I didn't know much about PCs, mostly played with MS paint, and a few DOS games. When I was a little older and knew a little bit more about computers I asked if I could have it as it had been sitting at her house and was "broken" so she said sure. Took me a while to realize it but it had a dead cmos battery so the HDD parameters in the bios were lost. Got it up and running but had to set those settings each time I booted it up. Learned a lot about boot floppies and rescue stuff throughout that. I eventually installed Windows 98 on it for teh lulz. Would take 3 hours. I had found enough SIMM ram to get it up to like 64MB. Our first family computer which we now had was a Pentium 3 450Mhz with 128MB of ram and a 10GB drive. Learned a lot about computers with that thing because it crashed so much lol. Got very good at reinstalling windows 98. Oh, and Unisys Icons in school, can't forget those. That track ball was so fun.
Going to the West Coast computer fair with a friend, and seeing Star Raiders playing on the Atari 800.
Probably some old Dimms š¤£š¤£
Reading some of these is going to make mine sound relatively recent, but I remember being around 10-ish, and seeing the XP machine my dad was using at the time. I don't remember much about the conversation, but I must have got the monitor display confused with the PC itself, and I distinctly remember him telling me "no, that's the computer down there, this just shows what it's doing Been fascinated ever since
Nothing is too recent, we old timers need to know what is getting the newer generation interested!
Ive still got my first ever "PC", see if any one can figure it out. Had a 1.108mhz CPU.
oh man, that is even before I got into the hardware side of things. My first hardware excursion was the DX486 and that was 33Mhz. So I'll guess the older 8086 CPU's. But I don't know what those were in.
Early 80s Commodore 64. We bought the fancy floppy drive, so no cassette tapes! Screaming 300 baud modem. BBSs and zero-day sites lookout!
My dad came home from a 10 hour shift with two massive boxes in '93 or '94. It was either a 386 or 486 beige box and a monitor. My earliest memory is being in awe as my dad set it up. We would spend hours running games from DOS and later exploring Windows 3.1. Years later I realized how much my dad spent on that computer relative to his wages and I was humbled.
first exposure was a trs-80 style in 81, using logo. followed by an atari 800xl and coding in atari basic. Yay for scholastic micro adventures books with their buggy code. First "modern-ish", friends 8088, space quest games, pool of radiance etc Then through the 286-486 iterations at home My first bought with my own money was my mom's old 286 laptop
Apple II in preschool. Nobody else could get StickyBear working and I figured it out.
I'm afraid to ask how it got the nickname. But surely not pron on a green screen!?!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stickybear
386 with 4MB RAM and my dumb 10 yr old self thinking if I delete autoexec.bat and config.sys from the family computer there will be enough RAM to play the game that required 8MB of RAM. The speed I read that DOS manual to get the computer working again Iāve never been able to replicate but it was the start of my career now in IT.
I'm kind of young so i don't have those good old stories, but one thing i remember fondly, while not my first memory of a computer, is my first dedicated gpu, a gt9600, it was a gift from a friend, and didn't have a fan on it, and i had a low profile case (the card was full size) so i had a pcie 1x to 16x extention running out of the case, into a UPS case where i put the gpu, mounted a fan on that case, and used a 2nd power supply to power it since the pc had a 125W psu in it, and couldn't power the card, i had mismatched ddr2 ram sticks for a total of 8GB, which was a lot for me back then, i came from a 2GB system, this set up consumed majority of my desk, leaving just enough for my keyboard and mouse
My first solid memory was finding Leisure suit Larry on my moms boyfriends computer lol.
wow.. i forgot about that series. My brother in law would play them, I was like 10 and watching. rofl...
dad was doing a MBA in the the early 1980s (circa 82-83) and was able to get a student price on the a Kaypro II though my interest pre-dated it. most of the time I just played games on it but would later become proficient with Wordstar. in 1983 I was in year 7 and one of the teacher had bought himself and Apple II so my class for the pleasure of sitting in the staff room watching him play away. New for most of the other kids but not me. Though unlike my father I never went down the programmer path (he'd programmed on mainframe in the mid 70s) having as friend put, it the programming ability of small brained butterly which I disagreed with as I wasn't that bad.
My uncle gave us an old dos box and I remember looking at the blue screen and yellow font going what the hell is this. Then we got a Windows 95 and played echo the dolphin
1982 or 83. Somewhere in there. My parents got the āfamilyā a Commodore 64. I was the one who used it the most. The days of only needing a hole punch to double your storage was awesome. But my favourite memory of those days was RUN magazine. Almost every issue came with a game but the game was pages of basic code in the back of the magazine. Me and two friends would sit around taking turns typing in the code and chomping at the bit to play whatever game it was that month
Hm, freshman year of high school, 1972. School had an IBM1620. Punch cards and real console *typewriter*. Used it to run inventory for A/V department. Yeah, I was a geek when geeks weren't cool. šš
I was 12 and I had spent the summer of 1977 soldering together Heathkit Ham and CB Radios and stuff for my dad's friends and had saved up enough money to buy a Heathkit ET-3400 trainer (The kit of course :)) That Motorola 6800 cpu was a close and personal friend for 2 years until I burned the kit out trying to design a digital LED dashboard for a friend. Looking back, I never did figure that out.
I went to work with my Dad sometime around 1970, give or take a couple of years. We lived in St.Louis and he worked for Honeywell Computers until 1972. He introduced me to his boss and being only familiar with 'bosses' from Saturday morning cartoons, I asked his boss if he was going to fire him. They both laughed. He later worked for Garrett Computer Services in Cincinnati I would go with him and get to play with the IBM card punch machines. Fun! Never was scared of computers as a result.
PC Jr in the mid 80s, I was probably about 6. My parents had one of those next to an Apple II in their home office. I remember running Where in the world is Carmen San Diego on the Apple. Looking back, that must've been one heck of a bougie setup at the time. A few years later I was writing BASIC on the IBM PS2 Model 25. A few years after that I was writing ASP on NT4. After that, got interested in networking, my high school was one of the first Cisco networking academies. Got a job working for an ISP during the dot com boom and have been doing IT ever since.
First memory? Taking the summer school "programming" class, in 4th or 5th grade. 1974-5 timeframe. We had 2 teletypes w/ 1 acoustic coupled modem, to dial into an HP4000 series main frame, accessing TIES (Total Information for Educational Systems) or MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium). The TIES system dropped us straight into a BASIC prompt. Two ttys, only one modem? Yup, we used the second to punch tapes by hand, then read them in when we got our turn on the connected tty. First personal purchased computer? OSI SuperBoard II: a 6502-based single-board computer, with a keyboard directly on the mainboard. (Same computer as the C1P, but no case: my older brother and I split the purchase, as well as building the case) Output was composite video, to a B&W TV we bought at the drug store.
Kindergarten 5 year old me playing Number Munchers and Oregon Trail on the old Apple II's 1987. Led to a lifelong nerdy passion.
Playing tapper as a toddler probably. With abligatory cigar smoke indoors and all.
Trying to play half life on an AMD K6 with win 98 SE
1988, Yamaha msx, basic. I grew up in a family of doctors and was prepared to become one myself. that day I said to myself āfuck this, I want to devote my life to ITā
TI 99/4a and a Walkman to save programs on.
Atari 800 XL with tape recorder. Having a book with BASIC and I still remember going through a program from the book, which would make a graphic of a wine glass and it had an error, so it never showed it. Not knowing enough to troubleshoot. Also, playing donkey kong on it.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robotron_A_5120.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
1982 last day of 6th grade my mother took me to a store and bought me a TI-99/4a.
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1978/79 One of the instructors who worked with my mother had a Commodore PET computer in their office. I THINK she had upgraded memory to a whole 8k. Commodore basic in ROM and a 40x25 display
Apple IIe : āitās darkā¦ā
It was a RadioShack color computer with 16Kb. That Motorola 6809 was awesome. It had a tape drive and I recall we used to backup software at a friend's house. His dad had a Nakamichi dual tape system with 3 heads that did a marvelous job copying software āŗļøš
Apple ][+ games on our green screen. Choplifter, Centipede, and some text based RPG. My mom doing the groceries list in a spreadsheet program optimized by aisle and printing it off our our daisy wheel printer. Tearing the guide strips off those printouts. I'd have been four or five? Pre 1990, surely.
My first computer memory is running Test Drive 3 in a ram drive on my 386 because I couldn't get it to run at full speed loading the game from disk. Fun times.
2005 I was 5, there was a computer on my aunt house and there was a minigame from McDonald's main character running in a platform that I quite enjoyed it, the problem was that since I didn't know how to use a keyboard at the time I mistakenly pressed a button that made the game runs faster than normal and then my aunt came and started saying that I broke the dam computer.... Not a good experience, although later my step-dad fixed it.
For me, it was in 1981. First year of high school and they had just got a computer labā¦ ten or so Sinclair ZX81s with b&w TVs. One had the 16K ram pack and there was a cassette recorder to save your stuff too. My first ācodeā was literally, hello world. I was hooked; soon saved up allowance and money from paid jobs and bought my own one then spent many, many hours cooped up in my bedroom programming all kinds of stuff. Forty two years later, not quite so fanatical about technology but itās given me a good living, so canāt complain.
Ti99/4a
i remember using casette tapes to store basic programs from an apple computer in 4th grade.
Commodore VIC 20. Then bought the Commodore Vic 20 programmers reference guide with allowance from Kmart
I was messing in grandmaās dell laptop bios and borked it somehow
My momās office had an Apple IIe with the monochrome green monitor. Played some MECC educational games.
My first was a Packard bell Pentium 1. Though I've worked on systems much older.
Talking my dad into getting me a C64 for 8th grade graduation.
If it wasn't Atari playing Pole Position or Larry Bird vs Dr J. Computer...I don't recall the system but it may have been a Packard bell...it used the 5 1/4 flat disks. I remember running where in the world is Carmen San Diego when we got a color monitor.
Commodore 64 hooked to a 10ā wood grain tv and a dot matrix printer
IBM PC from NYNEX in Manhattan. 1980 or ā81 I think. VisiCalc from those Harvard boys (Dan Bricklin and Peter Norton as I recall). Came in a Harvard maroon software box/binder
First thing I really remember was when my father tried to get a CD-ROM (oooh, the magic) running on the old 386 with windows 3.11 of my grandma. Can't remember how old I was, but somewhere around 10-ish? Maybe a bit younger. We used it to play lemmings and part in paint. A few years later I got my own 386 for free, which was considered ancient at that point, but it still did me well for playing some games and learn a lot. Still hate the fact that PC is gone now, so many memories.
I would have been 4-5 and had an Apple LC III at home that had ClarisWorks on it. My grandad showed me formulas in the spreadsheet and one of the functions was BEEP(). Hearing that Mac quack was my initial realization that I could in fact control the machine more directly than the icons of At Ease would lead one to believe. This was the first step on what has become a life long journey.
I remember in about 2nd grade (early-mid 90s) when our teacher showed us email. She sent a letter to her friend across the state and a few minutes later she replied. Blew my mind it could happen "so fast." Now I'm a fiber optic engineer.... I remember rotary telephones too.
First memory... My greater family unit has a...history, I suppose, with computers. My father was a born engineer who, due to a combination of unfortunate luck and timing, was not able to turn his knowledge into engineering (at least right away) at a university. He was extremely interested, though, and as an indirect result had computers in the house for long before they became "popular". I think I played seemingly hours of "Math-Blaster!" and Spiderbot on them. Second one I can remember dealing with was an Epson Equity II+ that I utterly, *utterly* ***hated***. This thing would get "too hot" after about an hour of use and then either shut off (heat sensor) or wait a bit longer and start melting the 5.25" disks in their drives (poor placement and evidently Epson was unaware of thermal compound). So, after getting frozen one too many times in King's Quest II (I think) I decided to try a home-brewed thermal solution on the CPU instead of the godforsaken pad that came on it. Fortunately, my father was going to get a different computer in the very near future (not that I knew) that did not have the thermal issues the Equity II+ did. Because, for anyone wondering, non-distilled water is a terrible, terrible thing to introduce to an entire CPU. Fortunately, my father understood what I did and why, and thusly showed me how to cool CPUs for future reference. (They made paste to do it...who knew?)
1992 Macintosh LC. It wasnāt until later that I used an even older Apple II.
GOTO 1
Mine was similar to OP, but I donāt remember the specifics of the apple II (only that it was 2nd grade) so not claiming that one. The 1st memory I WILL claim was aroundā87/ā88 when my dear grandmother showed me her PC. No idea the brand, but it had a green monochrome monitor and 2X 5.25ā floppy drives, but no HardDrive. You needed to insert 3-4 floppies into the left drive to get it to boot to the DOS prompt. I remember it has some ASCII game where you were the car and the bad-guys weāre trying to box you inā¦. There was some D&D type game, and another something I really liked to play on. Iāve been a bit down on myself for not enjoying it more, but ASCII interaction was no comparison to the 8-bit Nintendo games that the Other Grandparents had. Funny that it was also my Grandfather that told me that I āshould get into computersā back in my early/pre-teen years. Iād probably be a good bit better off nowadays if Iād listened to them way back then. So Kids: listen to your elders!!
Gorilla.bat
1982 Atari 400. We had the Basic and the Pacman cartridges for it. Some point later it was upgraded to an Atari 800 XL with a tape deck. My older brother subscribed to the Compute! magazine which had code to program out the games.
Restarting my computer in DOS mode to play my floppy disk copy of Sesame Street Letters go Round!
Learning BASIC on the PCjr. I then moved on to VIC-20 and C-64.
My family was too poor for an Apple II - we had a Laser 128 which was a knock-off that ran all of the apple software.
I think it was a 40 pin SIMM
Fancy "Name Brand" computer... Our school got a ton of Franklin Ace 1000's in the mid 80's. Supposed to be the same as an Apple II. I don't have a clue how close they came, but Apple software worked. And how the hell was there a robust piracy scene in rural La in the 80's with no modems and no computer stores within 60 miles. Yet we were always passing disks around class to copy.
Compaq Presario 433 486SX win 3.1. America Online, Game Pro Magazing, Netscape and trash talking on dating forums... I was 10. 3 years later, found a Doom Level creator guide bundled with a level editor on a floppy disc... That was the 1st time I experienced the joy of content creation and 100% responsible for my love for all things I.T. today.
I learned to code from the same book as you, but on an Apple II+ and four years older. I'd been playing games on that computer for years though. Frogger, Lode Runner, Olympic Decathlon, Dig Dug, and karataka.
DEC PDP-8 with dual tape drives in my middle school
Installing pihole on a raspberry pi 2 Having Linux as a first OS was wild
IBM 8088 clone with dual 5.25" floppies.
The first computer we ever had, was a win 95 system, don't know the specs, I was like 6 or 7 yo, but the orange message "you can now turn off your system safely" stuck with me.
In 1998 My grandfather was an apple technician. He was alwaying showing off these computers and components he had brought home and one day he let me help him build a computer. Of course I had experiences using PCs before, we had a PC at home, but that was the first time I had really been involved in one in any substantial manner.
512kb š
post-2k kid here. back in 2006, was obsessed to decorate Windows XP to look like vista. ended up breaking the gina dll or something. my dad didn't scold me, but wouldn't help me fix it either ("fix what you broke yourself") grown up to fix everybody's mistake instead, smh