How did you first get into computers...

[T.O.tourist]

How did you first get into computers?

I heard that there was porn on this internet thingy, but I ain't found any.





10 print "I Started with a Commodore 64."
20 goto 10

 

[JohnHenry]

August 1969

A salesman showed up in my office with a portable (movable) Teletype ASR-33 and an acoustic coupler (150 baud modem), we plugged my telephone handset into the coupler and dialed a phone number.
We entered a user id and password, and then I wrote my first program:
for i=1 to 10
print i, i**2
next i

Let me see, 40 years * 250 days per year * 50 lines of new code per day

 

[Rono]

1982. My friend had an Apple 2E and after school we would go and play on it and learn basic programming. It cost his parents over $3000.00 just for the computer. He was 15 years old and got special permission from school to work at Litton Industries a few days per week teaching 40 and 50 year old guys. Litton programmed guidance systems for cruise missles. He also was allowed to do work from home. He would work for 2 hours and bill them for 6 or 8 hours.
I have been a Mac guy ever since.

 

[dreamblade]

I started on a Timex Sinclair 1000, in the early 80's. With a whopping 2k memory, I would plug it into my black and white kitchen tv and program the game I would want to play. Later my dad bought an interface that would allow us to plug a tape player to the computer to load the program we'd want.

Then my dad bought a 16k cartridge. NOW I was playing with power.

http://www.adlininc.com/uxpioneers/images/ts1000.jpg

 

[Prim0]

My more nerdy cousin gave me his old Atari 400 when he moved up to an 800...

 

[oldjones]

My brother's roommate sold time on a GE mainframe networked by teletype and an acoustic-coupled modem. He carried a teletype around in the trunk of his car to demo to potential customers, and the most popular demo was a game: "Land the LEM on the moon".

In the evenings we'd sit in their living room and take turns. Until his boss called him in and pointed out that the single biggest Canadian user of GE's computer time that past month lived at his address.

You ain't heard nothin' till you've heard a teletype ringing its bells and chuggin' away, furiously typing out a fireworks display on a roll of newsprint.

 

[viking1965]

Nope... not familiar with that one... I do however remember a game called Adventure. It was a text RPG made for the PC... it was quite interesting and fun to play actually.

Was it "Larry the Lounge Lizard"?

 

[WoodPeckr]

But the standard tool for many years in the 60's and 70's was the good old slide rule. I could multiply, divide, work logarithms and trig functions to 3 decimal precision in the twinkle of eye (that could be an exaggeration).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

LOL!
Still have my slide rule used back in the 60s in college!
Believe they do qualify as computers, no....

A very 'green friendly' device for its day....

 

[danmand]

LOL!
Still have my slide rule used back in the 60s in college!
Believe they do qualify as computers, no....

A very 'green friendly' device for its day....

I paid what must have amounted to $1,000 for a top of the line
Daiwa log log sliderule. I still have it, and 3 or 4 others.

Oh, the days of youth.

 

[Cycleguy007]

Was it "Larry the Lounge Lizard"?

Nope, It was "ADVENTURE" as I stated my my post.

 

[RobertCortez59]

I had a KALIKO VISION - does that count?

 

[great bear]

I got into my first computer by plying it with spam.

 

[Berlin]

Radio Shit's TRS80. My first contact. Had to do it for school, and no regret.

Remember the discs, the cassette ?

 

[Master Muse]

I keep saying I'm the Oldest

Afraid I've got the record. Long before becoming a lawyer, while fresh out of college after military service, I was hired by IBM. That was June, 1956. My job was to sell punch card systems and such computers as existed. The most popular was the IBM 650 which had a 2,000 word drum that stored ALL the data and ALL the coding. A word was 5 characters in bi-quinary code.

Later by a dozen years and after being with a couple of other computer manufacturing companies, I founded the world's most successful data entry hardware business. We also purchased a company called MITS which made the world's 1st PC type unit. They were in Sandia NM. Someone mentioned the PDP-11. I used the PDP-11 and the 11S in my machine. Then, I invested in a start-up that made a copy of the 11-s and othe DEC units, running on DEC software. Has met the Olson brothers yars before in the old mill building in Maynard Mass. They shared an office with two big partner desks, facing each other. Nice guys; brilliant technicians and businesss people too.

I've seen it all I think I retired way back and did think about purchasing CPM to do what Gates did but decided it was too much work and I didn't need the money.

Why become a lawyer? That's a long story for another day.

 

[danmand]

Afraid I've got the record. Long before becoming a lawyer, while fresh out of college after military service, I was hired by IBM. That was June, 1956. My job was to sell punch card systems and such computers as existed. The most popular was the IBM 650 which had a 2,000 word drum that stored ALL the data and ALL the coding. A word was 5 characters in bi-quinary code.

You have got the record.

 

[tarkovsky]

Sometimes I wonder if the kids today even know that the Mac is short for Macintosh, which is what it was originally called. I can remember using the Lisa, if that dates me.

 

[Anynym]

Sometimes I wonder if the kids today even know that the Mac is short for Macintosh, which is what it was originally called. I can remember using the Lisa, if that dates me.

The Lisa was an ugly little thing, even if it did have a few "neat" features.

a company called MITS which made the world's 1st PC type unit.

Not a credible comment without a lot of additional detail. Sorry, but this sounds more like someone thinks more of what he did than what actually happened. Especially if he doesn't seem to know there's a slash in CP/M.

 

[Cycleguy007]

What I find very interesting is that many people credit Jobs (As in Steve founder of Apple) with the creation & design of the GUI OS... and then accuse Gates (as in Bill from Microsoft) of "borrowing" this idea for his "Windows" concept.

People in the know, realize both of these guys "borrowed" the idea from Xerox!

 

[BoringBob]

How to get "dated".

The first few computers I used included a commodore PET, a RCA cosmac trainer, an HP2000 minicomputer, and a SWTPC 6800.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SWTPC6800_Computer.jpg

http://www.decodesystems.com/hp2000/pgihp1.gif

BoringBob, older than the hills

 

[The LoLRus]

I remember when the web first came out and Q107 announced on air what their website address was...LOL. Back then they didnt have the simple Q107.com, they had to go through the entire address letter by letter, so DJ announced it like this: http://www.Q107.ca.on/radio/onair.command Or something like that anyways, it was funny