Your Computer Cherry

When did you pop it?

Either, when did you first use one, and/or when did you get/ what kind was the first you owned/worked with?

I think I was introduced to Pong in 1977, and Apple Computers in school in 82? I got a TI 99 around that time....


A year or two later, I played Kings Quest on a portable IBM





I remember my dad showing me windows when it came out.....



and playing King's Quest with actual visible characters



MS paint was incredible....

My dad's a physics prof, so I got to check out the various labs he would work in. The first computer I saw was probably in 1975. A paper terminal hooked up to a mainframe.
I got to start playing with them myself around 1977 or 1978 at his lab. He built a Heathkit terminal for our home in around 1980 or so and I used to dial in to the college computer which was hooked up to the Dartmouth computer where there was a chat room. I was doing that in 1982 for sure. Maybe in 1981. It had a 300 baud modem. You would see the text fill the screen, character by character, line by line.

We also borrowed a friend's Apple 2 somewhere around 1984, and had that set up in our basement for a year or so. That was my first real personal computer experience.

I got exposed to a lot of high tech equipment in my youth. I remember when somebody was excitedly showing me the Cray computer they got to use in the late '80s, and I was most impressed by the built-in padded bench. I sat on it.

I'd consider the Heathkit terminal to be the first. This is what it looked like.

I got a Commodore 128 for xmas '85, had been playing with the 64s at school for a couple years.

Apple II in elementary school



Apple II GS at home



On which I played tons of Oregon Trail, Math Blasters, and Crystal Quest:

1977, dialed in to a mainframe from high school. Played Star Trek and Adventure (Colossal Caves) for the first time.

Not sure if it counts or not, but in the late 1960s accompanied my father to work and got to play with IBM punch card machines and stuff.

Bullitt;641647 wrote:

On which I played tons of Oregon Trail, Math Blasters, and Crystal Quest:

I loved Crystal Quest. I played it on a Mac II.

First computer was an IBM/360 mainframe. I talked to it via punch cards. Good times. :D

1992 I picked up a Commodore 64 at a garage sale for $10. Eventually figured out how to make animations of Popeye getting laid. With sound.

My parents got us a Commodore 64 in the Christmas of '84 or '85. Played a lot of Q-Bert, Outrun, BoulderDash, Wheel of Fortune, and occasionally this godawful Wizard of Id spelling game.

Sold the whole collection to a guy for $10 in '97.

Thermal paper terminal with acoustic coupler

Our Kid had an Atari games system when we were kids. Played Pong and Skeet. I got a Commodore Vic20, Christmas '83 ( iirc). I loved it, but was hugely disappointed that it had no modem or the capacity to hack into anything (ala Wargames). I diligently taught myself commodore basic using the book that came with the bundle. Oh yes. I sent that seagull flying across my screen.


My favourite games on Vic20 were: Hunchback, Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, Jetpac and the cartridge text adventure The Count.

It eventually died a death around about the same time I started to lose interest in computers generally. I never got over the disappointment of how far behind they were from my expectations of computers.

Got back into computers when i met J. Played about on his old C64; then got an Amiga 500; followed by an Amiga 1200.

First 'proper' computer was around 1993/4. Can't recall. It was the year the Pentium chip was recalled for some mathematical problem. I deliberately avoided the pentiums for that reason and because a 486dx was suddenly more affordable. Still had no internet access.

My Bro got a Pentium the year after that and got himself hooked up with internet access. It was very expensive at the time, because you had to pay the phone bill, the internet provider monthly fee, plus the per minute charges. Might have been through Compuserve. J used to go and use his internet access and pay the per minute charges when he did.

I think my first internet provider was Claranet.

Within a year of getting hooked up J and I discovered MMOs. I can recall ridiculous telephone bills from that time. One of at least £1400.

I remember being very excited about getting ISDN because finally I could keep up with others in the games I played.

Apart from a period of around 3 years (aged 15-18) computers have always played a part in my life, from at least the age of 8 (when Martin got the Atari) I'm not a computer geek inasmuch as i don't really know what I am doing on them and never got into the whole hacking and programming scene. But I love them and always have.


[eta] Here's a youtube clip of Jet Pac! I was addicted to this game. [youtube]1yahqxS3BIs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Whilst looking at these clips I was reminded of two other games I adored: Hoppitt and Blitz; both of which came as a bundle with the Vic20

August 1981. I was 6 years old.

My father bought one of the original IBM PCs, serial number < 100. It would be a collector's item today, had it survived unmodded. I was programming it by mid-October. BASICA!

But that same chassis, with significant enhancements, got me all the way through high school.

A 20MB RLL Hard Drive!
256 KB RAM!!
A CGA monitor!!!

We had some sort of games console, built in games no cartridges.
First computer I ever used would have been in ~'80, at school, I don't even know what it was.
First owned was a ZX81, I also learnt Basic by plugging through the manual. I had the 16K RAM expansion (pictured) and used to play a flight sim on it ( mostly instruments only), later many years on a ZX Spectrum Also had an Amiga 500+ in later years before moving to PC's.

In high school, '76/'77 used a dumb terminal with accoustic connection to Penn's (I think) mainframe. Two friends and I bought a Vic 20 in about '82 or '83. Bought my first PC in '87, maybe. It had a whole 640K of RAM and a 1 meg hard drive, IIRC.

The Atari. My friends and I played it a lot but the first impression sure wasn't an oooh ahhh ...more like an err..what's that?...does it work?

An Atari 800 in 1983, waiting for over an hour and praying that things would load on cassette tape!

Atari video game. I think mine pre-dated the famous Atari 64. I still have it, with a box full of games, and it still works.

In 1978 (I think) I took a summer school class at a neighboring district (ours certainly didn't have such things) to learn Basic on an Apple IIc.

In 1979 (I think) my parents bought me an Apple IIe. I used it all the way up through 1992 as a glorified word processor. I remember that it actually had an amazingly good printer for its time! What technology was that? Not dot-matrix, something else. A very early inkjet maybe. Of course that was before WYSIWYG, so getting the word processor to do anything like subscripts, bold, italic, double-space, etc. was a tricky business requiring special codes and a cheat sheet.

Of course it also had such great games to play on its creamed-spinach screen as Space Quarks and Lemonade! What fun! I also had a text-based game of Hitchhiker's Guide. I never got very far. I got on the Vogon ship and kept getting killed by bad poetry.

Mom bought herself a 286 sometime circa 1988 or so. My favorite game: Leisure Suit Larry. Remember him? :D I inherited that computer in 93 when they got a new 386. By then it had been upgraded to have 5K RAM and a whompin' 20 MB hard drive!

My hubby's first computer was a Timex Sinclair. He still has it, too.

Bally Astrocade was our first game system in probably 1981 or so. Commodore 64 in about 1985 was our first computer.

I vaguely remember playing Pong on a small console in the mid seventies, I think? My best friend in elementary school had it. I seem to recall we became bored by it, and probably moved on to more interesting things, like swimming in her indoor pool and hanging out in her swanky kitchen making peanut butter sandwiches.

Fast forward to 1982 and a FORTRAN class my junior year in HS. I never did get any of my programs to do what they were supposed to do. We worked on IBM typewriter-like plotters hooked up to a mainframe, which was a whole room full of big cabinet looking things.

Now that I'm learning HTML and actually reading through the code to figure out what the hell I'm doing wrong, I can understand what my teacher was seeing when he read through my pathetic attempts at writing FORTRAN. It used to absolutely amaze me! But I think I'm starting to get it now--it basically boils down to 'finish what you start.'

Atari 2600. Commodore VIC 20. Packard Bell 1gb. Compaq Presario 5000. Gateway GT5220 20gb. Currently HP s5220y 600gb.

Wow... Doesn't make me any younger !

First video game ATARI 2600

I discovered programming and BASIC with a Sinclair ZX81 on Christmas 1983. After that I went to a Spectrum, then Commodore PET, Vic 20, C64 then PC and Macintoch

Right now, on PC Core i7 6 GB RAM Win7 Pro. I stopped counting after 2 TB of disk capacity.

And as of now... Programming is not fun anymore, it's a job