My first computer experience: in the late '70s I built a 6502-based micro from a kit (Tangerine Ltd, in the UK) but couldn't get it to run, so the kit makers had me visit to check it out and gave me a working version to use in their office. The manual said something like "Start BASIC by typing 'BASIC<CR>' on the keyboard". An hour or so later when they'd found & fixed my build bug and returned my micro, I still hadn't figured out that '<CR>' meant I should hit the Enter key.
Nevertheless that kit started me on a 40 year programming career bringing me and my family to California.
When you start with a 5-level Baudot machine as your 'terminal' -- it's pretty easy to remember that the Carriage Return key causes the, ahh, Carriage to Return, ready to over-print (if you don't do a Line Feed); or if you did a Line Feed, then you're at the beginning of a fresh, new line.
Unix using \n for carriage return + line feed was ok only because it was still possible to use \r (carriage return) to do overprinting.
And of course, the 5-level baudot machine had no lower case; but unix could output \L\O\W\E\R \C\A\S\E just fine...
And then, don't forget about trigraphs: '??(' == '[' and '??)' == ']' etc
I don't remember the exact year, but I used to hang out at the local Radio Shack and play with the display model Tandy TRS-80s (and later the Tandy "CoCo" Color Computer). The manager once threatened to toss me out until he saw that I had written (in some early form of BASIC) a nice little demo of the machine's capabilities, after which time he advised his employees to just leave me alone as long as I didn't break anything. (This same tactic of programming a demo of the machine's capabilities would later land me my first computer store job.)
Later in life, my first proper exposure to computers came when the fourth grade teacher's assistant noticed I had an interest in science-type stuff and arranged to get me an hour a day on the school's one and only Apple ][+ (kept in the school's main office). He would bring me piles of books about computers and leave me to it, and afterward would ask me questions about what I'd learned. He also introduced me to his Commodore 64, which was a far superior machine to the Apple ][+ at the time. Both were 64K of RAM, and 1Mhz CPU, but the Commodore machines were just graphically (and audibly) superior.
Actually ended up running my first business on an Apple ][+ for several years because my mum (who bought me my first computer in my early teens) insisted on Apple because it was the name brand she'd heard a lot and therefore assumed was good, despite my insistence that the Commodore Amiga I wanted was far better value for the money. Still can't complain, as that Apple ][+ ended up paying for itself multiple many times over and eventually bought me my first Amiga, too. Pretty good for a machine with 64K of RAM, 1Mhz CPU, and 300baud acoustic phone modem… :~)
Mine was a full-on Commodore 64 kit that I got for Christmas when I was in 3rd grade. Everything was used and purchased from someone unloading their gear. To this day, I have no idea how my parents were able to afford it since disposable income wasn't really a thing for them until I'd left for college.
The kit itself include 60+ bits of software (mostly disks, a few cartridges) from games to productivity (geos!), monitor, printer, disk drive, light pen, speech synthesizer, fast-load cartridge, 300 baud modem, and tape drive.
Geos was my introduction to productivity and was used for all of my reports until we got a PC many years later, the modem connected me to Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL), and Gortek and the Microchips taught me basic programming.
Receiving that gift was one of those things that really shaped the rest of my life.
My first ever computer was a Christmas present, and tbh I was far more interested in the portable black-and-white TV that came with it. That got me my own dial-tuned TV in my bedroom. Luxury! I swear I could even watch snooker on that thing...
My parents weren't well off (Dad was a docker, mum worked part-time as a travel agent), living in the pretty run-down area of Northern city (the cheap end of L4 in Liverpool, UK, if anyone cares). The idea of getting my own computer was something I hadn't ever really considered.
So, the day arrives, and I get the TV (Wow!) and a printed circuit board with a bunch of components, otherwise known as the ZX81 in kit form. I spend a good month or two watching TV, as kids are wont to do, and eventually parental pressure to "get that fucking thing working, lad" mounts to the level where it can't be ignored any more.
Go down to the shed in the back yard (for Americans, a UK 'back yard' doesn't mean a garden at the back of the house, in our case it was a small, cemented over 'private alley' to the real alley (where the bins were) at the back of the row of houses. My dad had somehow crammed a shed in there) - and started to solder.
Took the weekend, as I recall, because I wasn't great at soldering at 11, but eventually it seemed to plug in and turn on - got the BASIC prompt and everything. Read through the manual, and there was a demo line to type in and show things were working. I worked through the example, got sufficiently confident, and the entire family convened in the lounge (where the only other TV was) to watch this modern wonder...
I typed in:
PRINT 2 + 2 = 4
And it of course returned back the value
1
At which point my dad sighed in disgust, muttered "I knew it, he's buggered it", and walked out the room. It took quite a bit of persuasion to introduce the concept of 'logical truth' to him...
I've never done CS (I'm an aging physicist if anything from 30 years ago matters in that regard) but I was hooked, initially on games, but also on what you can actually do with these things. These days I live far away from that 2-up/2-down Liverpool terraced house, in sunny California. Been working for Apple for nigh on 20 years, and coding for the last 40 or so. I don't think any single thing has changed my life more than that ZX81 kit. It wasn't even my favourite 8-bit computer (that would be the Atari XL I bought when Dixons were selling them off for £99 with a disk-drive) but it was certainly the one with the most impact.
That reminds me of a time when my brother and I were trying to clear space on our IBM PC. There were lots of programs installed that we didn’t use, including something called “DOS”.
We had something like an hour before our parents got home to figure out how to recover from the message, “Disk operating system not found”. We got it done, the parents never noticed, and we learned a few things very quickly.
My first exposure to a computer was in approx 1979, at school. We didn't actually have a computer at the school, but a local insurance company did. So we wrote our small programs on punched cards (in a dialect of BASIC IIRC), and at the beginning of next weeks class, were given listings of our compilation errors! I loved it! It was definitely the future!
My dad has some similar stories from his time in university learning to program. This used to be commonplace. Insurance companies, banks, hospitals, and large universities were typically the only places with computers at the time (mainframes), and so in order to ensure they had appropriate pipeline to hire more technical staff they would donate unused computer time for batch processing to smaller universities/colleges to ensure students could run their programs. My dad went to a very small religious university, but it offered some programming courses, and they ran their programs by "compiling" their punched cards in order, rubber banding them, and then handing them in where they were all stacked together in an accordion file, sealed, and then mailed via USPS to the state university to be run and returned, it would take on average 2 weeks to get results back as printed output + your original cards with markings from the sysop. I still have all his old punch cards, he kept them in a shoebox in my grandparent's basement.
Computers didn't begin becoming commonplace until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, even in business contexts or universities.
I still remember the exact moment when they wheeled an Apple II into my grade 1 (1980/1981) class on a TV cart and showed us what a computer was. It was an instant religious conversion and all I could think about from then on.
I'm not sure it's actually been good for me, as I lay here with a chronically inflamed lower back and terrible skills in meatspace; but while it's consumed my life, it has brought prosperity to my family.
IKR? To think as a kid I was more interested in nature, but also electronics and mechanical things but then the computer... everything else was just left behind... Nothing could compare to the fascinating infinite.
Exactly this. That realization that that box of circuits sitting quietly there on the table, waiting for your commands, was in fact an Anything Machine.
For me it was simulations. If you could write down the math for something, you could bring it to life.
My first exposure was in the 6th grade, around 1969 or so, we took a field trip to a local university with a computer. They set up a terminal to run the fox-chicken-corn puzzle, so each student got to try to solve it once. I kept wondering how a machine understood things about animals and vegatables. I retired in 2021 after 40 years as a programmer. Never underestimate a good introduction to a subject for a kid.
My first computer was a TI-99/4. In 1980, I have no idea where my parents got the $$ for it. I'm 56 years old now and have supported myself and my family by programming for nearly 25 years.
I had one. Probably 1982 or so. They were a few hundred dollars initially, which was not insignificant for a high schooler in those days, but dropped to $49 just before they were discontinued in 1984 or 1985.
Feels like I am of an age (29) that is kind of a cut off point to first exposure to computers being special (my exposure being in 1998). Granted for many by then computers at home were not a big deal in the US, but growing up in Ukraine I still vaguely remember my first interactions with a computer when my dad brought it home from the bank where he worked as a programmer -- we did not get personal computers til later. I don't have precise memories, but remember the general feeling of it being this cool piece of tech and being able to use it as being special, and Starcraft being so awesome. Exposure to video game consoles was also a big deal even beyond this age; it was very rare for people in those parts to have them.
Of course, in other parts of the world it is probably still be a special experience some people don't get to have as a normal part of growing up.
I think its really interesting to hear about experiences outside of the US.
One of my very first memories about computers is watching my dad play single player Quake 1 in his home office. I think that was around 2001 when I was 6y old.
I got my own seperate PC several years later, 2006. We didnt't have Internet connection until 2011 so until then I used all of my pocket money to buy blank CD-R and DVD-R towers and filled them with software and media at local library computers. On one summer school break I drove over 1000km between the library and my home.
During that time I managed to mess around with building games and got introduced to Linux and PHP programming.
After 2011 the internet at home was limited to mobile 2G EDGE speeds (~20kb/s) because during that time 3G was not a thing on Estonian countryside where I lived.
For me, my first "exposure" was my big brother coming home from college during fall break, and raving about his programming class. It was another three years before I got to touch a computer, at my high school, for a class in BASIC that one of the math teachers decided to offer.
I'm fairly certain my first up-close-and-personal experience with a computer was when my dad brought home a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981 when I was seven years old. He was a (now-retired) aerospace engineer and Star Trek fan, so buying a home computer for himself was a dream come true. Of course, I used it far more than he ever did. He picked up a Commodore 1-button joystick and a tape drive as well, and we hooked it up to the family TV in the basement. While I didn't launch into a lifelong hacking career, I did have a lot of fun playing games (Omega Race and a Pac-Man clone called Snak-Man were favorites), along with messing around with simple BASIC programs and creating mock-ups of elaborate game screens using the graphics key functions on the VIC-20.
My first exposure to computing was playing David Ahl's HAMURABI on a TRS-80 model I (I think) circa 1979-80 in 6th grade (but I think it was reserved only for us in the "gifted & talented" class). We took (or were told) to take it seriously and treat it as a mathematical/logical exercise, so we earnestly worked out all the values to input by hand before carefully typing them in. It must have been brought in specially, as I only ever saw (& used) it once.
When I was about ten, Chi Corp., which was associated with Case Western, had an open house. I keypunched my name on a card and fed it to a Univac 1108, which output a large image of my name on a line printer. I think an image of Snoopy was also output. I was hooked.
In middle school wrote Basic code on an HP-2000E. High school summer job writing C code on a PDP-11/70? running Version 6 or 7 Unix. Later, spent a summer at Bell Labs. Bjarne was working down the hall on C with objects. Rob Pike demoed a wire-wrapped Blit prototype. I wrote an assembler for an Ikonas frame buffer in Turner Whitted's graphics group for a C compiler port.
Around 1980 my Dad was taking computer science at the local university and he took me to the terminal lab and showed me the mainframe.
We played some BASIC games on the mainframe. I was around 5 years old. I discovered an Apple II buried in the corner of the library at my school and I was the only person who used it! Then a family friend bought a VIC-20 and I was totally enchanted by it.
My parents bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 and I typed in games from books into it, then a Tandy MC-10, Commodore 64, Atari 130XE and finally an Atari ST. That was 1988.
It's fascinating to think back at how much happened during those 8 years, computer-wise...
My first exposure was when I was a toddler, and my dad brought home from work a portable printer terminal and an acoustic modem. Later, we had a big printer terminal tied to a bright orange 300 baud modem churning through ridiculous amounts of paper; we were never short on scratch paper as kids.
Finally, my dad bought our first actual computer that didn't need a modem: the Acorn Electron, the little brother of the BBC Micro, which had a big port in the back where you could expand it: a printer interface that also included two cartridge slots, a disk interface that included a 3.5" disk drive (we would actually move from 3.5" diskettes to 5.25" after the release of the IBM PC), and a rom box that used to expand the rom of our 32 kB ram machine to 224 kB rom. Pascal editors and modem software directly available from rom. But the computer would often hang the moment you turned it on, and it didn't have an on/off button; you had to unplug it to reset it.
At some point my dad also brought home a massive luggable PC from work: a big suitcase where the bottom would fold away to become the keyboard, revealing two disk drives with a tiny screen in between.
Later, he bought an XT PC, and I think my brother did something that would hook it up to the Electron where one could be a terminal for the other.
My uncle bought an imported ZX Spectrum in 1984 when I was 10. I was instantly hooked. I read BASIC books from the library and programmed on paper every day, then tested the programs every Saturday morning.
He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.
> He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.
You could say something like "If you ever plan to get rid of it, please let me know first". You might find they offer it to you there and then, or worse offer it to you later on. And you won't feel like you're directly asking them for it on the spot.
My first computer exposure was in high school (Bronx High School of Science) in the 70’s. They had an IBM 1620, looked like something out of a movie with lights and switches, and a typewriter-like console. We wrote little programs in Fortran (with the advanced divide feature). I still have the textbook we used somewhere.
2nd grade, Apple II at school. I was hooked. Started tinkering with computers everywhere I could. Dad spent like 5k in 1993? getting a 486 DX2/66 with 16mb of RAM, 340MB hard drive and a gorgeous 17" Sony Trinitron monitor. That machine was a powerhouse at the time, I spent as much time as possible on it.
In second grade, I and several other kids were given a demo of a TRS-80 computer running a tutorial of how to write a program in BASIC. The tutorial was about developing a program to calculate baseball batting averages, I believe. It asked the user some questions about a baseball game, and performed a few steps. Nothing unusual so far -- just like a calculator, right?
But then it looped back to ask the questions for the next game, and updated the rolling averages, which of course took into account the information from previous iterations. My jaw hit the floor when I realized the immense power of being able to do things like this -- the possibilities are endless! Something changed in my mind in that very moment, and it's never changed back. From that day on, I was obsessed with thinking about what sort of computer programs I could write.
FWIW Somehow, while in high school I got on the mailing list for Allied Industrial (electronics) catalogs. One edition came and there was a page or two for the TRS-80, several months before any national advertising.
When I was 10 or 11, my father had a TRS-80 model III he'd bring home from the office in the weekends around 81 or so. I have a vague memory he might've had an older TRS-80 model early on before the model III - one with a separate monitor. Did my first BASIC stuff on that from Osborne books.
I then saved paper run money for ages (18 months maybe) and bought myself a 48k Spectrum. The Spectrum wasn't even out when I started saving - just that a computer of some description was the goal. I don't think I would have had the patience to keep saving another year or so for something like a C64.
September 1973, a class in Fortran (IV) on a Burroughs mainframe. The input options were paper tape or punch cards. Punch cards were marginally less awkward for a bad typist: if you made an error in position x, you could copy the card to position x-1, then resume typing. I did OK, and enjoyed the craps-game simulator, but it didn't really thrill me.
In the late 1980s, while doing tech support, I wanted to do some data conversion, and taught myself Eclipse assembler. That and writing macros for the AOS/VS CLI got me going with programming.
High school in Paris. A PDP 11/32 running BASIC on a teletype. I learned how to make ASCII art posters copied from Creative Computing magazine. Independently invented/rediscovered run length encoding.
I kind of love how not having the Internet meant a lot of 'inventing' things on your own. I also 'discovered' RLE and Shannon-Fano coding amongst many other already discovered things. But it was a total blast and good for the mind.
Mine was working at a radio station. We had all the music on a database that would rotate the playlist. This was late 70’s early 80’s with good ole green monochrome screens. Later on we had amber colored. The hard disk platters were the size of large pizzas. And remember kids this was all text only. Of course the station also did billing & payroll on the system. WISE AM Asheville,NC was the station. In 1972 we did have a class in punch cards at a technical school if that counts :-)
My very, very first exposure was probably when I was about 5 years old, so that would've been about '68 or '69. My dad worked as a computer operator on a military base and they had a bring-your-kids/family-to-work day. They were printing out Bugs Bunny & Wile E Coyote pics on the line printers and passing them out to the kids. My dad also used to bring home discarded punch cards and we'd make Christmas wreaths out of them (with added silver and/or gold spray paint)
> My dad also used to bring home discarded punch cards
Reminds me of a story I heard about my grandfather. He was a meteorologist for the USAF. At the time, they distributed the day's weather forecast on these big paper maps. The maps are only good for one day, so at the end of the day, he would bring home the used maps to his kids so they could draw on the reverse side.
First time I saw a computer was an early IBM at my dad's office. I was too young to read but I clearly remember the green cursor waiting for input. I pressed Space Bar and watched the blinking cursor run across the screen, line after line. I was fascinated by this mysterious machine and wanted to know more about it. Computers held my interest ever since.
I don't remember the first time. The computer is something that has always been a part of my life. My grandpa would leave sticky notes with the DOS commands I had to type to get into my games before I was able to read, I'd type them in slowly a character at a time matching the glyphs on the page to the ones on the keys and screen.
Mid/late 1970s, some kind of university time-shared system (maybe a CDC-6600, at least I know the university had one at the time) accessed from home, my dad had a teletype (110 baud) and later an ADM terminal (300 baud) with an acoustic coupler modem. Playing with BASIC programming and the Adventure/Colossal Cave game.
My Dad brought home a plug-in calculator, I was excited by that.
On holiday in Denmark a local bookshop had a green screen terminal that I was enthralled with, and there was the IKEA store terminals.
I think a teacher piqued by my passion had arranged for a Commodore PET computer to be set up in our class for a few days, maybe it was just coincidence.
>BASIC is a terrible language, but there were few alternatives back then.
Ah, but where are all the stories from people who were inspired into programming by using Java?
I was wondering about Markus Persson (aka Notch) who wrote Minecraft in Java, but: "Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his father's Commodore 128"
First computer at home: my dad brought home an IBM clone circa 1986. He had a buddy at work (he was an insurance agent) that was really into pirating games, who gave him one bankers box full of floppies, and another full of photocopied manuals.
I was probably 7 years old. Dad had a DOS machine for his business. Through rote memorization I could navigate to the games folder and run programs like Qbert.
My dad used to work as a "system programmer" in Poland, starting in late 70's. He has worked in a biggest (I think) government facility back then. He used to write IO code for a database system. Because of a ban on IP imports across the Iron Curtain, or maybe how expensive DB/2 was, rewriting from scratch was the only option to have something that actually worked. It was all about registering child births, deaths, marriages, etc. So whole that database system was written by just a handful of people in S/370 Assembler (I think) using obviously 3270 terminal.
I was in his office number of times. Journey usually was starting in the morning. We did not have a car so we were taking a tram, about 45 mins to get there. Then about 5 mins walk and we are saluted by fully armed soldier. Then my dad calls the captain, using a phone handed over by another soldier behind the desk, asking if he can enter facility with his son. Permission granted, we enter.
For me, that was a completely different and magical world behind that gate. Everything neat and tidy, very unlike the world outside. My dad was taking me to his room (no open spaces back then) shared with one maybe two colleagues. Each had a terminal and a phone on their desks. Room was full of documentation books, punch cards here and there, other strangely formatted papers. I was allowed to wander through the office, use lifts (very hi-techy compared to what I saw before) and so on. I was 10. A boy in communist country in a middle of such facility.
Every now and then my dad was taking me to the main DC. One of the places I could not enter on my own. For me, it was stunning. Risen floor (with cables running below), noisy climate control and a room, 40m x 40m maybe full of mixture of washing machine or refrigerator size devices. One corner of that place was behind a glass with people in white coats there. Considering the noise, probably a good idea. One, maybe two of them, were wandering around in that DC looking at all the flashy lights.
So my dad was walking me around, telling me what those devices were: that's the disk (10MB If I remember correctly), that's the tape backup, that's a printer (A3 printer, noisy and fast), and here it is, that's the main CPU. I think it was IBM, but cannot be sure. There was also this Odra system there, probably with 1Mhz CPU, being a top of the line back then. In our country.
Later on my dad got a PC from his employer, it was a 4.77Mhz 8086 PC with 20MB disk. I was allowed to use it. This was the machine that got me into programming. It was so slow and noncompetitive to Atari and Amiga that the only fun thing to do with it was to program it. That sealed the deal.
Nevertheless that kit started me on a 40 year programming career bringing me and my family to California.