How old were you when you started using the computer

How old were you when you used your first computer?

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I was 19 when I used a computer for the first time, but it was either a mainframe or minicomputer, I don’t know which. I used a PC for the first time when I was 28.

12 back in 1962.
Built a GE Analog Computer Kit.
It worked like an electric slide rule.

The first knob was set to a number.
The second to a multiplyer or devisor
. And the third dial nulled out a tone at the correct answer.
very cool & much fun for it’s time.

Later moved on to a single board KIM w/hex pad input.
..then (1977) a Rockwell AIM 65 with an actual QWERTY kybd and dual RC cassette storage!
added eprom burner. bank-switched 3 languages, eprom burner, 30 word speech recognition/response
& A/D D/A converters. a lot of fun. it’s still somewhere buried in the garage.

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48+
It was the November of 1983 and I was 9 years old.
I remember loading the demo tape from a cassette player and I remember the first time I saw my first game: a variation of breakout, written in Sinclair Basic!

I don’t know for sure on the computer. I was using a betamax vcr was when I was 4. I had watched a tv copy of Star Wars A New Hope zillions of times on that sucker. It was a Sanyo tank with the top loader version.

I did have a 286 but I was not using computers much yet at that point. The first computer that I really used was a dos 386 that got upgraded to 6.2 and had windows 3.1. I still have it and last i checked it still worked. I loved that sucker. Especially playing the 3.5 inch floppy version of the ORIGINAL XWING flight simulator. Has to be one of the greatest pc games ever. Top notch control and was the whole reason I joined the sound blaster camp to get sound for the first time. Albeit 8 bit mono but to hear the sound effects and the synthesized John Williams music for the first time was epic.

Did I ever mention before that I like Star Wars?

Just thought I’d pass that on.

How old were you when you started?

Seems like we hear from SpiceHeads all the time about their first computer. So how old were you when you first started using a computer?

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1994. I was 6. playing command and conquer cause my parents didnt understand that violence was bad for children.

I was 10years old and using the Macintosh computers.

I had my first computer when I was 15, blew up my first motherboard at 16. Learned how to build properly after that.

I cant remember my exact age but it was our families first computer. very early 90’s most likely.

It was an old Compaq running windows 3.1. I played games on it such as Chip’s Challenge and Doom 2. I think I was a bit young for Doom 2.

I was 16, and bought myself a Commodore 64. The first game I bought with it was Elite, and I lost months of my life playing that.

5-6 years old, Windows 95 on an old packard bell tower. using Encarta for homework

1994. I was 6. playing command and conquer cause my parents didnt understand that violence was bad for children.

Command and Conquer. Excuse me, I’ll be out sick for the next few days.

Oh, and 8, playing on (and taking apart and reassembling, much to my parent’s chagrin) a 3gb HP running Windows ME. ME was so insecure. My parents had a password set and all you had to do was hit Esc and it logged on! My parents knew nothing about computers, and were so mad when they thought I’d hacked the PC before I showed them that it would be useless to put another password on. It wasn’t connected to the internet, so they gave up and let me play.

Also, Sim City 3000, so much Sim City. 8-12 hour days in the summer and winter break.

I think I was around 9 when I started using a computer. I remember it had Windows ME and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Hmm, about 6 when I started using stuff like the ZX spectrum and C64, upgraded to PC when I was about 9, started doing local PC repairs and so forth when I was 12.

I think I was around 9 when I started using a computer. I remember it had Windows ME and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

You were 9 when Windows ME was out. Boy do I feel old.

My first was a self-contained computer you plugged into your TV because it had no monitor and it had a word processor and a few games built into it.

My first real computer was a 486 that barely did much of anything, but I was able to install Warcraft 2 on it so I loved it. After that, it’s all kind of a blur.

I was 6. Playing Flight Simulator 95 on W95. Also loads of dosgames.

I was 46 years old.

I was 6 years old when my dad had a REALLY old machine. While he was at work and my mother taking a nap, I thought it would be a great idea to completely take it apart. Little did I know that there would be so many parts and how pissed my father would be. After my furious parents who wanted to stuff that motherboard down my throat proceeded to call a tech to come to the house to put it back together, and once again, leaving me alone to play with my toys, I decided to put it all back together. I did so and managed to get it to work. That’s when it was quite obvious that IT was my thing. I have since never looked back. I went and got my Cisco IT Essentials when I was 9 years old, which I passed. I did some other short courses in the mean time, but really got into it when I got my CCNA at 14 years old and my MCSA and MCSE at 15. Still going strong!

4, came up playin the microsoft entertainment packs. Chips challenge, rodents revenge, ski free.

1988/1989 I would have been 6 or 7ish, if I remember right it was an Apple ll. The teacher I had noticed I had issues staying on task but was attracted to computers so she made a deal. If I completed certain tasks in a time limit depending what it was (spelling, Math etc.) she would allow me 10 minutes on the computer. It really worked for me and I think that is what started to point me into this career direction. From around that point on I was taking apart anything to figure out how it worked.

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Yeah Pass_the_Tylenol, mine was a Commodore 64 as well. I played Olympic Summer Games (broke the joystick doing the sprints), and of course Impossible Mission («Stay a while. staaaaaay FOREVER!»). But my favorite thing to do was to print out giant banners on that awesome connected tear-away paper 🙂

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Adam6486 you should find that teacher today and thank them! Great story.

5-6 years old, Windows 95 on an old packard bell tower. using Encarta for homework

Good lord, I’ve totally forgotten about Encarta! Talk about a blast from the past!

I think I was about 12 or so. playing around with my Dad’s Macintosh Performa.

I was 9-10 and it was an Amstrad CPC464 with Diskette Drive not tape.

I was 4 and playing sonic 3 on my mom’s windows 95 machine. The cruising AOL for whatever looked cool at the time.

good times, every single lightning storm the power supply would die, we ended up just unplugging the power whenever we werent using it to keep it safe.

1980, 9 or 10 years old. Dad bought a brand new Apple II+ with Applesoft in ROM. Taught myself BASIC on that. Got to where I could whip up a hi-res kaleidoscope program in about 10 minutes to impress my teachers at school.

Before that, every time we’d walk into a Radio Shack and see a TRS-80 on display, I’d have to try typing something on the keyboard. Always got responses like «Program or File not found» or «Syntax Error» but that never stopped me from trying. 🙂

How old were you when you started using the computer

I was allowed to use the computer from a very early age. When I was about 2 years old is the earliest memory of me using it, and I played a lot of educational games on it. We had two computers set up in that room, one for me and one for my mother. When my mom wasn’t using the main computer, I could use it to play games too. I actually preferred that one because it was faster anyway. I’m not sure what I felt when I first used it, but I remember it being very entertaining for several hours at a time, even as a child.

I didn’t know how to get to any sites besides pbskids.org when I was little. I’m also only 16, so it was fairly common to have a household computer by the time I was a young child. My mother let me watch and play anything that was educational or academically challenging while I was growing up. I actually didn’t know about other TV channels or websites that existed until I was much older. She still worried about my overall health, but a few of her concerns were overridden by my need for education.

Символ показывает уровень знания интересующего вас языка и вашу подготовку. Выбирая ваш уровень знания языка, вы говорите пользователям как им нужно писать, чтобы вы могли их понять.

Мне трудно понимать даже короткие ответы на данном языке.

Могу задавать простые вопросы и понимаю простые ответы.

Могу формулировать все виды общих вопросов. Понимаю ответы средней длины и сложности.

Понимаю ответы любой длины и сложности.

Решайте свои проблемы проще в приложении!

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How old were you when you started?

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1972, I was 14. Math teacher sat me down in front of a TTY with a dial-up 110baud modem and typed «HELP BASIC.» The rest is history.

The next year, I learned to key the bootstrap code in manually using toggle switches on a Data General Nova 1200. If you didn’t get it right, it wouldn’t read the paper tape with the OS on it.

I must’ve been around 11 when we got the Commodore 64C. I though I was cool, as we had the 5.25″ drive vs my friend’s cassette tape drive.

I used to mess with the speech synthesizer for that thing for HOURS.

5 or 6 on an old DOS machine. Playing Beat the House, Jazz the JackRabbit, and Doom.

Can’t remember the exact age, but I started using one I think around 7 or 8. My Dad bought a Gateway 2000 with Windows 3.1 on it. My sister and I use to play games on it all the time. My father played Doom a lot and I played MicroMan and SkiFree quite a bit.

Unfortunately, I never really knew about programming because most of the interaction was graphical, so I didn’t start programming early which is one of my lives many regrets.

Kindergarten on the Apple II

Let’s see, it was 1991 or so and I was 25. Just started in this new curriculum called Management Information Systems. If you were serious you bought a computer and also if you were lucky went to work in the campus computer lab. I spent my last bit of savings and got a 286 with the turbo button. Cost me 1400 bucks, came with a 24 pin dot matrix printer and a floppy upgrade kit. That way you could have an internal hard drive and a floppy. Installing the floppy drive was the first job I did. Got the data cable on backwards and the little green light stayed lit plus the floppy would not work.

Abour 4/5 I guess. Dad always had one and played games (castle wolfenstein etc.) and I used to sit on his lap and hit the keys. that’s using it right? Started fixing/building PCs at about 14 properly though.

Probably 8 or 9 when my family inherited this computer some distant family member handed off to my Grandma. Played around for hours in MSPaint until I got ahold of a bunch of arcade games for PC. I also happened to get the Idiot’s Guide to Windows 95, and I read that thing cover-to-cover out of pure boredom. From that time until my teenage years when I cobbled together my own outdated thing, I spent so much time breaking and un-breaking the family computer.

First computer I had at home was early mid 80’s when I was 5 or 6 was a CoCo 2. Also got a Vic 20 around the same time.

1987 Kindergarten playing number munchers from Mecc.

first started repairing them in 96.

I was about 14 when I started using and repairing an Atari 400 ‘computer’ with a cassette ‘drive’.

Our first home computer was a Texas Instruments TI99 4/A, complete with the audio tape data recorder, back when I was in first or second grade. My dad also brought home, over the summer vacations (he was an elementary school principal), an Apple II computer setup for me to use/play with. A few years later we ditched the TI and got an Apple IIc.

Hours and hours with LOGO and all the classic Broderbund games.

Using a computer, I was 3. Back then that was rare. Not like now, my kids each got their own computer when they were one. I started working in IT, though, at 13.

14 in 1975 punch cards

I started officially at 27 years old, now 2 years later I’m IS Manager.

when i was 4 (1985), my dad brought home a Commodore 64 and it was awesome =D

7th grade. 1983-ish.

My Jr. High «Media» class had a TRS-80. Not long after, I saved and had some classic computers of my own. Timex Sinclair, CoCo2 and heavily used the Apple][es belonging to the HS and local college.

I was either 11 or 12 on a Compaq Windows 95 pc connected to a second phone line we used for AOL. Yahoo and AOL Chat rooms were way cooler than all of these «Grams» kids have these days.

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I want to say that I was around the age of 8 or 9. I remember being in 5th grade and chatting on AIM. I’m sure before that I was on playing games and such. It wasn’t until I graduated from high school that I got my own laptop.

I was about 5 with an old Packard Bell running DOS then later upgraded to Windows 3.1. Surprisingly the old gal still runs (but it’s mainly for reminiscing) =D

I guess I was about two (1982). My parents had a TI-99/4A that I played educational games on. A couple of years later my dad brought home an IBM Portable PC (1984). He used it for work; I used it for FaceMaker and awesome banners printed on our dot-matrix printer.

I must’ve been around 11 when we got the Commodore 64C. I though I was cool, as we had the 5.25″ drive vs my friend’s cassette tape drive.

I used to mess with the speech synthesizer for that thing for HOURS.

I had the 5.25″ drive as well, and it drove me nuts with it’s slow access times. I LOVED playing the old Infocom text adventures, but they were hellish when playing from floppy disk on a CBM64. Usually it was a case of typing «Go west», go boil the kettle, make a cuppa, and then come back to see if it had completed the move.

Horace («Hungry. «, «. Goes Skiing», «. And the Spiders») etc.

Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy

Daley Thompson’s Decathlon aka keyboard killer

Ah the memories come flooding back!!

Started at 18, IBM punch cards, Northstar Advantage, Apple II.

I was about 5 or 6 when I had my first computer. I had many desktops over a period of about 10 years then got myself a laptop when I was 15 before going back to a desktop a few years later.

I was 13 and it was 1982. Our public library managed to get a couple Apple IIe machines.

8 is when I first started using, Apple ][e, Commodore 64

12 is when I first started to tinker. Wrote my first BASIC program.

Built my first computer at 16, and it has been a great journey ever since.

I was 10 when my stepdad let me hook up his Commodore 64 loved the games but had more fun messing with basic, 12 when i built my first machine.

1992 Apple LCII, played on the paint program it had.

I was probably about 7 or 8 when my parents bought our first home computer. It was a Gateway, I believe. I remember getting on it mostly to play this game called Jewel Chase. Now I really want to play that game!

5-6 years old, Windows 95 on an old packard bell tower. using Encarta for homework

Microsoft Encarta, wow.

I was 7, in 1989 and I was using a Commodore 64 playing Chess Master, lol, then bought PAL 286/386 computers and started ripping them apart.

8 is when I first started using, Apple ][e, Commodore 64

12 is when I first started to tinker. Wrote my first BASIC program.

Built my first computer at 16, and it has been a great journey ever since.

Anyone remember Prodigy? The «Internet» service, lol?

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1987, I was 5, my brother and I received an Amstrad CPC464 for Christmas, wow, I remember family members literally queue in my bedroom to play Street Fighter :). I wish I had it now!

I was in 10th grade when we could fill out coding forms that would be shipped to the LA city schools IBM 360/40, where keypunch ladies would make the cards, then operators would run them overnight, and we’d get a greenbar printout the in the next day or two.

When I started programming professionally, there were a few Apple ][‘s people were trying to figure out how to use, so I helped them with that. When the PC’s came out, I had a lot of work replacing them with real computers as people realized their communications were limited. I bought my first computer in 1983, I think, it was a PDP 11/23 running rt-11, later I had my hardware buddy convert it to a 23+ in trade for the valuable 8″ floppies.

I bought my first Amiga 1000 in 1985, I think, several of us got together and got a deal, then we’d swap software.

My first actual PC was 1989, I think, some little local company was building them. Eventually I modded it several times, then retired it after about 10 years maybe?

What computer did you first start with and how old were you?

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I don’t remember much about it, it was an old Dell with Windows 95 that my parents gave me because they got a new Gateway with Windows 98, I was about 10 years old I think.

When I was 8 years old I got my very own Packard Bell with Windows 95.

Technicallly my first was a Commodore 64. We also had an Atari computer. But what I consider my first was a Tandy SX 1000 when I was 7. Oh man was that thing awesome! Text Adventures were all the rage. Kids nowadays will never know the frustration of trying to draw a map on a piece of paper based on the directions the game gave you.

You are in a room.

You see a hammer.

«Pick up the hammer»

Sweet Jesus I’m gonna kill the Frost King with this hammer.

Then of course there was Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry (don’t forget to zipper your fly!) but those might have been on the 386 I upgraded to a few years later.

My first computer was a Commodore 64 with a cassette tape drive and a 13″ black and white TV for a monitor. That was in 1979 and I was 17 years old. My first programming class was Fortran on an old IBM System 34 Mainframe with Punch Cards in the fall of the 1980. We didn’t have a CRT anywhere in the lab and only had one line printer terminal that looked like a really big typewriter. You typed a line of code and hit enter and it printed that line on the paper, so you had to be really careful what you typed. The punch cards were the most interesting though. Old, good times.

I was about 4 years old when my parents bought some computer from a shop that ran Windows 98.

I used to just play cereal box games on it. My dad taught me how to use Ctrl+Alt+Delete one day when my games would freeze. That was probably the first step in my IT skills and I was the family tech by 10

The first computer I bought was a used(!) Commodore VIC-20 in 1984, when I was 13. Second computer was a Commodore 128, around 1987 I think. Didn’t get rid of that until about 1997.

I started out with an Apple IIe in high school in the 80’s. After I came back from the military, I eventually got a Windows 3.1 box. I later upgraded it to Windows 95. I later put 98 on that same box, and eventually (just to show them that I could) I put XP on it. I managed 128gb of EDO RAM on an Intel 166MMX processor. It was slow as dirt, BUT IT WORKED!

My brother taught me how to navigate DOS in order to play shareware games on an old Tandy 386 when I was about 8-10 years old. Using DOS made me feel like a wizard. that was the beginning!

The first computer I remember using was to play Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake 1/2. It was shared between us siblings and I was about 6 years old. I had smashed on keyboard with alphabet games prior, but this particular 333 Mhz Pentium 2 was my rig with 64 MB RAM.

When I first got my own system, I built a Pentium 3 700 Mhz processor with 256 MB RAM, and thought that 20 GB hard drive was the best thing ever. Those 700 Mhz cycled Quake 3 many times over again for years.

Data logic Systems, Inc. is an IT service provider.

The first computer that I owned was a trash80 from Radio Shack when I was 40. I worked in CPM, DRDOS, MSDOS, Windows 1, Windows x, windows for workgroups, Novell Netware, Windows NT (workstation and server) using arcnet, ethernet, token ring, and FDDI

Packard Bell 386

High school 1976: HP 1000 access by dialup. I mean we dialed a rotary phone, got the modem mating call and locked the handset into the modem acoustic coupler. Then you pressed HERE IS on the teletype until you got the login prompt.

US Army 1978: Age 19. The first computer I worked on professionally was a Burroughs D84 with 12K of core memory. This was used to test, program and launch a Pershing nuclear missile. In the photo, the smaller units are the 4k memory modules.

In 1983 we upgraded to the Pershing II. The test van used an HP 1000 E-Series with a 30MB hard drive. The system that generated radar targets used a DEC PDP-11/70 in a truck mounted shelter.

Commodore 64, and I was 5. lol

I think the game was linking logic or something like that. It was a red cartridge that was put in the back on the computer.

Commodore 64, and I still own it. I had to be maybe 8 years old.

First machine I really started to use and learn how they worked, an IBM PS/1 286 10mhz with 30meg hard drive, 256 color VGA monitor running good old DOS.

Great feed. I believe my first was a Tandy 1000 or something similar. Then had a Texas Instrument with a tape drive to load games! Commodore VIC 20, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Apple II GS (one of my favorite) GS stood for graphics and sound, first introduced me to the 3.5 floppy, endless hours of Space Quest and King’s Quest back when you had to type everything in the game not the crappy remakes where you just pointed and clicked with the mouse. Then to a 386 followed by a 486 DX2 with 100 Mhz turbo button. After that was on to a lot of different Dell Optiplex and Latitidues for a long time. Now currently running HP Elitebook with Solid State and 16 GB of ram. Man times fly!

It was an IBM, with no hard drive, and a printer hard wired to it. You had to move the computer and the printer as a unit, and they were *heavy*. The OS was stored on one 11″ floppy, and the programs and data were stored on another.

I must have been about twenty-eight, in the USN.

On a black and white TV with a Tape Drive so I could save my programs. I had to be about 14.

I graduated pretty quickly to.

Dual Disk Drive. woo hooo!

An ancient IBM mainframe was the first real computer I sat down to at age 18. Now if you’re asking for the first computer I ever owned, then it was a TS1000, with a whopping 1K of memory, 16K is I bought the expansion module.

First Windows machine was a IBM PS/2 PizzaBox Desktop

80 meg hard drive (120 meg maybe?)

Intel 386 @ all of 25 MindMelting MHz

Blew it up repeatedly, BestBuy replaced it with the IBM PS/2 Minitower at the following specs:

Intel 486 DX2 @ 33 MHz

160 meg hard drive

I remember the days of reinstalling Windows off 3.5″ floppies under my parents noses. They didn’t know I even did that until I told them one Easter Sunday some 5 or 6 years ago.

My very first pc was the Laser 386. Later on, my mom upgraded. Didn’t quite have Windows yet. I learned at a young age what DOS was and how to find my way around. Gosh, I could go on for days about this. As I said, we eventually went with Windows 3.11 and boy the games just became much more exciting! My how times have changed.

Still have it in the attic.

made Diablo 2 my best friend.

This was me too. This game=my childhood.

I was probably about 10. It was a very old system by this point. throw away obsolete. but it was mine! Learned everything starting from there.

8086 clone with a single 5 1/2″ floppy. No hard drive, no clock. And DOS 3.2

My first computer was a Tandy 1000

Mine was a Sony Viao PCV-90 running Windows 95. It was my brother’s computer. I was 20.

You always remember your first.

Atari 2600 basic programming rom when I was about 11 and then a Timex Sinclair 1000 shortly after.

Commodore 64 when I was around 13. Did some programming with it in Basic and Assembly language.

Wow I can’t imagine the replies to this thread. And there are going to be a ton of different answers. For me this makes me look super young (but I am lol, i’m 26) I started on Windows 95 in school with typing etc. My 1st home computer came with Windows 98. Ive’ been able to at least have a few moments with each Windows OS after 95. I really got into computers during the XP era.

A Texas Instruments TI/99/4A

OMG, I loved that computer. It had 16k of ram (no hard drive). Programs were saved to cassette tape (it took forever). If power failed while you were working on a program, you lost everything you had done since the last save (which taught me the importance of stopping often and backing up my work, a lesson I still cherish). It had BASIC 1.0 and there was a native machine language (later there was even a simply compiler).

Using this computer (at age 12) I learned binary / Hexadecimal conversion, graphic design using sprites and bitmapping (later vector graphics), BASIC, Machine Language. It was a great machine for a simpler computing experience. The skills I learned on this machine help me today when writing batch scripts and vb/js scripts.

Later I graduated to a vic20, c64, amiga 500 before finally getting my first IBM clone PC.

Started on an old 8088.

Dual 5.25″ floppies, no HDD, 640k of RAM (because who would EVER need more than that!).

I can’t remember the name of the program we used, but it was a precursor to Windows. Would have been around 1982 or so? It was a DOS based menu system, that you could click with a mouse.

TRS-80 in the back of the library at school sneaking in games of Hunt the Wumpus, 4th grade.

Program storage was originally by cassette tape, however a separate expansion unit was later produced which supported more RAM, and the connection of floppy disk drives. A fully configured TRS-80 was quite a maze of wires and boxes.

I remember the days of Win98/SE, then 2000 happened, then ME ruined it, then we got something legend called XP, skipped Vista for 7, then upgraded to 10. ahh the good ol’ days of dial up 56k, then DSL Verizon, switching in between Comcast, and now the funny business with High Speed Verizon/FiOS, or Xfinity and the competing mobile broadband companies. Then I remember the days of AoL and AIM being the hype of the time for IMing and all the cool kids had an email or AIM account. Now we got VoIP and Skype.

Then I remember the games starting with Need For Speed to Porshe Unleashed, NFS Underground. the all others that followed suit, then FPS games such as counterstrike 1.5, 1.6, condition zero, unreal tournament, then you the Medal of Honor series and Call of Duty jumped the bandwagon. Now its Call of Duty and Battlefield.

I remember the time where eMachines existed and Compaq was still in business as a separate company.