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What Was Your First Computer Experience?
I was talking to one of the kids I work with (I think he’s like 25 or something) and we were talking about the first computers we ever used.
The first time I ever saw a computer in real life was probably in 1985 or 1986. I was in first grade. They brought it in. They explained this would be the computer for the class room. They showed us how to boot it up (with a 5 inch floppy). The program that it ran was what I found our many years later to be some kind of CADD. It had a little triangle called a “turtle” and it could draw lines. If you wanted it to turn one way you typed in a 90. Which I thought at the time was an odd code that I should probably write down.
I didn’t need to worry about it because that was the last time I ever got close to that computer. If it got used again that year, it certainly wasn’t by me and I don’t remember it.
But that was my first computer and my first computer experiance. We have a huge diversity of people here, so I thought we might have an interesting discussion about this. What was your first computer experiance? When was it? What was the computer? (The Wikipedia has great links to computer systems with pictures.) Tell us about it.
Published in General
The state-of-the-art in educational computing in 1991:
My first experience with a computer was Wolfenstein 3D when I was a kid. Been a gamer ever since.
Hey! I <a href=”http://wiki.alu.org/Paul%20Snively”>resemble></a> that remark!
Late 1970s I was a computer operator on an ICL mainframe for the Co-op in England. COBAL, punchcards, teletape, magnetic tape reels, and stacks of hard discs on drives as big as washing machines. The whole floor of computers had less memory than than this iPad.
Nice RtL! One question — why Chewy?
The first practical task involved and IBM XT loaded with Lotus Symphony, a Printronix greenbar monster, a wheel deak printer and a Stone age phone modem in 84.
All this to run a Rockwell A-Plant. And it was only used to print stacks of greenbar reports.
Was told, we do not know how to use this thing, you learn it and then teach us. Like I knew squat about the topic besides having read a few articles. So one cracked the books learned to write Macro code and then evaluate the tasks we performed at the plant.
In the end, wrote sustainable applications improving productivity and accountability.
Then moved into the corporate mainframe world. May have been late to the game, but have thankfully seen the last of 380k IBM 3480 tape libraries, StorageTek silos.
Still puzzes one why do people buy spiffy looking software of the shelf, only use 10% of the features and waste so much time and money thinking they did a good thing. Oh, Yeah, We always did it this way !
I was told by a girl I liked in college that, at 6’4″ with dark reddish-blonde hair (at the time), I resembled Chewbacca. That became my login name for many years hence.
Still, the fact that in middle schools and high schools there were such resources available to kids, whether in the late 70s or early 80s, is astounding. Out of this world, compared to the experience kids in the Glorious Paradise of Communism had at that time, or even a decade later.
That was a deliberate choice by the Communists. They could have had computers in school labs at the same time we did. The computer revolution was one reason we beat the Soviets.
Totalitarianism relies on controlling information flow. In the 1960s and 1970s books by Solzhenitsyn were being typed up on typewriters and passed around that way. Typewriters were registered in some communist countries. The Soviet Union had to be very afraid of the PC. You could put forbidden books on a floppy and pass them around that way.
Once every schoolboy had computer access technology growth in the US became turbo-charged. The Soviets started falling behind, then had to adopt PCs to keep up, then collapsed as a result.
Seawriter
Well, yes of course, but considering most schools in the Glorious Paradise barely had windows, heating, or even books for all their students…”choice” isn’t how I would describe it. More like, they were so far behind on the basics of life, that thinking about computers in middle schools in 1980 would be an alien concept for them.
Wow, it was probably 1977 or 1978. I was getting my bachelors in business at the University of Georgia. One of the required courses was in information systems – basically an intro to Fortran, but really an intro to hell. Our assingnments were basic programs, but they were using punch cards. The School of Business had I think two devices on which to type these cards and hundreds of students taking the class. The line to type your cards reminds me of port a potty lines – you stand in line forever and know the person behind has done the same. It helped a lot that I wasn’t a good typist. Projects were submitted by batch. You came back hours later only to find your program didn’t work because of a typo on the second card. The fun started all over again. This time the typo was on the fifth card. Back in line. Typo on the 8th card. On and on. I consoled myself with the fact that others would be doing this in my illustrious career. Thank goodness punch cards are a thing of the past and that we have point and click interface. My coding requirements are minimal, and mistakes come back instantly. I still wish I had people to do it for me, though.
So you could have tutored me. Fortran was torture!
In my first real job in the early 1989s, all the computer guys had Star Wars names- including Chewy.
That would be the early 1980s.
Does anyone remember Quip- the early fax? In my office it had its own office. It used mimeograph like paper on a roller. You dialed the number and set the handset in the machine to transmit the document. It was magic!
Oh man, Wolfenstein! That game set me on a path of discovery that gave me emulators, learning assembler, C++, math I *actually wanted to learn*, stuff way beyond anything I could actually do but it was an amazing time.
Well had some punch-card driven beast with remote terminals in 1981, I can’t recall the name of it. My first computer was a TRS-80 Micro-Color Basic. I remember bulletin boards before the world wide web and playing Zort.
Like anonymous, Univac 1107, 1967.
Unlike anonymous, I was five years old and visiting my Dad’s office.
Some time later, I became the world’s lowest paid keypunch operator at 1 cent per card.
It shows.
We took a field trip while I was in elementary school in the 1960s to visit a computer. I lived in the LA suburbs at the time. The computer was so large that it filled a room. They demonstrated how they would run information through it using punch cards, or maybe the punch cards were the final product. Anyway, in 1984 my husband and I got a Texas Instruments computer that we played around with. What a difference a few decades make, as now I spend a huge amount of time working on a computer and then come home and hop on my computer for keeping up with the news.
I was at a junior high science fair in 1968 (do high schools still have science fairs?) and some kid had made an 8 bit adder that would add two numbers together in binary. He war probably using discrete transistors because I’m not sure there were integrated circuits of any kind available to the public. An adder is one of the basic building blocks of a microprocessor. He may have used IC’s as the first logic gates chips were made in the early 60’s.
When I moved to Reno, NV in 1978 the TRS-80 was for sale in stores for 2000 dollars. I couldn’t afford it, so I bought a book on it and wrote pretend programs in BASIC on paper. I entered UNR in 1980 and took my first real computer class writing programs in FORTRAN (FTN77) on a Cyber C730 mainframe using punch cards to enter the data. It was GREAT!! I finally was able to afford my own computer when I bought a Commodore Vic-20 for 300 dollars in 1981 or 82.
Classical reference to the “Captain Crunch” whistle used by hackers on old phone systems.
I had a Pascal teacher that proclaimed at the beginning of class, that if anyone first learned to program learning BASIC, he would be ruined forever for programming. It still pisses me off 34 years later! I got my BSEE degree and programmed in ‘C’ for a living for 10 years. I guess I wasn’t ruined completely. Even though the class was supposed to be Pascal, I don’t think we wrote any programs in Pascal because we where too busy messing around with Turing machines. (on paper).
My dad was very into computers in the 70s-80s. The first computer I remember was an Atari 400. At first it used tape cassettes for software. It would take about five minutes to boot up, and you had to keep still enough to so the vibrations wouldn’t cause an error in the boot up. He upgraded to a floppy drive fairly soon. Later on my dad made a game he called “Halloween,” which was kind of like Space Invaders but with pumpkins and cats and things. Good memories.
I used to play this on the System 360 at college at a 1200 baud Decwriter hidden in a closet off a hallway in my dorm. Right now at home our WiFi network is named “XYZZY”
Summer 1967 – Burroughs B-283. Data input was either through direct machine language input into the processor (punching a bunch of lighted buttons) or, more normally, reading stacks of punch cards through a card reader. Later there was a supervisory printer (a teletype-like typewriter) through which the operator could input a limited number of commands to communicate with the operating system (in Burroughs language, the MCP – Master Control Program). The punch cards could feed data into the memory (either 4800 or 9600 characters) and the data could be permanently stored (for archival purposes or for later input) on magnetic tape. Behold the power of the mighty B-283 and tremble:
https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/node/30929