What was your first experience?

[lagagnon]

I entered a brand new Junior High - High school complex recently built in 1968. I was in Grade 8 (13 years old). No expense spared in that place. The huge industrial arts area had a PDP-8 computer. I learned to program tic-tac-toe on the thing - without really knowing what the hell I was doing. The thing was beyond our teachers ability as well!

Then again not till 1st year Uni 5 years later - used teletype terminals and punch card feeding into an IBM mainframe running the MTS operating system. After that I used almost every computer and OS known to man during my long career as a geologist....

[jpeters]

My first computer was an Atari ST.  For fun I wrote a statistical package (Multiple Regression, Factor Analysis, etc,  in Basic based on some books I found in the UC Berkeley Library  (UC had these books on how to run analyses on a hand calculator!).  Later I just hacked into the UC system at Evans Hall and ran their SPSS program, my first experience with UNIX.  I used this to run stats for my PhD dissertation. 

I remember purchasing my first color monitor, and the external singe/double disk drives..each with a separate transformer.  Graphics involved piecing together bitmaps. I remember logging onto a virtual community (PARKS), where people built text-based virtual worlds, and writing little programs that allowed me to monitor peoples' "private" rooms unnoticed (except by a few other geeks also parked in the room in their "invisible" vehicles) . 

Musically, the Atari did just about everything a modern computer can do, with decent compositional software and midi interfaces.  I remember when the Falcon came out...a terrific upgrade that never took off, because Atari was run by a bunch of geeks that had no clue how to market (they never made it to  the shelves of any major distributors, and then underpriced their own distributors so they went out of business).     

[nickispeaki]

in 1988 in school Korvet (USSR pc) with cpm. Then in university Yamaha and 386 with m$DOS 3, apple classic, ... acer aspire now.

[junan]

Intel 286 PC with PC DOS, with Monochrome monitor. Follow the x86 path, from 286 -> 386 -> 486DX -> Pentium 233MMX -> Pentium III 933 , convert to AMD XP2700 and now using AMD X2 (the price is right)

And the monitor from Monochrome -> CGA -> EGA -> VGA ...

[PingPing]

My first computing experience?  Using one of those typewriter thingys remotely over a modem (accoustic coupler) to a VAX.

My first experience?  Two kernels at the same time 

[KB2HSH]

Apple IIe in Catholic grade school...

Circa...um...1985.  Oregon Trail on 5.25 floppy...PRICELESS.

[bmarkus]

- A Polish made ODRA 1024 machine (ICL clone?) with 64k word drum mass storage and 16k ferrit RAM (...) but with a great ALGOL60 compiler
- Original DEC PDP8 with FORTRAN

Of corse punched paper tape input. In 1974.

[roberts]

I still have my collection of punch paper tape programming utilities, next to my 8" floppy disks!

[bmarkus]

I still have my collection of punch paper tape programming utilities, next to my 8" floppy disks!

Do you have it as a .tce or .tcz  

[roberts]

  

The customer programs were on plain paper puched rolls.
Now the programmers had their stuff on punched mylar tape, that was the status symbol back then.

[tinypoodle]

For anyone interested: There are a few current apps for data storage on paper:
http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/
http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html

[thane]

First computer experience: WatfivS [sp?] (a subset of FORTRAN) on an unseen university computer in 1977.

First personal computer: Apple II+ with 48K of memory and a cassette port for storage (1980). Never cared for BASIC but managed to program it to play Backgammon (used assembly language subroutines for some pieces of this). I had so much spare time in those days!

Talked my office into buying Turbo Pascal for the supermicro; my all-time favorite programming language.

Since then COBOL and Java, not nearly as much fun. Windows boxes at home.

Then TCL on a thrown-away Compaq and a custom bare-bones -- fun again!

[liknocks30]

Grade school around '95. We were taught Word and Excel.

[gerald_clark]

It was1967, my junior year in Highschool.  Our math class learned Fortran 4 ( Watt For ) using marked sense cards.
I was one of the first members of the New London High School Computer Club.  We used an ARR-33 Teletype to
connect to a computer in another state to run programs in BASIC.
We would punch out tapes on our own time, and they would be read and run during club meetings.

The first computer I owned was an Altair 680 I built in 1976.

[bmarkus]

We used an ARR-33 Teletype

Guess it was ASR-33, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR-33_Teletype