I was young and stupid. Remember floppy disks? Yeah, we still had them when I was studying. Went to a computer cafe, rented a PC and DOS was already booted up (I'm an old fucker). I didn't want to reboot because PC rental was metered. I inserted my floppy disk and got infected by a virus that deleted my work. No git back then and my backup was on the same disk (fuck me). Back home, rewrote the whole thing from memory.

I got mad and wanted revenge. De-constructed a floppy disk, replaced the magnetic media with sandpaper and went to each and every PC on that computer cafe.

It was closed for day.

Some time 199x, when I was still a little kiddo, my dad bought a PC. It had a big ass HDD (dimensions-wise), 1x 3.5" floppy disk drive and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. It ran DOS. Dad managed to hook up a dot matrix Epson printer to it and used the computer for writing... whatever, really :)

Then dad got some of those 5" floppies with games and installed them on our PC. Mach3, Indy, Entity and Atlantis were my favourite ones. Later we got Wolfenstein 3-D, but that was just too scary, too intense for me.

All that was years before we got Windows 3.0 installed there.

I have a power nap after lunch. No matter what. Waking up from a nap is like getting a new extra day for free. And this time whatever was bad before the nap just doesn't seem so bad anymore.

I actually made a friend on gitter. We were regulars in a few channels, we started talking. Then we paired for some projects, he would help when I was stuck and vice versa. I ended up traveling 9000 miles to meet him and he took me to party for 2 weeks straight. That was fun.

My first experience with computer was when I was 4/5 years old. We had DOS computer. I did not know anything that time. How to start game or anything. So my dad wrote down steps on my notebook for starting the 'Dave' game. I played that game nearly 2 years, along with 'Prince'. This brings lot of dos memories. :)

We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.

In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.

Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.

A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

I just want to rant now. Is the limit between rants still enforced? I hope so, I am afraid that I start complaining, I will just not stop. I've been holding up so much by now. Well whatever, I've got used to not complaining for so long, that I just lost all desire to rant.

Having sex. Or long hot showers. It's amazing how doing either of those helps me unplug for the day and start to refresh my self for the next day of coding.

Context, I used to burnout quiet often. Learning to unplug allowed me to be a better software engineer that could work better over an extended period of time.

First computer I saw was an Apple II running Oregon Trail in grade school. Then I played computer games on my uncles Apple IIe. The first home video game I ever saw was Pong. It was a device you hooked to the RF input on the TV. It had 2 paddles to control the input (single axis controllers). The first game console I played on was the Atari. The first computer I programmed was on a black and white Macintosh. Then the other programmers in my high school told me the PC was better. Well, it was better for learning IMO. That was with Windows 3.0. But the programming was Turbo Pascal in DOS. DOS gave you complete control of the machine. Better at the time for me learning to do graphics and sounds programming. The first computer I bought was a 386 and I played with VR programming. Made my own joysticks using the limited joystick port. Fun times learning electronics and software together.

My first interaction with Computers started in 1996/1997 and it was Dangerous Dave, PacMan, Mario, Pre that pulled me in so deep. We had multiple Floppy Disks and each of them used to go awry after a few months of use. Had to keep deleting stuff to fit all my Favourite Games

A year later I learnt the basics of MS-DOS and GWBasic. Looking at seniors do C Programming on Borland Turbo made me feel scared and one of them said it is the real language to make Games, and all types of Animation stuff. I was very intrigued but only for a while. I kept playing Games which was what I was fit for at that time