1984
Age 9
Commodore 64
Taught myself BASIC

I was 8 years old the boy in the block invited me said I have something to show you. His parents bought him a Macintosh. He typed my name on the black screen and there was a response.
He said look it says “How are you?” And I was mesmerised got so excited I was like wow 😲
Guess what the text was actually saying? syntax error 😂 Little did I know at that time!!
I went home and told my parents, can you believe what I’ve seen today?? Computer responded me talked to me!!
On my birthday I got a Commodore 64 that year and the story begun.

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.

Don’t forget to wait for this screen before you press the shutdown button.

When I was in elementary school, my pc got a virus. So, after I look it up, an article suggest that deleting system32 on my windows will solve my problem. I think everyone here knows the rest of the story.

My first contact with an actual computer was the Sinclair ZX80, a monster with 512 bytes of ram (as in 1/2 kbyte)

It had no storage so you had to enter every program every time and it was programmed in basic using key combinations, you could not just write the commands since it did not have memory enough to keep the full text in memory.

So you pressed the cmd key along with one of the letter keys and possibly shift to enter a command, like cmd+p for print and it stored s byte code.

My Daily WFH Routine :

Pretend that you are struggling really hard to solve some issues and it would be done by EOD.

Complete the task before lunch and the rest of the day is all mine :)

Boss: How can we keep the office clean?
Me: By staying at home

My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer

My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.

After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila

we had copied a shortcut :)

I remember I was a child trying to tinker around the only computer that we had. No one knew how to install the Windows OS from scratch with the drivers and everything else (they were installed on floppy disks) so when no one was around I managed to do it everything. I remember such joy, felt like a hacker 😂

Now I'm a web developer and I feel like a moron each time I'm sitting on a defect I can't solve so I'd say these were good times 😜

I don’t remember the first experience as I was a very small child, but I remember a very defining one: picture a 4yo just casually turning on the computer and playing a game.
My mother and sister find me out and panic because “oh no, turning it off it’s hard how will we do? Your father is working and can’t turn it off!”

Now picture the 4 yo saying “it’s easy, you just do this”, followed by him closing the game, launching the bash command to close the computer and going away.

I must have been so creepy in their eyes 😂

First time using a computer:

Booting up some Mickey Mouse game from a floppy disk when I was 4 on my dads gateway 2000.

First time coding:
Writing html in dream weaver at 14.

Edit: holy shit dreamweaver still exists?

This and Road Rash and Windows 95 and accidentally deleting the soundcard driver to make space for Rollercoaster Tycoon.

Dad was taking me and my brother to work and we were playing with his pc. Our game was MS PowerPoint :D. We were adding funny images/emoticons to a slide and laugh. Sometimes we were printing our masterpieces. Good old days ...

First experience with a PC....

It would have been the Commodore64 and those giant 5.25" floppies, ah those were the days with CRT TV's.

Watching a friend load up Tetris on that big screen was eye opening for a 8-9 Year old.

Year 7 maths in 1984 - the teacher had a computer and showed us some BASIC commands to do mathematics.

I was spellbound. That year my father also bought a Commodore 64 for the family and I gravitated towards it. I typed program listings out of magazines and learnt programming almost by osmosis.

My dad was a young guy, and I like animation like young kid...

I found my dad's hentai porn on his computer. Sorry dad.

Playing gameboy Pokemon roms in an emulator called noCash, which would ask you to pay after a set amount of playtime if you wanted to continue having color in your games.

i was probably 4 or 5, my mom brought some educational games from school and I'd often play them. I don't remember a time before computers though

Playing Galagon/Galaga on my dad's slow-ass toshiba company laptop. I still sometimes boot it just to play again

First "computer" : Electronika BK. Had some fun with table software and some basic

first X86 : Intel 80286 with wooping 1MB of ram and 40 MB hard drive.

First fun experiance :

Me : "I'm gonna clean folders"
Me : "What are these files on the c: ? I'll move them into a folder"
(Youknow like io.sys, autoexec.bat)
Reboots :
Computer : "Please insert a boot drive"
Me : "The what now?"
Needed some help to fix it.
At least I learnt how boot loader works and wrote my own small thingy in asm

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. :)

Playing War Wind and Z (from Bitmap Brothers) on a Win95 computer of my friend. Good old times :)

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.

It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.

My first computer was an old Pentium 2 running windows 98 with no internet and just a CD Rom and Floppy Drive. Got it for my 7th Birthday I think and immediately wanted to make it do my biding.

Didn't work out. Had no clue what the words on screen meant and batch scripts looked like sorcery to me.
Hell even the options menu in German was a cryptic puzzle to me.

Got a little better in the meantime.

ms paint on windows xp.

The first would be playing some Pac-Man on a bootleg ZX Spectrum that my uncle made (allegedly, he made more than one and sold them).

Outside of games, had a Win95 PC at some point. I don't remember much as that was something around 20 years ago.

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

A Ninja Turtles Tiger Handheld game!

First games console ever tried: NES. Around 1986.

First computer:
Sinclair Spectrum +2 !! Around 1988. I used to buy those books that came with code. I wrote all that code in but hardly ever played the actual game.
Once met the guy who created lots of game faves at the time (manic miner, chucky egg etc). That's where it all started...

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.

I was 7 years old, and my mom’s friend brought me their old computer as a new year present. I was absolutely happy that day, because I wanted my own computer as far back as I can remember. I spent that evening exploring russian psychological (!) sex quiz (!!) with pictures (!!!) :D I found it on C:\

Actually no, there is an earlier memory. I was four, and I really wanted to mess around with my sis’ computer, it was some kind of holiday, maybe the new year as well. They won’t let me do it, and being an engineer, I took a rectangle-shaped candy box and made a “laptop” out of it. I remember drawing the screen, the icons and stuff. And plastic mold that actually handles candy, I turned upside down, and the candy cavities became sort of “buttons” I could press.

My uncle had a computer with a dot matrix printer attached. I remember that there was a Python turtle like drawing program. Spend quite some hours making blocky single line drawings with that. Printed some too.
No clue what kind of computer it was though. Probably a PC clone like headstart.

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

Went to my friends house and he had a new Amstrad CPC464, with ’Oh Mummy’, a Pac-Man close with better music.
Fell in love with computers from the moment I saw it and bought a Spectrum 128k+2 not long after.

1997 Olivetti, 122 MHz Intel processor, 8MB RAM and 1GB HDD and Win 95. I mostly used software for children learning and games.

But my first “computer” was a shoebox with a keyboard drawn by hand on the cover and a screen on the bottom where I could change the “software” by swapping different drawings inside a transparent envelope.

All hardware and software made by me 😁

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

My first experience with a computer was playing Alley Cat. Anyone else familiar with this gem?

Everyone’s first computer seems to be a genuine piece of history.
Mine is a laptop from 2008 that I still use as a media hub for my TV.

Well this is in fact just me reminiscing, instead of telling anecdote.

My first PC was a pentium two, the cpu casing being those horizontal ones, and a big bulky monitor resting on top of it; all white. A white mouse, two white speakers (you know the ones). I was perhaps just about 6 years old, and I used it the first bunch of times to play Mortal Kombat, and Sega's Moto Racer 3, and watch animated disney movies but mostly mickey mouse on VCD. I guess my habits of gaming and binge watching started way too early.

My first experience with a computer was actually sitting on my dad's lap and watching him play world of warcraft - and damn, that hit hard

Zx81…loved typing machine code directly ..make sure you get those 1’s and 0’s in the right order else Whoosh and start again!

damn hearing how company treats us IT workers is sad

When my brother got our first computer and he let me play MiG-29 Fulcrum and Age of Empires III

My first experience with a computer was inhereting my older brothers Amiga 500. The rest is history!

My first experience…

My father bought a Commodore 64 but couldn’t figure out how to use it. A few days later I was playing games and making art. He yelled at me saying none of it was in the manual. He was mad I understood how to use it. It all came naturally to me, and I early
on realized I had a gift.

Making a shitty website in middle school.

Playing NFS (it was the version which had the McClaren car), few other games and watching some movies (CD player) It wasn't my computer though. It was my cousin's and I used it while he was working. I think I broke it couple of times (windows 95) to get the BSOD.

I bought my own computer only when I started working. My family couldn't afford one before that. Luckily I had good friends in college who let me use theirs for course work.

My first interaction with a computer was probably playing Parsec on an old TI-99/A we dug out of the attic. After that there were a lot of troubleshooting sessions with my dad on various computers trying to get some game up and running. I still remember the IRQ/DMA combination needed to get sound in Duke.

It really is no mystery why I ended up working with this stuff.

1995 comodore. I couldn't understand how can something cool like this have shittier games like my sega megadrive 2. In 99 I get my first pentium and internet, then I get trapped.