My first exposure to a computer was in approx 1979, at school. We didn't actually have a computer at the school, but a local insurance company did. So we wrote our small programs on punched cards (in a dialect of BASIC IIRC), and at the beginning of next weeks class, were given listings of our compilation errors! I loved it! It was definitely the future!
My dad has some similar stories from his time in university learning to program. This used to be commonplace. Insurance companies, banks, hospitals, and large universities were typically the only places with computers at the time (mainframes), and so in order to ensure they had appropriate pipeline to hire more technical staff they would donate unused computer time for batch processing to smaller universities/colleges to ensure students could run their programs. My dad went to a very small religious university, but it offered some programming courses, and they ran their programs by "compiling" their punched cards in order, rubber banding them, and then handing them in where they were all stacked together in an accordion file, sealed, and then mailed via USPS to the state university to be run and returned, it would take on average 2 weeks to get results back as printed output + your original cards with markings from the sysop. I still have all his old punch cards, he kept them in a shoebox in my grandparent's basement.
Computers didn't begin becoming commonplace until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, even in business contexts or universities.
My first computer experience: in the late '70s I built a 6502-based micro from a kit (Tangerine Ltd, in the UK) but couldn't get it to run, so the kit makers had me visit to check it out and gave me a working version to use in their office. The manual said something like "Start BASIC by typing 'BASIC<CR>' on the keyboard". An hour or so later when they'd found & fixed my build bug and returned my micro, I still hadn't figured out that '<CR>' meant I should hit the Enter key.
Nevertheless that kit started me on a 40 year programming career bringing me and my family to California.
When you start with a 5-level Baudot machine as your 'terminal' -- it's pretty easy to remember that the Carriage Return key causes the, ahh, Carriage to Return, ready to over-print (if you don't do a Line Feed); or if you did a Line Feed, then you're at the beginning of a fresh, new line.
Unix using \n for carriage return + line feed was ok only because it was still possible to use \r (carriage return) to do overprinting.
And of course, the 5-level baudot machine had no lower case; but unix could output \L\O\W\E\R \C\A\S\E just fine...
And then, don't forget about trigraphs: '??(' == '[' and '??)' == ']' etc
My first ever computer was a Christmas present, and tbh I was far more interested in the portable black-and-white TV that came with it. That got me my own dial-tuned TV in my bedroom. Luxury! I swear I could even watch snooker on that thing...
My parents weren't well off (Dad was a docker, mum worked part-time as a travel agent), living in the pretty run-down area of Northern city (the cheap end of L4 in Liverpool, UK, if anyone cares). The idea of getting my own computer was something I hadn't ever really considered.
So, the day arrives, and I get the TV (Wow!) and a printed circuit board with a bunch of components, otherwise known as the ZX81 in kit form. I spend a good month or two watching TV, as kids are wont to do, and eventually parental pressure to "get that fucking thing working, lad" mounts to the level where it can't be ignored any more.
Go down to the shed in the back yard (for Americans, a UK 'back yard' doesn't mean a garden at the back of the house, in our case it was a small, cemented over 'private alley' to the real alley (where the bins were) at the back of the row of houses. My dad had somehow crammed a shed in there) - and started to solder.
Took the weekend, as I recall, because I wasn't great at soldering at 11, but eventually it seemed to plug in and turn on - got the BASIC prompt and everything. Read through the manual, and there was a demo line to type in and show things were working. I worked through the example, got sufficiently confident, and the entire family convened in the lounge (where the only other TV was) to watch this modern wonder...
I typed in:
PRINT 2 + 2 = 4
And it of course returned back the value
1
At which point my dad sighed in disgust, muttered "I knew it, he's buggered it", and walked out the room. It took quite a bit of persuasion to introduce the concept of 'logical truth' to him...
I've never done CS (I'm an aging physicist if anything from 30 years ago matters in that regard) but I was hooked, initially on games, but also on what you can actually do with these things. These days I live far away from that 2-up/2-down Liverpool terraced house, in sunny California. Been working for Apple for nigh on 20 years, and coding for the last 40 or so. I don't think any single thing has changed my life more than that ZX81 kit. It wasn't even my favourite 8-bit computer (that would be the Atari XL I bought when Dixons were selling them off for £99 with a disk-drive) but it was certainly the one with the most impact.
That reminds me of a time when my brother and I were trying to clear space on our IBM PC. There were lots of programs installed that we didn’t use, including something called “DOS”.
We had something like an hour before our parents got home to figure out how to recover from the message, “Disk operating system not found”. We got it done, the parents never noticed, and we learned a few things very quickly.
I still remember the exact moment when they wheeled an Apple II into my grade 1 (1980/1981) class on a TV cart and showed us what a computer was. It was an instant religious conversion and all I could think about from then on.
I'm not sure it's actually been good for me, as I lay here with a chronically inflamed lower back and terrible skills in meatspace; but while it's consumed my life, it has brought prosperity to my family.
IKR? To think as a kid I was more interested in nature, but also electronics and mechanical things but then the computer... everything else was just left behind... Nothing could compare to the fascinating infinite.
Exactly this. That realization that that box of circuits sitting quietly there on the table, waiting for your commands, was in fact an Anything Machine.
For me it was simulations. If you could write down the math for something, you could bring it to life.
Mine was a full-on Commodore 64 kit that I got for Christmas when I was in 3rd grade. Everything was used and purchased from someone unloading their gear. To this day, I have no idea how my parents were able to afford it since disposable income wasn't really a thing for them until I'd left for college.
The kit itself include 60+ bits of software (mostly disks, a few cartridges) from games to productivity (geos!), monitor, printer, disk drive, light pen, speech synthesizer, fast-load cartridge, 300 baud modem, and tape drive.
Geos was my introduction to productivity and was used for all of my reports until we got a PC many years later, the modem connected me to Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL), and Gortek and the Microchips taught me basic programming.
Receiving that gift was one of those things that really shaped the rest of my life.
My first exposure was in the 6th grade, around 1969 or so, we took a field trip to a local university with a computer. They set up a terminal to run the fox-chicken-corn puzzle, so each student got to try to solve it once. I kept wondering how a machine understood things about animals and vegatables. I retired in 2021 after 40 years as a programmer. Never underestimate a good introduction to a subject for a kid.
In second grade, I and several other kids were given a demo of a TRS-80 computer running a tutorial of how to write a program in BASIC. The tutorial was about developing a program to calculate baseball batting averages, I believe. It asked the user some questions about a baseball game, and performed a few steps. Nothing unusual so far -- just like a calculator, right?
But then it looped back to ask the questions for the next game, and updated the rolling averages, which of course took into account the information from previous iterations. My jaw hit the floor when I realized the immense power of being able to do things like this -- the possibilities are endless! Something changed in my mind in that very moment, and it's never changed back. From that day on, I was obsessed with thinking about what sort of computer programs I could write.
FWIW Somehow, while in high school I got on the mailing list for Allied Industrial (electronics) catalogs. One edition came and there was a page or two for the TRS-80, several months before any national advertising.
My first exposure to computing was playing David Ahl's HAMURABI on a TRS-80 model I (I think) circa 1979-80 in 6th grade (but I think it was reserved only for us in the "gifted & talented" class). We took (or were told) to take it seriously and treat it as a mathematical/logical exercise, so we earnestly worked out all the values to input by hand before carefully typing them in. It must have been brought in specially, as I only ever saw (& used) it once.
2nd grade, Apple II at school. I was hooked. Started tinkering with computers everywhere I could. Dad spent like 5k in 1993? getting a 486 DX2/66 with 16mb of RAM, 340MB hard drive and a gorgeous 17" Sony Trinitron monitor. That machine was a powerhouse at the time, I spent as much time as possible on it.
>BASIC is a terrible language, but there were few alternatives back then.
Ah, but where are all the stories from people who were inspired into programming by using Java?
I was wondering about Markus Persson (aka Notch) who wrote Minecraft in Java, but: "Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his father's Commodore 128"
My first computer was a TI-99/4. In 1980, I have no idea where my parents got the $$ for it. I'm 56 years old now and have supported myself and my family by programming for nearly 25 years.
I had one. Probably 1982 or so. They were a few hundred dollars initially, which was not insignificant for a high schooler in those days, but dropped to $49 just before they were discontinued in 1984 or 1985.
I'm fairly certain my first up-close-and-personal experience with a computer was when my dad brought home a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981 when I was seven years old. He was a (now-retired) aerospace engineer and Star Trek fan, so buying a home computer for himself was a dream come true. Of course, I used it far more than he ever did. He picked up a Commodore 1-button joystick and a tape drive as well, and we hooked it up to the family TV in the basement. While I didn't launch into a lifelong hacking career, I did have a lot of fun playing games (Omega Race and a Pac-Man clone called Snak-Man were favorites), along with messing around with simple BASIC programs and creating mock-ups of elaborate game screens using the graphics key functions on the VIC-20.
My Dad brought home a plug-in calculator, I was excited by that.
On holiday in Denmark a local bookshop had a green screen terminal that I was enthralled with, and there was the IKEA store terminals.
I think a teacher piqued by my passion had arranged for a Commodore PET computer to be set up in our class for a few days, maybe it was just coincidence.
High school in Paris. A PDP 11/32 running BASIC on a teletype. I learned how to make ASCII art posters copied from Creative Computing magazine. Independently invented/rediscovered run length encoding.
I kind of love how not having the Internet meant a lot of 'inventing' things on your own. I also 'discovered' RLE and Shannon-Fano coding amongst many other already discovered things. But it was a total blast and good for the mind.
Around 1980 my Dad was taking computer science at the local university and he took me to the terminal lab and showed me the mainframe.
We played some BASIC games on the mainframe. I was around 5 years old. I discovered an Apple II buried in the corner of the library at my school and I was the only person who used it! Then a family friend bought a VIC-20 and I was totally enchanted by it.
My parents bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 and I typed in games from books into it, then a Tandy MC-10, Commodore 64, Atari 130XE and finally an Atari ST. That was 1988.
It's fascinating to think back at how much happened during those 8 years, computer-wise...
I don't remember the first time. The computer is something that has always been a part of my life. My grandpa would leave sticky notes with the DOS commands I had to type to get into my games before I was able to read, I'd type them in slowly a character at a time matching the glyphs on the page to the ones on the keys and screen.
My uncle bought an imported ZX Spectrum in 1984 when I was 10. I was instantly hooked. I read BASIC books from the library and programmed on paper every day, then tested the programs every Saturday morning.
He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.
> He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.
You could say something like "If you ever plan to get rid of it, please let me know first". You might find they offer it to you there and then, or worse offer it to you later on. And you won't feel like you're directly asking them for it on the spot.
My first computer exposure was in high school (Bronx High School of Science) in the 70’s. They had an IBM 1620, looked like something out of a movie with lights and switches, and a typewriter-like console. We wrote little programs in Fortran (with the advanced divide feature). I still have the textbook we used somewhere.
First computer at home: my dad brought home an IBM clone circa 1986. He had a buddy at work (he was an insurance agent) that was really into pirating games, who gave him one bankers box full of floppies, and another full of photocopied manuals.
For me, my first "exposure" was my big brother coming home from college during fall break, and raving about his programming class. It was another three years before I got to touch a computer, at my high school, for a class in BASIC that one of the math teachers decided to offer.
I don't remember the exact year, but I used to hang out at the local Radio Shack and play with the display model Tandy TRS-80s (and later the Tandy "CoCo" Color Computer). The manager once threatened to toss me out until he saw that I had written (in some early form of BASIC) a nice little demo of the machine's capabilities, after which time he advised his employees to just leave me alone as long as I didn't break anything. (This same tactic of programming a demo of the machine's capabilities would later land me my first computer store job.)
Later in life, my first proper exposure to computers came when the fourth grade teacher's assistant noticed I had an interest in science-type stuff and arranged to get me an hour a day on the school's one and only Apple ][+ (kept in the school's main office). He would bring me piles of books about computers and leave me to it, and afterward would ask me questions about what I'd learned. He also introduced me to his Commodore 64, which was a far superior machine to the Apple ][+ at the time. Both were 64K of RAM, and 1Mhz CPU, but the Commodore machines were just graphically (and audibly) superior.
Actually ended up running my first business on an Apple ][+ for several years because my mum (who bought me my first computer in my early teens) insisted on Apple because it was the name brand she'd heard a lot and therefore assumed was good, despite my insistence that the Commodore Amiga I wanted was far better value for the money. Still can't complain, as that Apple ][+ ended up paying for itself multiple many times over and eventually bought me my first Amiga, too. Pretty good for a machine with 64K of RAM, 1Mhz CPU, and 300baud acoustic phone modem… :~)
My very, very first exposure was probably when I was about 5 years old, so that would've been about '68 or '69. My dad worked as a computer operator on a military base and they had a bring-your-kids/family-to-work day. They were printing out Bugs Bunny & Wile E Coyote pics on the line printers and passing them out to the kids. My dad also used to bring home discarded punch cards and we'd make Christmas wreaths out of them (with added silver and/or gold spray paint)
> My dad also used to bring home discarded punch cards
Reminds me of a story I heard about my grandfather. He was a meteorologist for the USAF. At the time, they distributed the day's weather forecast on these big paper maps. The maps are only good for one day, so at the end of the day, he would bring home the used maps to his kids so they could draw on the reverse side.
58 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadComputers didn't begin becoming commonplace until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, even in business contexts or universities.
Nevertheless that kit started me on a 40 year programming career bringing me and my family to California.
Unix using \n for carriage return + line feed was ok only because it was still possible to use \r (carriage return) to do overprinting.
And of course, the 5-level baudot machine had no lower case; but unix could output \L\O\W\E\R \C\A\S\E just fine...
And then, don't forget about trigraphs: '??(' == '[' and '??)' == ']' etc
Ahh, the joy of legacy hardware.
My parents weren't well off (Dad was a docker, mum worked part-time as a travel agent), living in the pretty run-down area of Northern city (the cheap end of L4 in Liverpool, UK, if anyone cares). The idea of getting my own computer was something I hadn't ever really considered.
So, the day arrives, and I get the TV (Wow!) and a printed circuit board with a bunch of components, otherwise known as the ZX81 in kit form. I spend a good month or two watching TV, as kids are wont to do, and eventually parental pressure to "get that fucking thing working, lad" mounts to the level where it can't be ignored any more.
Go down to the shed in the back yard (for Americans, a UK 'back yard' doesn't mean a garden at the back of the house, in our case it was a small, cemented over 'private alley' to the real alley (where the bins were) at the back of the row of houses. My dad had somehow crammed a shed in there) - and started to solder.
Took the weekend, as I recall, because I wasn't great at soldering at 11, but eventually it seemed to plug in and turn on - got the BASIC prompt and everything. Read through the manual, and there was a demo line to type in and show things were working. I worked through the example, got sufficiently confident, and the entire family convened in the lounge (where the only other TV was) to watch this modern wonder...
I typed in:
And it of course returned back the value At which point my dad sighed in disgust, muttered "I knew it, he's buggered it", and walked out the room. It took quite a bit of persuasion to introduce the concept of 'logical truth' to him...I've never done CS (I'm an aging physicist if anything from 30 years ago matters in that regard) but I was hooked, initially on games, but also on what you can actually do with these things. These days I live far away from that 2-up/2-down Liverpool terraced house, in sunny California. Been working for Apple for nigh on 20 years, and coding for the last 40 or so. I don't think any single thing has changed my life more than that ZX81 kit. It wasn't even my favourite 8-bit computer (that would be the Atari XL I bought when Dixons were selling them off for £99 with a disk-drive) but it was certainly the one with the most impact.
We had something like an hour before our parents got home to figure out how to recover from the message, “Disk operating system not found”. We got it done, the parents never noticed, and we learned a few things very quickly.
I'm not sure it's actually been good for me, as I lay here with a chronically inflamed lower back and terrible skills in meatspace; but while it's consumed my life, it has brought prosperity to my family.
The seduction of the virtual.
For me it was simulations. If you could write down the math for something, you could bring it to life.
The kit itself include 60+ bits of software (mostly disks, a few cartridges) from games to productivity (geos!), monitor, printer, disk drive, light pen, speech synthesizer, fast-load cartridge, 300 baud modem, and tape drive.
Geos was my introduction to productivity and was used for all of my reports until we got a PC many years later, the modem connected me to Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL), and Gortek and the Microchips taught me basic programming.
Receiving that gift was one of those things that really shaped the rest of my life.
But then it looped back to ask the questions for the next game, and updated the rolling averages, which of course took into account the information from previous iterations. My jaw hit the floor when I realized the immense power of being able to do things like this -- the possibilities are endless! Something changed in my mind in that very moment, and it's never changed back. From that day on, I was obsessed with thinking about what sort of computer programs I could write.
The game in question: https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=7...
Ah, but where are all the stories from people who were inspired into programming by using Java?
I was wondering about Markus Persson (aka Notch) who wrote Minecraft in Java, but: "Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his father's Commodore 128"
On holiday in Denmark a local bookshop had a green screen terminal that I was enthralled with, and there was the IKEA store terminals.
I think a teacher piqued by my passion had arranged for a Commodore PET computer to be set up in our class for a few days, maybe it was just coincidence.
I also discovered/invented the Z-buffer while working a summer job at Xerox doing molecular graphics.
We played some BASIC games on the mainframe. I was around 5 years old. I discovered an Apple II buried in the corner of the library at my school and I was the only person who used it! Then a family friend bought a VIC-20 and I was totally enchanted by it.
My parents bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 and I typed in games from books into it, then a Tandy MC-10, Commodore 64, Atari 130XE and finally an Atari ST. That was 1988.
It's fascinating to think back at how much happened during those 8 years, computer-wise...
He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.
You could say something like "If you ever plan to get rid of it, please let me know first". You might find they offer it to you there and then, or worse offer it to you later on. And you won't feel like you're directly asking them for it on the spot.
First computer at home: my dad brought home an IBM clone circa 1986. He had a buddy at work (he was an insurance agent) that was really into pirating games, who gave him one bankers box full of floppies, and another full of photocopied manuals.
Later in life, my first proper exposure to computers came when the fourth grade teacher's assistant noticed I had an interest in science-type stuff and arranged to get me an hour a day on the school's one and only Apple ][+ (kept in the school's main office). He would bring me piles of books about computers and leave me to it, and afterward would ask me questions about what I'd learned. He also introduced me to his Commodore 64, which was a far superior machine to the Apple ][+ at the time. Both were 64K of RAM, and 1Mhz CPU, but the Commodore machines were just graphically (and audibly) superior.
Actually ended up running my first business on an Apple ][+ for several years because my mum (who bought me my first computer in my early teens) insisted on Apple because it was the name brand she'd heard a lot and therefore assumed was good, despite my insistence that the Commodore Amiga I wanted was far better value for the money. Still can't complain, as that Apple ][+ ended up paying for itself multiple many times over and eventually bought me my first Amiga, too. Pretty good for a machine with 64K of RAM, 1Mhz CPU, and 300baud acoustic phone modem… :~)
Edit: Might have just been a handful of nasty ads that I initially encountered that redirected me. YMMV
Reminds me of a story I heard about my grandfather. He was a meteorologist for the USAF. At the time, they distributed the day's weather forecast on these big paper maps. The maps are only good for one day, so at the end of the day, he would bring home the used maps to his kids so they could draw on the reverse side.