Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Computer...When did you start???

I just finished fileing a small claims suit on-line against the guy who totaled out my pickup last Dec. & his insurance is giving me the run around. I pay all my bills on-line & just last week filed a release of liability with the DMV...Electronic tax file. etc. etc. I didn't get on-line until Y2K...I used 6 or 7 different computer systems while I worked for the Air Force as a civilian but I just didn't realize at the time just how much the world is changing & getting connected...I couldn't imagine how much easier & uncluttered life would be...Today I wouldn't be without one...When did you start??? Wonderful technology...

On a main frame in college in the 70's. Had to keypunch cards for it in Fortan.

My first computer access was with an Bay Area Electronic Data Processing (BAEDP) timeshare via an IBM teletype/tape reader in 1972.

Scott

I bought a Dell DX2-66 shortly after they were introduced. I had to look back and see when that was,.. and it appears that it occurred sometime in mid to late 1992.

I hooked up to the internet shortly after that,.. but there wasn't much happening with it at that time.

Discovered mIRC about 1995 or so,.. compliments of my computer dweeb brother,... eventually became the operator of a channel on there,... met a woman on there,... (several, actually)... eventually married one of them.

Yeah,.... considering that I initially bought a computer to stay current with AutoCAD, you could say that it's had a totally unanticipated impact on my world.

It radically altered the course of my life in more ways than I'll ever really know.

I had a Commodore64 in high school back in the early '80s, but then I never touched another computer until around 2002, when a friend gave me one he no longer needed. I didn't realize how useful they had become until I tried it out and started surfing the web. Now I'm an addict.

I found the Internet in 1993 when I was about to get out of the Navy...We started ordering supplies online and it was a PITA because it was in DOS...I thought the Internet would never fly with civilians because it took so long to do anything online...Then me and my buddies found Newsgroups...That's where the dirty pictures were posted but even then it was so time consuming I thought it was quicker to buy a magazine...
I remember buying a new,state of the art,28,800 modem...That was fast man...

My first computer was an AppleIIe 'way back in the early 1980's. Finally got a PC (a 386) in 1993... and up-graded to a custom-built, latest thing type computer (200 MHz) in 1996... came on line in March of 1997 and have been here ever since.

My first computer was a Pionex I bought from Sam's. Paid about $1300 for it. Had a 24 meg hard drive and 2 meg of RAM. Must have been ~1993
I remember when State Farm went bought their first computer for the southeastern region (AL-MS-LA). It had a room all its own about 30 feet square if I remember and it had to be air conditioned. Now my laptop would blow it out of the water into smithereens.

Started in 1962 programming a 66" Bullard Vertical Turret Lathe in what language I don't really remember but it was on paper tape. Have worked steadily on all types of computers up thru Cray's and Amdahl's with most experience on IBM360/370 series. Programmed on the last Univac III that was in production. Have written in probably every common and some uncommon programming languages. Retired in 2002. Not much exposure to what I have always termed 'toy computers' (PC's) as they were used basically as terminals when I retired. I do think I still have a COBOL compiler around for them though, but it's for many operating systems back. Do not know much about PC's and do not like them. About the only thing I use my laptop for is Email and these forums. I have a mental block about them and cell phones and just don't seem to be able to understand them at all.

96 was forced to at work

I had an Atari 400 and then an Atari 800XL in the mid-80's. I got a 300-baud modem that I used to call BBS's (the precursors to the Internet). Only one person could connect to the BBS at a time (one phone line!) Compuserve was actually up at that time, but it was all text; no pictures that I remember. I stopped using that computer around 1989 and didn't get into PC's until 1996 or so.

Did punch cards for IBMs and Sperry/Univac in 79. Hand you stack of cards to the acolyte, and get a stack of green bar the next day or two. Remote access via 300 baud acoustical modem so we could play net trek. First home PC was an Altair 8800b.

Remember DARPAnet? Or the non-commercial internet? I remember surfing the web with NCSA Mosaic, and becoming my company's internet specialist because I had 'one of those email account things'. Buying Sparc 20s for $25,000 and admining SunOS, while Bill Gates said the Internet was no big deal.

Who would have thought?

Mac IISi in I think 1991. I remember our first printer, a HP inkjet. It was one of the first color ones and it was on sale down from it's original $1000.00 price tag.

First modem was a 2800 baud. Moved up to 14.4 that was screamin.....

I was a computer operator nights when I was in college starting in 1976. That was when computers filled huge, air conditioned rooms. My job was primarily feeding 5081 cards into the readers, hanging tapes onto tape drives and printing out the billing statements the programs created.

My first PC was a commodore 64 in the 80's. I had a modem that I plugged into the back of it. Speed was non-existant but it was new and exciting. Back then, forums like this were called "bulletin boards".

First PC was an IBM PC Junior with 64 Kb of memory in 1983. From that I graduated to a IBM 287, then to a HP Pentium 3, to an HP Pentium 4 and now have a Dell with 3 gigs of memory. I don't like to buy new stuff (if the existing is working) just for the sake of buying.

When I was in High School a semi with a trailer full of I don't know what kind of computers came around and parked outside for a couple of weeks each year in the late 70s. About a dozen or so of us would go out there at a time and they would tell us what IIRC DOS commands to enter and we'd all go, "Wow that was cool". Then the next group of students would come and we'd have to go. The next year we'd do it again. Seems like our regular teachers didn't know much about 'em either. I took about ten years off after my freshman year in college, and by the time that I went back to college in the late 80s, it was a whole different ballgame.

I remember the Radio Shack TRS-80 (basic)

1969 with timeshare access (phoneline) to an IBM 360 w/Fortran in Silicon Valley. Learned Assembler in '71. Got an IBM PC B in '82, 10 meg harddrive with 64K RAM, upgraded to 128K RAM in '83. Learned CPM for a micro also in '82. Been with a home PC type ever since.

bought a 286 for the biz in 1987 with an Oki Data printer.

tech said it was more computer than I would ever need. (grin, but true)


hard to believe I've bought 15 or 20 of the damned things since then!

I started with the Commodore PET computer in the late 1970's as part of a high school class on personal computing. For memory storage it used audio cassettes, and it was sequential memory. Here's what it looked like: Then I graduated to the Commodore 64 in the early 1980's. It used those big flat floppy disks. My next step up was the Epson Equity Personal Computer. Still used the same external memory, but this time the operating system was MS DOS. A few years later I got a new computer with the first Windows operating system.