How Did You Become Interested in Computers?

OmegaWolf747

For me, my true love affair with computers began 31 years ago in my tenth grade touch typing class, when the clunky old IBM electric typewriters we'd been using were spirited away over Christmas vacation and replaced with a LAN of IBM PS/2 Model 25s. To a modern person, those machines are clunky old beige boxes with less processing power than a modern smartwatch, but to my teenage self, those things were space age!

g121

OmegaWolf747
Grade 11 .. we used card punch machines .. our card deck would be taken to a different school to run & we'd get the result the next day : )) ..

JanJ

OmegaWolf747 Wanted to do Video Editing....
I had done 2" Quad Editing on a CDL PEC 102 Editing system in the 1970's with Ampex AVR2's.. .. I did many Commercials and shows in 70's & 80"s.. That worked off a Data General Nova 4 with paper tape, core memory, and an absolutely HUGE Hard Drive made by Company that became Seagate...
In the 2000's, via **multiple jobs, I had progressed Past CDL, CMX, ACE, Mach 2000, and others... to Adobe and Avid, and a smattering of Discrete Logic editors!
I was supporting Discrete, Avid SD & HD SDI at my TV Network Job at ABC, and was doing HDV Premiere at home...and found an issue with Dissolves at home in "CS1", and posted it... and got a strange email IM from site I was at.... and that led to my being part of the ADOBE BETA TEST Group for Premiere Pro... That continued till CS6. I eventually did under the table file conversions at work using the Beta software of AME & Premiere PRO at ABC when they shot footage that Avid or Discreet couldn't import! They didn't know it was happening...
That led to Encore (Which I was OK with, and AME & PS, which I was OK with, and AE, Which I had NO Business being with at all!!! AE & PS Relied on RGB Color Space!!! Video is YUV Color Space! Only Premiere and Encore 'groups' at ADOBE really understood YUV Color Space... Others went off and developed with ADOBE RGB Color Space, which was better than RGB Color Space, but still had limitations.... and wasn't as good as YUV, but number-crunched easier than YUV..... and I think that's what prevented AE & PS from going YUV...
But I was part of Beta Site until the start of CS7, which then became Something Else with monthly $$$$....
I was OK with Yearly $$ for upgrade, but not Monthly$$
And I bailed!!!!f As many of the other Beta Testers did!!!
I'm still running CS 6 Master Suite!!! Which is good for HS 1920x1080/30

dave

g121

Luxury! We had one Port-A-Punch, the sole upside of which was you quickly learned the punch code and could read cards without a printing punch.

A couple of days a week, I'd round up any card decks from any of the half-a-dozen people interested, take 'em down the post office, mail them to Imperial College where they'd be submitted to the 7094 (PUFFT Fortran running under IBSYS). Basic turnaround was 3 days - i.e., post on Monday, get cards and output back on Wednesday if you were lucky.

This was an after-school activity arranged by a maths teacher who was himself taking a degree in computer science through the Open University. I was 16. I got the 'post office interface' role because I was too impatient to wait for someone else to do it.

vaxvms

After many years with vacuum tubes I was intrigued by computers when I first saw an IBM 029 punch card 50+ years ago. And a card sorter. WOW! I learned to read the Hollerith holes in the cards when the ink ribbons ran dry while learning to write FORTRAN IV code, and I got good at it. Anyone here remember green bar paper?
Sometime after 1980 I was introduced to the VAX 11/780. OMG! Submit a job and get instant results! An interactive system and a video terminal!!! A delete and backspace key, not duplicate the card to the error then fix it. Goodbye punch cards and paper tape. Life is Good!

PCs came much, much later in life, using a 300 baud modem to access Compuserve. GUI happened even later.

I went to a presentation by Admiral Grace Hopper sometime after 1985 and was blown away by her knowledge and abilities that helped make our current digital lives wonderful.

g121

vaxvms Anyone here remember green bar paper?

of course, we called it pyjama paper : ))

& at my 1st job .. for night support dial in ..
a Texas Instruments Silent 700 modem : ))

broknsymetry

dave You from Yorkshire?

But you try and tell the young people today that, and they won't believe you!

Four Yorkshiremen

vaxvms

g121 "pyjama" paper?

Stick an EOJ card in the middle of someone's deck to get revenge.

Zenit_IIfx

Got my first computer when I was 4 years old, it was a Packard Bell Multimedia, Pentium 1 233mhz, 64mb RAM, 4gb HDD. I was just a little kid but addicted to the computer right away. That singular purchase my parents made kicked off an entire career that has paid for the computer countless times over. I fed the hobby as a broke student buying old gear before it was cool or collectible. Spent time messing around with it building things. I would have to say that I learned far more on my own than from any formal education in IT. Completed an IT bachelors with concentration in cyber-security. My heart is in overall systems engineering. I'm lucky I get to work on nearly all aspects of IT in my current position, simultaneously wearing multiple hats. DevSecInfraOps, is that even a thing?

I still collect vintage computers - that is the 100% fun part of computers for me still.

GadgetsRme

My user name GadgetsRme says it all. First a Commodore 64, then a128. Those were followed by a TRS80 on which I learned Basic programming. Next came PCs IBM 8088, Tandy 286, 486 which I built from scratch. Then I built a couple of Pentium variations and started dabbling in Linux. It just gone on from there. Now my daily use is either Android tablet, phone or Linux laptop.

Donoreo

My first computer was a Coleco Adam, but before that, I used many friends' computers like Vic-20s and C-64s.

broknsymetry

I read about computers as a kid from some book in the library. It was a blueprint on how to build a computer from transistors. Later when I first went to GaTech I took the Intro computer class, we had to program using punch cards. I became more interested after I could use a monitor and learned Basic, Fortran and Pascal as well as some other obscure languages. When I joined the Navy as an ET, I was trained on the AN/TPX-42(A)V10 DAIR Radar which incorporated a Data General NOVA 3/12 computer that had to be programmed via front panel paddle switches or cassette tape. A couple of years later I was in charge of the SNAP II (Shipboard Non-Tactical Automated Data Processing Program), a Harris H300), minicomputer aboard my ship for maintenance but self taught to program in Vulcan Basic from the only reference I had available - an error file. After leaving the Navy the first PC I bought was a Philips 386SX. As a grad student and a physicist I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of computer systems including super computers.

DrStrange

broknsymetry I have a homemade FM broadcast transmitter which has PLL synthesis (in binary) programmed via DIP switches. 🙂

dave

broknsymetry

When I was doing the rounds of computer companies just prior to graduation, I went to IBM, ICL (UK computer company that was), and DEC.

IBM was all white shirts, but on the other hand, a bunch of them stopped to ask if they could help when I had the hood up on my Mini after the interview, and didn't seem too worried about oilstains. But they had an executive dining room.

At ICL I was shown round by someone who said things like "you submit card decks there and get back the printouts a couple of hours later" while we were looking at the machine room from a viewing gallery.

At DEC I was shown round by a guy not much older than myself who said "...and this 11/70 has 256 KW of memory..." (pulls out chassis on a running timesharing system) "... there". That pretty much sealed the deal right there.

DrStrange

My interest in computers and IT is an outgrowth of my general interest in electronics (especially radio).
Radio and electronics came first, then computers.

HFB1217

I Was going to college for Electrical Enginering and mid-course we went from Vacuum Tubes to
transistors and the first thing they taught was the basic Flip-Flop circuit and its use in computer registers for the representation of Ones and Zeros. Mid-course Vietnam took the place of school and then Army Engineer School for Chief Engineer of Nike Hercules Nuclear Missile Bases as a
SSG E-6. After the service went to Work for the Bell System Western Electric and that started my education with the world of 1973 computers and over 6 computer schools with the Company. I know from that how a computer is built from the transistors up and how they function.
Early 90's went back to college and learned 3 computer languages and Started a computer Graphics course as an addition to the standard Graphics courses. Doing SETI at Dslr got me into building home computers as a business and the Overclocking as a Hobby, Still doing Cutting Bleeding Edge Computers to this day.

Hydraglass

Long story - but 1983 in grade 5 they had a one week computer class that we went to the high school for and was on Radio Shack TRS-80's - we learned some Basic, used LOGO, and did a few other things. I was immediately fascinated. I went home and told my parents - the next weekend we went out and bought a Commodore 64 and a 13" TV for it and my parents set it up on a desk for me. I was hooked. I spent months, nay years, learning to program in Basic on it, playing games on it, etc. In '87 my older brother got access to a bunch of early IBM XT's that were going to be scrapped from where he was working, and got me an old 8088 w/ 640K RAM and 2 x 5 1/4 floppy drives and a CGA monitor. That got me into DOS, Pascal, Word Perfect, Lotus 123, etc. Then shortly after I went to university and got my degree in Electrical and Computer engineering and it all went from there - I got a job as a helpdesk consultant while in university, got a job in IT/IS on graduation, then went and started my own computer consultancy in '00, sold it in '09, got my masters in EE, worked in computer and PLC electrical control design for energy generation for a decade, and now work in robotics R&D.

Heat84

I'm still waiting for sombody to say their first computer experience was the room sized computer from WWII.😛

My first computer experience was the Apple II or IIe in the 80's when I was in elementary school. It was love at first sight. In those days there was only one computer in a class room. The other students weren't interested in it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. I remember playing Oregon Trail. That's still the best educational game ever, followed by Number Munchers. One guy was involved in creating both games. Then Macintoshes came out in the early 90's.

Back in those days, I liked Macintoshes alot better than IBM clones, but I ended up with an IBM clone. But now I prefer IBM clones. Apple is communism. Too bad we don't have Motorola clones or whatever you would call Android phones if they used the IBM clone system.

A couple years later, my father got a Commodore 64 and later an Atari ST. I think it was 1991 when we got our first IBM clone. My first internet experience was connecting to the network at my father's work with a baud rate modem in the early 90's. There wasn't much to do but look around. Some of you guys probably used the internet way back in the 60's when it just connected a few colleges around the world.

sempergoofy

Heat84

Heat84 I'm still waiting for sombody to say their first computer experience was the room sized computer from WWII.

My father served in an MRU (Machine Records Unit) in Korea during the conflict. The pic I posted is from 1955 after the MRU withdrew to Japan. That's as close to WWII as I can get you with my story.

dave

Heat84

Not from WW II, but certainly any respectable computer required false flooring in a room of its own.

AMDUSER

The first computer I ever used was an old Apple II E in elementary school with a green screen monitor with 5 inch floppy drive. [Late 1980s] It was not really until we got a computer at home during the mid to late 1990s that I started dabbling and learning you could modify MS Windows 98 setup. By modify, I mean change the setup from oem to upgrade a using MS C++ with a particular file and editing the string table. That was on a Packard Bell with an Intel Pentium 60 with 24 Meg of ram [and 8 of that soldiered on the mainboard.] I ended up replacing that with a custom built AMD Duron 850 on a Aopen MK33 with a TNT2 M64 32 meg video, 128 Meg sdram with a 13.6 gig WD hard drive. I was not until a few years later I graduated from St. Paul College with credentials in IT / IS.

broknsymetry

AMDUSER The first computer I ever used was an old Apple II E in elementary school

I think my second grade classroom had an abacus in it. No one ever used it and I imagine the teacher didn't know how. 🫤

Prevok

Always had interest in tech and video games. When I was 4-5 years old, I wanted a NES, but my mother was worried I would spend too much time gaming. Instead she bought a used Apple IIc.

First exposure to computers. Was cool, but being command line driven and in English, as a native French speaker that hadn't learned to read yet, it was not the most useful piece of tech I have owned 😃

While in elementary school, I was going to my local public library every time I could, because they had computers we could use. I spent so much time on the early internet looking for cheats for games and reading stuff in tech in general. It was a world of information that just opened up to me. Fun times. Dabble a bit in chat rooms as well.

While in the first grade of high school my dad bought me a used Macintosh LC. Again it was not the greatest buy, as I was unable to play the same games as my friends on PC, but at least I had a computer. No modem and no internet though 🙁 It allowed me to tinker a bit, learn more and manage computers.

Late in the third year of high school, my mom finally caved and bought our first PC. Pentium 3 800 MHz, 128MB of RAM (I think) and the worst declination of the GeForce 2 MX. Because it had just came out, it was running Windows ME (worst f*****g OS ever). Crashed constantly, blue screened at least once per hour. I spent countless time reinstalling that forsaken OS, trying different drivers, testing alternative software, etc. Very formative, but shitty experience. A friend gave me a copy of Windows 2000 and then it was finally usable. The rest of the family didn't like it, they preferred the look of the icons on ME (go figure). I started getting experience with dual-boot. Over the various Service Pack, it eased running games on 2000, some I still had to revert back to ME (if I recall), but by SP4 and sometime a few registry tweak, I was able to free myself from ME. Once XP came along, I was able to get everyone back to the same OS, made my life a bit easier.

After high school, bought my own computer (Pentium 4 1800MHZ), started studying in IT support and it's been 20 something years. Now I have so many computers, it ridiculous 😃