I’m 77.
I was 40 the first time I used a computer and I relied on a co-worker to teach me how to use it. “It” being a main frame that lived in it’s own air conditioned and humidity controlled room. Access was limited to time slots that were allocated by the accounting department; it wasn’t unusual to be kicked off when accounting arbitrarily decided they needed more access. I consider myself to be barely computer literate even after all these years.
1994, a hand-me-down 286, I was already a touch typist. Subscribed for email to the Tallahassee Freenet, which was a long-distance toll call to connect to their text-only dial-up Lynx browser. No mouse, just arrow keys and keyboard code on a text-only green-on-black screen. Was on a ListServ for socialization with people of like interests. The only thing with any graphic display was a chess game on floppy. My email inbox showed up on my screen ten times faster than it does now. Years later, still using freenet and text browser, I was fast enough to snipe Ebay bidders waiting for their graphics-bloated Windows screens to load.
Actually, in about 1982, I bought one of those Sinclair computers advertised in Scientific American magazine. Required writing my own code, and saving it on a casette player jacked to the computer, and hooking it up to my portable TV screen for display. But it actually worked, and I could create simple games on it. But that didn’t really lead in any way to my learning to use the 286 twelve years later.
In 1968, my girl friendn in Romania was a computer programmer, she was the first woman and one of the first four people in Romania to learn Fortran. But nothing she knew or did with computers rubbed off on me, it was just her job.
TLTE – It’s actually mind boggling, to reflect on the time line curve. It was 25 years from having a Fortran-writing girl friend to being onliine for the first time. And then another 25 years to go from that text-only freenet to where we are now.
46, and I too had Apple II classes in school and a TI-99 at home at some point.
My first new computer was a Packard Bell 386 in the 90s, featuring AOL and Wolfenstein. I’ve forgotten the system before that, a 286 with some proprietary word processing that I really liked.
I’m 34, and I’d say about 1986 or 1987. Dad bought a new 286, a true IBM PC. He wrote a couple batch files to make using it easier. One pulled up a menu of pretty much all the installed programs so that they could be started by letter or number. Even when I learned to navigate DOS, the command was still useful. The other is one I really miss every time I have to look through a lot of files in a directory while in DOS. It was kind of like using dir with a couple switches, but it would automatically double-column the contents and pause display once the screen had been filled until you pushed a key.
The rest was mostly just using it as a kid. Playing games, using Paint (Windows had to be loaded after DOS loaded, of course), eventually using it a little for school. Learned to touch-type on it when Dad bought a copy of a Mavis Beacon program. It never got much use for school. By the time I was old enough for school assignments like writing papers we were running a 486. I’ve actually had very little formal instruction in how to use a computer and a large part of it was redundant. I’m not counting learning how to use a specific program, or how to use a specific program better, especially for work.
In my 40s.
When I was 10 I got my first computer. It was an Atari XL followed shortly by a Commodore 64. I learnt mainly from reading computer magazines, bulletin boards and experimenting on my own.
dir /w /p
Apple for the students. Early 80s.
Taught myself BASIC on an Atari 800.
Osmosis.
In the early 80s I bought some kind of Atari machine with cassette tape memory.
At the same time my college had a Digital Equipment VAX machine with dumb terminals.
When I entered the workforce in 1984 we had the same VAX setup. Shortly after, I found myself in a job that required travel and was provided a 286 laptop than ran on DOS. It was monochrome, came in a plastic case, and weighed about 20 pounds. So, I learned how to navigate around in DOS and run programs like Word Perfect and Lotus 123.
Shortly thereafter we migrated to a desktop and Windows environment (circa early 90s) with all Microsoft applications. And about a year later we got Internet access at work, still in the early 90s.
So, from the time I was 20 years old I’ve been messing around on some kind of computer.
Now I’m thinking about the days of using memory managers to squeeze as many drivers as possible into the space above 640k but below 1 MB, and having to tweak it over and over (and over) by hand. And adding expansion cards to the system and having to spend a day or two pulling cards and flipping tiny DIP switches, moving jumpers, and shuffling IRQs and DMAs until you finally managed to get all of the cards to work together. (I once had a configuration that no amount of effort to get it to work in other Windows versions succeeded and I had to settle for the much-hated Windows ME.)
I’m 44. We started being introduced to computers in school in the 5th or 6th grade. I’m pretty sure they were TI-99s but I wouldn’t stake anything on it. We typed short papers in Bank Street Writer, did some spirograph-like tricks in LOGO and played with some introductory BASIC. I remember my math book in 6th grade had some introductory BASIC programs in the back as an appendix.
In the 6th grade, I got a Commodore Plus/4 for Christmas which was garbage and luckily stopped working quickly. My mother was able to put its refund value towards a Commodore 128 which served me for years after that. Although it was mainly used for playing games, I’d write programs in BASIC, often spending more time writing a program to solve my math homework than it would have taken to do it myself. But I think the most important thing it taught me was that, aside from a legendary POKE command, you didn’t “break” a computer by messing around and trying stuff.
Past that, it was Apple IIe’s in junior high, IBM DOS machines in high school and I had my own IBM clone going into college. A cheap garbage Packard-Bell taught me, out of necessity, how to mess with IRQs and BIOS and other software internals. A cheap garbage Compaq taught me how, out of necessity, to open the case and poke at the hardware.
I get the feeling that really knowing your computer is sort of like working on your car. If you grew up in the right generation, it’s likely that you learned because you had to in order to keep it running. These days, especially with sealed systems like phones and tablets performing much of the same duties, you have to actively decide to have an interest in it. And basic performance has gotten better so it’s easy to coast by on “it just works” rather than solving driver issues or other incompatibilities. I’m not surprised that younger people are less familiar with how computers operate despite having a lifetime of exposure to them.
Early 60s. Nothing but books until about 1973 when I first got to sit behind a teletype and enter a few BASIC commands. Starting in 1974 I had some access to computers at work, but rather limited. I was able to operate a computer, that is to start jobs, hang tapes, that kind of nonsense, but rarely to program. Sometime in 1975 I saw an article about the Altair computer and began to seek out the means to build my own computer. I signed up for an intro to computers course at a local college and spent the next year in their computer lab programming in BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, APL, and even some 360 assembler. Then I began to build my own computer. Before it was capable of doing anything I found a job at a computer store and suddenly had access to a lot of small computers.
I begged for and got as a combined Birthday & Xmas gift the TI-99/4A 16kb computer that hooked up to a TV. I learned how to use it and taught myself how to program in Basic on it. No floppies of course but it would take TI game cartridges and you could save programs to tape.
An amazing little machine that I guess really paid for itself in the long run. In 1982 I believe it cost $200. Amazing my parent sprung for it.
I had given it to my nephew at one point and he actually gave it back year laters, so I still have it.
I’m 50 to answer the OPs other question.
Nice to see several other posters had experience with the TI-99, it was a good early computer to learn on.
I learned how to use a computer when I was hired to write documentation for software. This was in 1984.
I already knew how to type, but hadn’t used a computer before. The software was a spreadsheet/word processor/database hybrid, which seemed a good idea at the time until Microsoft started selling suites. I would try the various options on the software and then write what happened.
We did have a computer in high school – an Olivetti Underwood Programa 101. It had all the computing power of a cheap pocket calculator these days. I learned Basic and Fortran in college; two of the easiest courses I took (for assignments, I’d just write out the commands, enter them on punch cards, and then check back later; any problems were due to typoes).
Played with an Apple //c and IIe at school, just trying things and learning. (I even learned how to copy the one game everyone liked so much so that it could be played on either computer.) One was in the library, and I would wind up spending hours in there, before I’d get in trouble for being out of class too long.
When I moved on to my own school, I got my first computer, an 80286 with a Hercules Monochrome adapter, and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on it. I read the manual veraciously. I remember being very frustrated not knowing how to start Windows, but my uncle (the computer geek in the family) told me.
From there, I started reading tons of help files. I bought some books, but those were mostly Internet related, back when you had books of interesting things to do online. And I just kept trying things. I wound up getting a modem from my teachers, and then my uncle gave me a hand me down 486 with VGA graphics. And eventually the government owed me money so I used it to buy a Windows 98 machine.
Never once was I explicitly taught anything, until college when I took some courses on Photoshop and Illustrator. Oh, and I learned Access that way, too. Everything else was self-taught.
Exactly. I used to upgrade some component in my computer several times a year, and a do a full motherboard/CPU/memory replacement every couple of years just because the hardware at the time wasn’t capable of running demanding software at a decent speed. But now most things run at a reasonable speed (and the things that don’t would still be slow with the best CPU on the market) that you don’t need to worry so much about constant upgrading. My current CPU is an ancient 4-core AMD Phenom II from 2009, and I really don’t have a compelling reason to replace it (although I am lusting for one of them there newly-announced Threadrippers.)
I’m 50. When I was a kid, my father used to go to the “computer center” at the university from time to time, and take me with him. I was pretty little. I mostly amused myself my making rubber band balls. The computer took up a room, was very noisy, and took punch cards. Sometimes my father had to wait a while. But he had to turn in his students’ grades that way (he was a university professor) even back in the early 1970s.
My intermediate school got Tandies when I was 11. They were the kind that used tape players to load programs from cassettes. We could play a very slow game of Blackjack on them, or use Basic to program them to count up to 1,000,000. The computers were in all the math classrooms. IIRC, there were two in each classroom, and we’d hurry through our work at the end of class, so we could be allowed to use the computers. It was the first time I was ever motivated to do math.
The university gave my parents desktops for their offices around 1978 (my father was a full professor; my mother was on the research faculty at the time, but she occasionally taught a class, and she published a lot; she also was the school’s star grant writer, having never been turned down). About a year later, they got another desktop approved for their home use.
When I moved in with my aunt and uncle, they also had a desktop at home. There was only one for the use of two adults, two high school students, and one intermediate school student, but that was typical then. There was actually a sign up sheet, and you had to write down whether you were using it for homework or something else. If it wasn’t for homework, you could get bumped by someone who had an emergency work/homework issue. If you wanted to play a game, you had to share if someone else wanted to play. It was in the oversized study/library in the converted garage, which was a very cool room in a very cool house.
When I first moved out, I was computerless for a while, and stuck with a lousy typewriter, until I discovered PWPs (portable word processors). They were machines that did nothing but word process. They didn’t have harddrives, but they could save documents to disk. You could save about 10 pages in the devices memory before it warned you to save to disk, and a disk on mine was two-sided, and held about 20 pages per side. The display was 10 lines, so it was like looking at a typewriter platen. You could scroll up and down pretty easily. It was a little smaller than an electric typewriter, and very heavy. It printed with a cartridge that lasted for a good 200 pages.
Before the internet, I was in college-- OK, BBs existed, but I wasn’t into them. Email existed, but so few people used it, it wasn’t really worth the expense of a computer having access to it at home. I took a computer class my senior year, and had to go to the computer lab to check email and BBs.
My PWP lasted for five years before the screen started to go. By then AOL was around. I had just gotten an enlistment bonus from the National Guard, so I bought my first computer. It had a CD-ROM drive, and WIN3.1. I couldn’t connect to AOL because it had a 28kpbs modem, and I needed a 56k. I didn’t know what the problem was. I tried to connect every time AOL sent me a disk in the mail. Finally, about six months later, I called AOL up, and the tech on the phone talked me through finding the device manager (I had no idea thins was what I was doing, though) and finding out that I needed a new modem. I went to a computer store and bought one.
I was very nervous about installing it. I thought about taking it to a shop to have it installed, but when I opened the computer, and it wasn’t filled with tiny, delicate little parts, I was amazed. The old modem really did just pop out, and the new one popped in. And I got on line. First AOL site visited: SDMB.
Anyway, I was hooked on tinkering with computers after that experience.
Sixth grade, first year of middle school, 1982. I took an elective called “Computers,” which was learning to program in BASIC (and a little LOGO) on an Apple IIe. I think it took me about a year to convince my parents we needed one at home; we eventually got an Apple IIc.
Two stages:
• My mom bought me a Smith-Corona word processor, from which I learned the concept of select, cut or copy, reposition cursor, and paste. Also the concept of “save document” and coming back later to “select document / load document”. And of course “print” and “delete document”.
•In 1987 my college Women’s History teacher marched us to the Macintosh lab, walked us through the process of inserting a floppy (provided by the lab, containing Macintosh System 3 and a copy of MacWrite 4.6), using the mouse, double-clicking things both to open them (disk icon) and to launch the writing program; once inside the word processor I once again familiarized myself with how to cut copy and paste (new techniques, same idea). OMG there were fonts, fonts, and more fonts. (Courier, Chicago, Geneva, Helvetica, Times, and Monaco… wow! And all different point sizes, and italics and bold and underline and outline and shadow!). I wasn’t expecting to like it or to find it easy to use. An hour of introduction and I was addicted.
• A month or so later, I had Font/DA mover and SuperPaint and Microsoft Works which included a spreadsheet and a database program and I was off to the races.
I don’t remember how much I paid for my used TI-99/4a in the late 1980s, but it was probably under $10. (I do remember specifically that I paid $1.00 for my Timex-Sinclair 1000 with the memory expansion module.)