My first interaction was in 1974 when I took a class in Fortran at a local community college. We used punch cards that we created on machines that were as big as refrigerators (turned sidewise). You submitted your program as a batch, it ran overnight, and you found out the next day what your first error was. Then you repeated the process, each time only finding out what the first error in the code was, because once that was encountered, the whole thing was canceled. It could take a week to debug a simple program if you weren’t really, really careful.
The year after I got mine, they were marked down to $50 new. So $10 sounds about right by the late 80s.
I’m 68. My first exposure to computers was learning how to operate a card punch machine, a sorter, and wiring plugboards on an IBM 407 accounting machine. One step up from hammer, chisel and stone in terms of computer capability.
My second exposure was working as an operator on aCDC 6600, which at that time was the world’s largest and fastest supercomputer. It was huge; the computer room was bigger than my Taekwondo school, which is 3200 sq. ft. I took some classes in Fortran, etc. and that’s what planted the seed for my computer career.
At the age of 15, in 1978.
My geometry textbook had BASIC programs to demonstrate certain computable geometric properties, like a silly “enter two angles of a triangle and the program will compute the third (or tell you it isn’t a triangle if the sum of the two angles given was already >= 180 degrees)” program.
Radio Shack had just started to sell TRS-80 microcomputers, and I “hacked” the demonstration program at the local store (hit the “BREAK” key to stop the demonstration, find a line number after the end of the demo program, and enter the program out of the book after that point) to run the my programs.
The guys in the local store didn’t give me too much guff about it, and I rewarded them by buying one of the computers from them the next year (after I’d saved up the $600).
I"m 42. It was somewhere around third or fourth grade. I got introduced to the Apple IIes in grammar school, and it completely captured my imagination. My parents bought me a Commodore VIC-20. I read through the manual (which actually was pretty good at explaining computers and BASIC), and learned through typing out programs from books and magazines. That’s pretty much it. All self-taught. I eventually moved on to a Commodore 128, learned a bit of machine language, and then kind of got away from computers and anything programming related for awhile. I didn’t own my own computer from college (1993) to pretty much 2004. Just used work, other people’s or shared computers then. I had been using them regularly, just not one of my own.
I’m 52.
My first real exposure to computers was in a Computer Programming class during my senior year of high school (1982-1983); we were programming on Radio Shack TRS-80s in BASIC.
Then, in college, I had a work-study job in which I was doing a lot of computer work (data entry, spreadsheet design, word processing), on IBM PCs, using programs like WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3. I also had to take one semester of programming as part of my business degree (did various programming tasks in Pascal).
At that same time, some of my friends were getting personal computers, so I did a lot of fiddling around on Commodore 64s, and, later, first-generation Macs.
My jobs have always involved working on computers on a regular, if not continuous basis – again, word processing, spreadsheets, and some database work.
I didn’t buy a computer for myself until '93 or '94, but, by then, I’d been using computers pretty much continually for over a decade.
That was even before Isaac Asimov started selling them! (His were the vastly more expansive models, also inexplicably called TRS-80.)
- Very similar experience. Had to take FORTRAN in college in 1973, but we weren’t, of course, allowed anywhere near the mainframe. We had to produce stacks of keypunch cards that were then fed to the computer by someone, which then produced reams of paper because you forgot to close a “do” loop or something.
Had an Atari 2600 with Pong and Tank and Space Invaders. The first actual computer was an 8086 Tandy with a 5.25" floppy drive, bought new in about 1986. You couldn’t really do much with it, but I taught myself how to work with DOS commands and do modifications. A program like dBASE III required a stack of floppies to try to manipulate. I also had WordPerfect and a shell program I can’t remember the name of; a forerunner of the Windows notion.
I pretty much stayed with every new version up through the first Pentium models, and taught myself how to replace components and fix glitches, but have fallen hopelessly behind on the latter, as my pleas for help on this board can testify. 
I’ll have to remember that next time I’m running DOSBox. The problems of never really learning DOS in other than a piecemeal fashion.
Still, it makes sense to me that he’d write a script for it with a simpler command instead of the switches. The man did his doctoral programming work on punch cards.
You can also type “dir /?” to get a list of options.
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What does “learn how to use a computer” mean? It seems to me that there is very little overlap between what this meant when I started using computers in the early 80s and what it means today.
I had one or two very basic lessons (pun sort-of intended) in how to use a computer at school, but after I got my first computer (which was a Timex Sinclair 1000!) I learned how to use it (and the computers that came after) via books and practice.
What are you considering as “computer-literate”? I suspect that computer use among kids is actually on the decline nowadays because much of what they used to use computers for is now taken over by smartphones and tablets (unless you want to say that such things actually count as computers—does your definition of “computer-literate” include “cellphone-literate”?).
My dad had a Tandy 1000, a semi-obscure IBM PC clone which was originally intended to cash in on the massive mega-success of the IBM PC Jr. When the PC Jr crashed and burned, the Tandy 1000 was promoted as more of its own thing, and it did have rather nice graphics for the era. Anyway, I learned both command line MS-DOS and the Tandy’s strange little GUI (DeskMate) and I was programming in GW-BASIC by the time I was seven. I got fed up with Windows when I was in middle school and taught myself Linux out of a book with Red Hat 6.2 (I think it was) CDs attached, and I’m using Linux to this day. I currently work as a computer programmer.
Not really. Most people aren’t car literate, and literally nobody alive today was born before the introduction of the automobile.
There’s also multiple definitions of being computer literate, some of which are rather ephemeral: If you’re a Power User, your knowledge is entirely procedural, in that you know all the ins and outs of specific pieces of software but very little general theory. Therefore, your knowledge often has a short shelf life, and can be rendered useless by a single company going out of business.
Programmers… well, programmers can be just as bad in that respect if they only know one language, especially if that language is the extension language of some proprietary system. However, good programmers have some founding in CS theory, regardless of whether they have formal education in the field, and that theory is much longer-lived.
Most people only get the first kind of literacy, the specific cookbook knowledge, and that knowledge doesn’t build on itself. It’s just rote memorization of specific commands, and you can’t use it to do novel things, just what the application developers already thought of. Therefore, there’s little incentive to increase your level of that kind of literacy, unless you really do use some specific applications a huge amount.
When you gain the second kind of literacy, the theoretical knowledge, you’re building things and solving problems and the theory comes naturally as a consequence of building systems you can understand and maintain, and that run acceptably well. That kind of knowledge builds on itself, and invites the people who seek it to keep going, to expand their abilities so they can do more interesting things with it.
I wonder how these computer-illiterate people would answer the question, “What is a computer?”
Anyway, no one is born with that knowledge, not in 1950 and not now. Nor does owning a smartphone help even a bit. But stuff like knowing how to open an Amazon account or using the in-house software at the OP’s workplace has pretty much nothing to do with fundamental computer science. In what ways does their computer illiteracy manifest?
I am 60. I was working in a non-academic office at a university when, one morning in 1987, a crew of techs showed up and installed keyboards and monitors at everyone’s desks. They left us with no instructions or any idea of what we could do with them, so they sat idle for a month or so. Eventually we got curious and started to play with them. We discovered we had access to 3 or 4 university databases that we could use to look up info, and a rudimentary email that we could use to send requests to IT to build a new database to our needs. We could not input any info at all and the existing databases had nothing of interest to our department, so they sat for a year or so until an input function was added. At that point, we started using them.
I have no idea what hardware it was. I do remember getting actual usable networked software at the end of 1988. It was called All-in-one and allowed us email, Word Perfect, and Lotus 123. Again, we received no training, but it was a simple enough system and we figured it out.
At work, in the mid to early '80s we had a Tandy computer, mostly for word processing and printing schedules, no one really knew what else to do with them. Lotus 1-2-3. We started to do some things with that.
Then we were corporatized and went to a MCBA type linked accounting system. That is where all the menus are selected with the F-1 thru F12 function keys. The guy who set us all up swore that it would be the end of paper as we knew it!
Boxes and boxes, and more boxes of green and white pin fed paper later I realized that I had missed an investment opportunity in computer paper. I mean we were seriously buying paper by the pallet load.
First home computer in 1998, an IBM Aptiva! Big damn monster of a monitor. Top of the line, I think I spent about $2500 bucks with printer. Had a 6 Gb (yes six), hard drive. What passed for our IT guy at work told me, “you will never use that much space in your life!”
I have the same feeling toward the advice of computer visionaries now that I did then. Something else will be coming, different from what is expected. The future is being dragged in a direction that can be monetized. But I don’t think that will be the end result and I expect failure of many of the business models that think it will.
Oh, I am 60 yrs old.
A friend of mine was recruited before finishing college to run the mainframes for one of the nation’s largest insurance companies due to his knowledge of legacy programming languages. He’s still there some 20 years later.
He has no idea what’s in his home computer and I’d be surprised if he had ever performed a minor upgrade like adding memory to a home PC much less replacing a CPU or building a system.
The first computer I ever used was one of those that was hooked up to a teletype machine - not even a monitor. I also learned some programming at a course for younger kids taught by the local community college (IBM big-iron, programmed with punch cards, “face down, 9-edge first”).
TRS-80, back in the 80’s. I was literate enough to match the symbols in some programming book we picked up with those on the keys. I’m pretty sure my first program was calculating account balances and interest, at the tender age of…4 or 5?
That led to an old green-screen MS-DOS version with 5.25" floppies and 2! drives, and then to a Windows 95 PC, shortly after the first Pentiums came out.
So I’m fairly certain I was closer to today’s children than the other - I was computer-literate before I was proficient at reading.
The husband of a friend of mine was a COBOL programmer for over 20 years; he finally left the industry about a decade ago, when he could no longer find work in COBOL. He was, by all accounts, brilliant in COBOL, but the very basics of using a Windows PC completely flummox him.
I had a intro Computer class in college that had Basic projects on a Vax 11/ 780 running VMS.
I bought a XT PC, a book on DOS and Norton’s Inside the PC book.
Self taught. DOS shared many commands with VMS. Similar directory tree structure. I learned DOS in a couple weeks.
I studied the Norton book for over a year. Repeatedly going back over the chapters