How did you learn to use a computer?

In My Humble Opinion
81

If “programming” or “sysadmin” is just a job, maybe.

But if your actual passion is computer systems, you’ll have a working understanding of ALL aspects of the technology. I’m a programmer who became a sysadmin and hardware maintenance guy all at the same time, simply because they’re all related

Someone willing to tolerate incomplete understanding probably missed his or her calling, IMHO. Perhaps that perspective is not common. More’s the shame, I guess.

FWIW, I’d be deeply suspicious of a system administrator who doesn’t know how to upgrade his server’s hardware (or, at a minimum, how to properly connect the peripherals).

82

That does not seem to be unusual from the hard-core programmers/Ph.D.s that I know in computer science. My wife is an excellent programmer with a Ph.D. and a good job in her profession. However, when technical issues come up, it’s me doing the support. :slight_smile: Being interested in the abstract problems programming can solve and the algorithmic and mathematical thinking it involves does not mean you’re interested in the hardware aspect of things.

83

68

While working as a biologist in 1979, taught myself on a TRS-80 and a few timeshare systems where I had free access. Took a CC course in Fortran, got a job maintaining an old COBOL system, moved on to mainframe database stuff, went into R&D with a mainframe software company. Bought a Mac and taught myself Pascal & C for a new project at work then took a job working on Windows 3 applications in 1989. Always built my own Windows boxes, bought the Macs :slight_smile:

Retired in 2009 and have not written a line of code since.

84

I’m 40.

I started using a computer when I was around 7. My data was a programmer, and I thought they were cool.

When I was 10, I programmed a game modeled after Dungeons and Dragons. We’d play it for hours. It was written in Basic and was 95% words, but it was actually a lot of fun.

85

In college. My first PC was a .286

I remember Windows95 very well.
It was loaded with bugs and would constantly cursor-freeze on me.

I too find it strange that you’re running into people who are computer illiterate.
That will not look good on your resume if you’re looking for a job

86

Late 30s – my dad was an engineer, and worked with computers since he was in college (he tells stories about the punch cards), and we had a home computer about as far back as I remember. Commodore 64 is the earliest one I recall, and my brother and I grew up playing games on it. We got an IBM-compatible some time around 1990, and I recall calling up local BBS’s with our modem (2400, than 4800, then 9600 baud) and spending an hour downloading a single picture of boobs, and playing BBS games like Operation Overkill. My junior year in HS I took a basic programming class, and a single semester of C+ in college (not my major). I’ve always been computer literate, but not to the point of hacker/programmer level… enough to fix most problems my elderly relatives run into, and replace most of the easier components (hard drive, video card, etc.) myself, but that’s about it.

87

I’m 48.

First time using a computer: Apple ][ in 8[sup]th[/sup] grade. Ours was the last school in the district to get them.

First time using a computer for more than just rudimentary programming for a few minutes per day: the Commodore 64 system that Dad bought a few months before I graduated high school. It was supposed to be a word processor which printed to a Brother typewriter that we already had but we never could get them to cooperate.

88

Luxury! We had to make do with ASCII boobs.

89

I remember ASCII nudies. You had to print it off and then rub flour in your eyes before holding the sheet 24" away and squinting. “It looks sort of like a naked lady…”

90

I’m 57. I’m a GIS programmer. I do not have a college degree.

I guess I learned through brute force. Family got an IBM PS2 in the late 80’s. I was a draftsman/cartographer at the time.

Got a job in a GIS conversion shop (convert paper maps to digital). So I learned a lot there, but little of it is relevant today.

I’m rather stunned that the OP is running into people in their 20’s that are not computer literate.

91

I, too, bought a TRS-80 when they first came out and taught myself BASIC. Data storage was a cassette tape drive. Be careful to buy leaderless cassettes or you risk losing the first lines of your program. The process was:

  1. type up your program and debug
  2. simulpress the “Play” and “Record” buttons on the cassette player
  3. type “csave” on the computer
  4. go eat dinner, take a shower, watch a movie, read “War and Peace”
  5. check on save progress
  6. repeat steps 5-6 until save process completed
  7. hope the volume setting on the cassette player was set right and the tape is not too “noisy”
92

I’m 69.

In the early 80s my wife and I were writing a textbook and the publisher, HBJ, wanted to see if authors having a personal computer would speed the writing process. HBJ gave us an advance to buy a system, and we ended up with a Commodore 8032 and a daisywheel printer. Basically self-taught, but not much beyond word processing at that point.
In 1984 I started working for a telecommunications software company and used a PC for word processing until I convinced the company in 1985 to spring for Macs and LaserPrinters for the publishing effort. Spent the next 30 years writing and illustrating on the Mac, with occasional side trips to PCs (used both at VMware and Dell), and finished up working with XML and DITA to create single-source documentation before I retired two years ago.

93

Missed the edit window when adding:

Loading a program was pretty much the reverse, but type “cload” on the TRS-80 first, then press “Play” on the cassette player. Steps 4-5 still applied.

94

1st computer names i remember are things like Sperry-Univac, and the brains were somewhere else in a sealed room with a hollow floor where they piped the air from antarctica.

You did not go in here, because the room sized monstrosity could not handle static, humidity, dust, heat, etc.
Mind you the whole room was not the CPU, just a single tape drive was about the size of a large standup freezer.

What you go to do, if you were very lucky, was log some time share on the system, and get to connect to this thing on a lovely black and white terminal with something like a 12 inch screen.

The amount of time available was very limited, so you spent a lot of time with pencil and paper trying to make sure you had no errors in your program, so you could type it in and run it a few times before your time ran out.
You learned to type fast even if you could not touch type

Then my school got it’s own small terminal system, sadly i forget what kind it was
It was not anything fancy, was fairly slow and required a lot of swapping out of its semi rigid disks, they were like 10 or 12 inches and only semi flexible (no not a disk pack)

The system was so slow that sometimes you could literally see it time slicing from one terminal session to the next one.
At the time it was still kind of amazing, now days you’d get some kid raging over the time it took.

Wish i could remember what system it was, i think it was one from NCR but i could be wrong. It was probably slower than 2Mhz, but at the same time it was awesome because we could copy the concept of a game we had come across running on the time shared mainframe, a MUD.

Of course then we found hiding and leaving the mud process running pretty much slowed the entire system to a crawl for other classes, teacher was not exactly happy but not exactly mad either.

I never became a great coder, i did better at scripting but i liked taking the hardware apart better :smiley:

1st hard drive i ever saw was as big as the steering wheel on your car, and about 6 or 7 inches tall.
That was just the platters, the drive itself remained inside the computer.
These were the things that when the heads crashes they literally crashed and cut gouges into the disks ruining them and the heads.

It was a long time between that and having any kind of functional personal computer
(long in youth years anyways)
Getting trash80’s was awesome though, you could EXPAND them!!:eek:

A lot of the learning back them was on your own trial and error, there were no great books at first and no google of course, it was kind of fun though because just figuring something out was kind of like some mystery adventure game in itself.

95

These are customers who are having trouble with computers, not employees. You can’t get a job where I work without being computer-literate. The application process is done on a computer, and so are some of the tests, and most of the job involves doing stuff on computers (though the required literacy level isn’t that high). It is not a computer programming company or anything like that.

A “low” level of literacy at work might be moving desks and forgetting how to set up a printer. That doesn’t happen all that often and everyone understands the instructions on what to do (without needing their hands held), but they might have to look up those instructions every time.

96

Ah.

I agree with you about all of this.

For a suitable definition of “working understanding”, sure.

My point is, it’s possible to be computer literate with a somewhat high-level and general knowledge of the hardware. Knowing what RAM and disk are and why top saying you have 4 GB free has nothing to do with Emacs saying you’re out of disk space is that kind of knowledge, but it stops well short of being able to specify or, especially, physically build a desktop system.

My larger point is that there are no “computer people” once you know enough to know about computers, any more than there are “doctors” once you know enough to know about the medical field: There haven’t been “doctors”, or people who were equally specialized in all medical knowledge, since the early modern era, back when barbers performed surgery. Same in the computer world: I’m a programmer, not a sysadmin. I can administer my own systems, but put me in charge of a server farm and you’re wasting your money.

So I know what server farms are. I know what co-location is. I understand NAT, DHCP, BGP, IPv6, and, so help me, both SLIP and PPP. But there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to learn how to make it all work at a practical level, let alone to be able to fix it if something goes wrong and the whole Internet thinks the quickest way to everywhere runs through a T1 line hooked up to an Amiga. I’m not even sure what a T1 line looks like, physically.

So I’m willing to live with partial knowledge. Everyone is. Nobody inhales Stack Exchange, or at least nobody who gets anything else done.

97

I’m 45

In the early '80s my dad purchased a PC which (I think) was an Aster CT-80. I know it ran CP/M rather than MSDOS. Spent a lot of time with the Usborne programing books teaching myself BASIC.

After that I had an Amiga 500, then moved onto a 386. We did some programming at school but I was in the transition group that went from handing in hand-written assignment papers in yr7 to printed papers in yr12.

98

My friend got a new Trash 80, and when tax season was over, he loaned it to me along with the manual.

It had no hard drive, and used 5 ½ floppies to boot up. Work was done by writing to the floppy. The manuals were about 16 inches tall when stacked up, and I spent time learning how to write simple programs by reading the manual.

I’ve basically learned by doing and reading. Too bad there were no resources available to me for instruction or help. I lived in a small rural community at the time.

I am in my 70s now.

99

I’m 57.

First exposure was probably learning Fortran (for a beginning electrical engineering course) as a freshman at university in 1977. We did our work on punch cards as the terminal/on line accounts were reserved for sophomores on up. Kind of glad I got to have the punch card experience though it made debugging programs rather time consuming.

Next was my first computer science class which was Pascal, a world’s difference from Fortran. Then assembly on a Kim-1 (along with paper tape storage) for microprocessor class, then the C language, etc.

Sometime around 1979, my roommate bought a TRS-80 and we could dial in to the campus mainframe for most of our work, which was nice.

After graduation, at work it was the usual progression of desktops, IBMs and Apples along with Unix boxes. As an EE with computer background I found myself using computers to help design new computers for various niche applications.

My first computer at home, though was a 386sx in the late 80s. I just hadn’t had the burning desire to have one at home being surrounded by them at work.

After that it’s just been a steady stream of computers, including the one in my pocket.

100

I’m 47. My first experience with a computer, if you can call it that, was a ZX-81 my best friend owned in 1982. I later got a ZX Spectrum in around 1985, I was 15, and I played on that for a good seven years or so.

Meanwhile at school we learned on an Apple IIe. At first we had one, with a green monitor, then by the time I left school they had about twelve of them, only one with a colour screen. We didn’t really learn much at school, the teachers knew less than my friends and I did, which was barely anything at all. We just played games in the lunch break.

In the 90s my housemate decided to buy a Commodore Amiga 500, and that was my first experience with a proper OS UI, figuring out file systems, using a mouse, and drawing graphics (16 colours!) on apps like Deluxe Paint.

Then in 1995, when I was 25, I convinced my mother to buy a family PC with Windows 95, and I bought my own with Windows 98 a couple of years later, and internet access came along with those.

I am not very tech savvy, but I can tweak a couple of things on occasion, which to most people makes me look like a hacker from the dark web or something. Really I am just not afraid to follow instructions and click into the workings a few levels in if necessary.