Early 40s.
I originally learned on TRS-80s when I was about 5. Two different systems, actually–my older brother’s CoCo, and the Model I in a classroom I had access to in school. The former had the cassette drive Doctor Jackson justly derided and the latter had no non-volatile storage at all. I learned operating systems and programming in parallel with learning to read, basically.
After that, I somehow got hold of a Northstar machine running CP/M…with no documentation. I’m pretty sure that established my “learn by experimentation” approach. No one else wanted it (because no one knew how to use it), so I set it up in a little cubbyhole and typed things into it until I found things that worked. After that, every new system I’ve come across has seemed relatively intuitive.
tl;dr: Early exposure with no active teaching, just freedom to tinker.
I’m 61
(OMG, really? I’m that freakin’ old? Damn.)
There was a computer class in my high school, but I didn’t take it. My wife, Pepper Mill, who may or may not be the same age as me, but I can’t really say, DID take a computer class in high school. I took a FORTRAN course my freshman year in college, as well as a course in Assembly language during the between-semester January session. I’ve been keeping up on my own, but with a few short courses on particular software.
My earliest programming and datra collection was on stacks of punch cards, although I was able to do all the software for my bachelor’s thesis at a remote terminal and not have to keep my program for the thesis on cards, thank OG.
Bonus: Both Pepper Mill and I also learned to “program” Analog Computers. How many people here have used those?
Justly derided, for sure, but I also should have said “but it was sooooo cool!”
I worked at a press clipping service. Points if you know what that was. We had to look up our clients in a big book, that at times resembled the OED. Every week a new version. They finally, and in the early 80’s. computerized and put the damn book onmputer. I’d never even taken typing in HS, but we all struggled thru and that was how I learned.
Sure, especially compared to having no storage at all. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure the first time I directed profanity at a computer was after twiddling a volume control for 20 minutes, trying to get The Black Sanctum to load. (Tangent: “The Internet never forgets”, indeed–there’s a walkthrough of the graphical version of the game on YouTube.)
Shy of 50yo.
Started with an Apple II in school (junior high) for an after-school ‘Computer Club’ lab. Around the same time, my family got a Commodore Vic-20. I remember my dad (a programmer…punchcards LOL!) bringing home copies of Compute! and Byte magazine from his work that I would type in the sample programs from and fiddle with, learning to program. We migrated to C-64, C-128, Mac Classic (b&w boxy thing with the disc slot), 286, 386…and on and on.
Apple IIe computers in the computer lab in grade school. Mostly Oregon Trail, but occasionally Number Munchers. I remember a couple of times we were taught how to create or manipulate very simple programs re: drawing.
On a more advanced computer in the library, we liked to fool around with KidPix.
Many people can “use” a computer. The difference is they might regard it as a machine for consumption rather than production - e.g., tablets and smartphones.
Does my slide rule count? It has an analog display and is operated by an analog brain (mine)
They aren’t something i ever had the opportunity to mess with, no work in any fields that use them.
What did you work in? some kind of environmental or biological field or what not?
At some point, when I was in college (maybe 1979?) I discovered that the university mainframe computer had a word-processing program. I was an English major, so I’d never had any reason to have anything to do with computers, but this seemed worth looking into. You could go to the computer lab, sit down at a terminal, and write your paper. I loved it. Way better than a typewriter! I could edit my paper, and save drafts and rewrite to my heart’s content, and then print it all out (dot-matrix printer for drafts, and I vaguely remember there was a daisy-wheel printer for the final copy).
Then, after college, I was working at a magazine publishing company when we got the first IBM PCs. They were primitive things, of course, compared to today’s computers. You had to load your programs from a floppy disk.
We got Lotus 123. I thought it was sheer genius. I became the spreadsheet guru for the office, or for my department, at least.
It went from there.