How many were born before tv? Before PCs?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I grew up in North-East Ohio, on a farm outside a 10,000 pop. town named Ravenna.(Sexywriter, if you’re there, we’re a vanishing breed).

I was 10 or 11 when we got our first tv set. We got three stations and had a machine that rotated the antenna on the roof for better reception. Quite advanced at the time!
I didn’t get my fingers on this webtv keyboard until I was 57 or 58.

I was wondering if anyone else on the boards started life without tv,or how old you were when you got a PC. Can you imagine life without them? How hopeless would you feel if you were thrown back to the time when all you had was the rotary telephone and the radio? Don’t say if you didn’t know about anything else that it wouldn’t matter. I’m talking about having it and then having it suddenly removed.

2

Always had a TV, but I was about 11 or 12 (early '80s) when I got my first computer: a Radio Shack Color Computer. I don’t remember much about the specs, other than it had a cassette tape drive, and I used the TV in our kitchen as a monitor. Man, that was a long time ago.

3

Luxury, bleedin’ luxury! :smiley:

Being from the bush, it wasn’t until 1963 that we got mains power at home. Until then we had a “lighting plant shed” with a generator that cranked out enough DC to power about half a dozen light bulbs. The radio used dry cell batteries. Can’t recall when TV arrived, though I’d guess about '65, when I would have been 6yo. As we were over 100 miles from the nearest booster station we only got one channel.

Saw my first computer mainframe and PC in my first year of university aged 19. Purchased my first PC aged about 25.

4

Always had TV, probably always had a computer in the family, 'cause my dad works in computers, but I don’t think I would’ve ever really used a computer until the early-mid 90s. I bought MY first computer just over a year ago (but was thouroughly addicted to the family one before that).

As for the second part of the question; I could cope without TV, no probs. No computers would 'cause me much more difficulty (even ignoring the fact that I [will] depend on them for my livelihood).

5

I was born in 1942.

First compute I worked on (1961) had vacuum tubes.

Got my first home computer - a Tandy (read Radio Shack) Model 16 in 1981. It was a high-powered dude with 2 8-inch floppies. Hot stuff!

Guess why my SN is OldBroad.

6

We got a TV when I was twelve in 1960. The reception was very bad since we were about seventy miles from the transmitter. Only one channel was of any real use at first, but later a second one improved. We had a rotor on the antenna which helped. Today, I can see the tower containing the transmitter from my roof. It is twelve miles away and, with the rotor on the antenna, we get excellent reception. We have no cable. About the only thing we watch is PBS. The networks broadcast mostly crap and their “news” really stinks. VCRs have carried TV to a much higher level. If not for PBS and the VCR, I think I could chuck the tv.

I got a computer, a Pentium 120, about four years ago. I use it almost exclusively for web surfing and e-mail. I would never give it up. It is a dandy-andy tool which has become indispensible for me since I read mostly non-fiction. Before getting the computer, I had had several programming courses in the late sixties and early seventies using Holerith cards. Anyone remember key punch machines? You would encode the program on stacks of cards and submit the whole thing to an IBM 360 at the computer center. You would come back the next day for your results. If you were lucky, the program performed smoothly. If you had a comma or a period out of place, however, you had to correct the problem and resubmit the cards. It could take a while to get it right. People laugh, but this is the way the computers which ran the space program in its early days were programed. Imagine a couple of million lines of code on Holerith cards!

Do you remember when computer memory was “core”?

The printers were about five feet tall. Remember how they worked? A drum with rows of letters would rotate at high speed. Fanfold paper passing over the drum. Hammers, one for each row, would stike an inked ribbon just above the paper surface as the correct letter rotated into position. It wasn’t perfect and the letters never lined up perfectly.

Remember the disk drives. They were about the size of a kitchen range and had removeable disk packs which looked like a container for a devil’s food cake. Disk space was precious and gave birth to the Y2K situation.

And of course most people know that the tape drives were as big as a house.

7

Yes indeed; the first computer I ever 'puted on was a CDC 3300 in 1975. Used a teletype to input BASIC programs, or punchcards were used for “batch” processing of FORTRAN & COBOL programs. I also used a computerized typesetter that stored text files on punched paper tape.

8

I’ve had TV longer than anyone I know. My Dad owned a bar in San Francisco and bought his first TV set in 1946 to entice customers. He quickly replaced the 8" with a 10" and brought the older TV home. There was one channel on from 4 to 7 PM. The programming consisted only of local broadcasting – I remember when we hooked up with LA and, miracle of miracles, New York! The early programs consisted of news, local entertainers (there was a singer, Roberta Quinlan, who had a daily fifteen minute spot. During one broadcast her dress slipped, exposing a portion of one breast. This was hot live stuff!), a serial and a children’s show.

The reception was incredibly bad and most shows were interrupted with us yelling to my Dad, “Fix the vertical hold!” He had a mirror set up across our living room so that he could tinker with the knobs at the back of the set, watching the reflection of the screen in the mirror.

My grandmother was a recipient of a bar castoff and was determined to have ‘color.’ She bought a plastic screen cover that had 1-2" inch bands of color - an inch of blue, followed by an inch of yellow, etc., the bottom color band was green. Blue was for the sky, green for the ground. Of course it made no sense whatsoever and was merely annoying.

At UC Berkeley in the early 60s, computer science classes began to appear on the course schedules. Women were not allowed to enroll in them but there was a backdoor approach where you could declare Enginnering as a major and be allowed to particpate in relevant computer classes. Needless to say, you’d have to be Wernher Von Braun’s daughter to be allowed within the engineering dept., and I never had a chance.

First job working with computers was in '69 for an airline reservation system. Surprisingly good considering that few industries had changed over from file cabinets to keyboards.

First home PC was somewhere around 1981, a Radio Shack TRS80, referred to as a Trash 80. It was keyboard only; you had to hook it up to a TV set to provide a monitor and use a peripheral cassette deck to save files. Unwittingly, you learned Basic in order to make the damn thing perform. Next was an Apple IIE somewhere around 1985. I remember printing a four page paper – the response was something to the effect of, “This is a very large job and will take a while to print” (early Apple-ese).

Damn old people! They just rattle on and on…

9

It was hell, too, because the monitors weren’t ready and I had to view the screen through an RF-modulator to my TV aerial.

It had 48K of memory and I splurged and got the tape-recorder plug so I could load promised software off an audio tape. Those never delivered.

I was producing videogames, and their joysticks weren’t being delivered, so I started “manufacturing” my own - Tandy in those days would do small batches with private lables. They had to be rewired a bit before we could ship them, because IBM never had ANYTHING compatible with existing standards.

10

I had worked on that computer when I was a software manager at Control Data Corp. I then jumped to the company that made the typesetter, Mohawk Data Sciences, to help them produce their first “PC” - shaped like a DESK!

11

As a typical baby boomer (born in '49) time between first seeing television and owning one in our own house was several years. I can remember Sunday visits to my grandparents in town circa 1955 where we were allowed to watch some snowy black and white Ed Sullivan or some such.

The tube arrived at our house in the summer of 1957 and we were constantly being urged to “go outside and play” instead of doing what we wanted, which was to stay glued to the tube all the time. Oh, and we had to sit at least 4 or 5 feet away so that we wouldn’t “ruin your eyes.”

Much of the 50s “Golden Age” stuff bored us silly. There was a special “look” to dramas such as Playhouse 90 (it had to do with the lighting) that was repellant compared to the filmed stuff. We enjoyed the wonderful Saturday morning cowboy and cartoon shows and endured the Lawrence Welk when we had to. Loved Lucy and most of the sitcoms, some of the cop shows (“10-4” said Broderick Crawford on Highway Patrol, and Lee Marvin was great on “M-Squad.”)

We lived 90 miles from the nearest TV town and the repeaters in our area were marginal, so we got three network stations + PBS, with varying degrees of quality. We were ALWAYS fussing with the horizontal and vertical hold buttons. Some years later when we got the color set, there were even more buttons to fool with.

As far as computers go, I worked at a radio station that purchased a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 (fondly called the “trash-80”)for $3000 circa 1980
180. It had twin 7" floppies, which made it a handy machine. For my own amusement, I typed in programs from computer magazines, laboriously line by line, with many retypes to correct mistakes. Shortly after that bought a Commodore-64 as my first personal computer. Later owned an IBM XT clone, a “portable” that looked like, and was nearly as heavy as, a sewing machine case. From there to various Macs, starting with the SE and PCs marching up throught the ranks to curent Pentium III. Have Macs at home, PCs at work and can take advantage of the best of both worlds.

12

I’ve always had TV and color TV at that, but I was the first on my block to have a computer.

In 1983, I got a TI99/4A computer. Basically, it was a glorified Atari with a keyboard. It was hooked up to the TV in the living room and my mother graciously donated her old typewriter stand for it. I spent a lot of time learning to program with it.

The next year, we got an Apple IIc. It had no hard drive, two floppy drives, no mouse (that came later with the Mac), a monochrome green monitor, and a dot-matrix printer. I spent even more time with that than I did with the TI.

We kept the Apple for quite a while, till I joined the Navy and got some exposure to 286 PCs. I spent a fair amount of time on my parents’ shiny new PC learning how to use it, and later, bought one of my own. My parents’ modem was a 2400 bps, so the 14.4 mine came with was fast in comparison.

The machine I have now is nothing like the first PC I used. It’s got 128 MB of RAM, 30 GB of hard drive space, a CD-ROM drive, a CD burner, speakers for sound (gasp!), and a cable modem in lieu of the 56k in the computer.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

Robin

13

I remember life without TV. I wasn’t very old when we got our first B&W Philco.
Maybe 6 or 7 years old.
Our first color was a round tube Zenith. About 1963 or so.
My first experience with computers was repairing test Modules for a Navy contractor.
I then worked as a technician key punching data into a old tube burner,about the size of a rather large refrigerator.
Then tandy 64
Then tandy 1000
Hi Opal
then this Gateway.

14

Oh yeah
Do CNCs count?
Right around Hi Opal

15

Born in 1958, but never grew up with TV. Don’t have one now, wouldn’t miss it if I did have one & somebody took it away from me.

Take my computer and you are dead f*cking meat, though.

16

I’m a baby boomer but can’t remember a time w/o television. They were clunky black boxes with itsy little knobs but they worked. I mostly remember watching tv at my grandparents’ house. Tiny little town (hey, it had a stop light!) in southern Ohio; we stayed there every other weekend. My cranky grandfather was a huge Dinah Shore fan. Unfortunately he also liked Lawrence Welk. ::shudders::

First computer? Early 80’s; a then top-of-the-line IBM/PC that now resembles (and underperforms) your average doorstop. I don’t precisely envy younger folks for being so effortlessly at home with computers. I wouldn’t trade in my experiences for anything. But the experiences surely are different. Not better or worse; just different.

{Aside to ageless: I haven’t been to Ravenna in quite a while; attended Kent nearby. I was so peeved when Fork 'n Fingers restaurant was torn down; best, absolute best, authentic family Mexican food I ever stumbled across. Is the Black Horse tavern still there? Still have the console television hanging from the ceiling and mushrooms growing in the cellar, i.e. the “ladies room”?)

Veb

17

I know I’ve done this on this board before, but it’s been a little while.

We got a TV in 1958 as the other two homes in the neighborhood that had them were becoming exasperated with their positions as keeper of all the neighborhood kids. We lived in Berkeley and reception was decent. Mt sister and I soon discovered Saturday morning TV. Shortly thereafter we moved to Tokyo and it was back to life without TV.

My first computer was a TI-99/4A I bought in 1982. The real joy of that was that it came with a book that made it very easy to learn TI Basic, which, although a little different from MS Basic, allowed me to learn the MS version when I transitioned to an IBM AT in 1986 (the manuals that came with IBMs and clones were more like command dictionaries than learning tools - on the DOS side you would never learn how to use an escape sequence from what was offered in the manual).

And computers have become part and parcel of most of the waking hours of my life (although I haven’t done much in the way of coding in 8 or 9 years - don’t really need to anymore).

The television, OTOH, has pretty much passed from my life. My previous one broke at the end of the (then) Houston Oilers’ most ignominious defeat (1992 playoffs against Buffalo) and I decided I’d just do something else and started reading more. A friend bought me a nice new one about three years ago, but I’ve gotten so completely out of the habit that I haven’t turned it on since the night he brought it over.

18

And would have no idea why you’d want to, anyway! We’ve gone from lousy manuals to none at all. Online help doesn’t help if you can’t get the stupid thing started.

Core memory is very pretty, but it’s amazing that it worked.

I think the TV came after I was born but before I’d remember it. Since my earliest memories are from when I was 2-1/2 I didn’t beat it by much.

First computer I ever used was an HP graphics terminal that could also run BASIC. 132 column screen and you could scroll backwards on it. Only computer I ever saw that would let you do that.

The BASIC was proprietary, with one of those “command dictionariers” as a manual. I bought a manual at Rat Shack, but didn’t know how much translating between dialects I’d have to do. Good practice, although a lot of “And why is that a syntax error?” anger that prepared me for C, which seems to be rather capricious in its deciding if something is an error or not.

19

I was born in New Zealand, another Baby Boomer, but things spread round the globe a little slower back then. I can remember life before refrigerators and showers, let alone TVs and computers.

We had a meat-safe set in the kitchen wall, in which we kept perishable goods. It was open to the air, and netting kept insects at bay.

First refrigerator the year my dad sold up his little corner shop, and we moved into a brand-new house. About 1958 I guess. First shower then too. (Baths before that, about once a week - fine old anglosaxon tradition)

First TV in 1962 - we were among the first in Welington to have one. I fell in love with Claire Mazengarb, a very refined lady announcer.

During my student years, I worked part-time as a cleaner, and my boss reckoned that within a few years every school-child would have a small hand-held computer to use in lessons. I considered him a ridiculously out-of-touch dreamer.

I spent the early years of my second degree, 1985-1990, typing long essays on a little portable typewriter, and prided myself on being one of the few in the class not to turn in hand-written work. There were computers at my school, but you had to book them, and something always went wrong and you had to reboot, and by that time your hour was up.

I doubt that anyone is interested, but we all like writing about ourselves, don’t we?

I love youse all

Redboss

20

Born in 1964, I can’t remember not having a TV, except for a few months when, during a fight with my brother, we knocked a vase of water and flowers over and into the innards of our black & white, launching my cheapskate father into television repair as a hobby.
Was among the first students in my high school to take the new computer class, where we learned to program ridiculously elementary stuff in Basic and Fortran on a mainframe computer hooked up to four monitors that likely didn’t have the computing power of a monotone Gameboy.
Could I live without either?
You bet.
As much as I enjoy it (computers) and as much as it makes my job easier in certain respects, I would do just fine without it.
And judging by the looming blackouts, many of us may have to do without this summer.
Glad I’ve got my trusty Royal ready with a fresh ribbon.