A Teletype ASR33 hooked up to a downtown mainframe via a 300 baud acoustic modem (remember those? Dial the number, listen for the screech, and place the handset in the cradle over the rubber donuts). Save your program using punched tape. To load, run the tape through the attached reader. If your tape breaks, tough stuff.
Programmed in BASIC - taught myself, my sophomore year in high school, 1973. Oh yes, born 1958.
Last year I had a chance to have dinner with my high school computer programming teacher, who happened to be the son of a famous contemporary classical music composer. He told me that he was learning more from us about computers than he was teaching us. I guess since we were hacking into the Los Angeles Unified School District’s student database, and creating programs to un “mask” any file (a “mask” was a primitive way of protecting your data - a 6 character alphanumeric password).
I still remember BASIC.
10 FOR A=1 TO 100000
20 PRINT "RICO IS A GEEK ";
30 NEXT A
40 END
My dad bought a 12 kilo portable computer in 1983 (this one, if I´m not mistaken), I was 6 at the time. Used to play Space Invaders on it. We still have it and it still works, and the original Space Invaders-floppy too. (Played it some time ago for nostalgia´s sake…) I actually used it for writing and printing out an essay about 10 years ago when our other computer was temporarily out of order
Then we had an Apple II (?) - oh, Lode Runner and the Winter Olympics! Those were the days! I don´t remember on what machine I played Zork, but I think that was dad´s work computer and a bit later…
ZX81, brought home to us when I was about 5, in 1981.
1k ram. Still have it but the power supply is broken. Must get a new one. Outgrew it pretty quickly, but had to wait quite a while for the c64.
Like winterhawk11 and The_Raven, the first machine I used was a Trash-80 Model I, Level 2 box that I encountered in first grade. The cassette drive never worked, so we had to manually enter programs every time we wanted to run them. We got a Model III soon after, and I ran it into the ground with Hunt the Wumpus. I even modified the game to display maps of the caves, some of which actually resembled the correct shape. It was quite painful.
The first personal machine I had was a TRS-80 CoCo. Every time I start fretting over load times on my PS2, I reflect on CLOAD and touchy volume controls, and wait with a smile on my face.
My first computer was also a Wang, in a summer school class in '69 that read punch cards, in some version of assembler. The card readers looked like toasters, and only handled one card at a time.
The first “real” computer I touched was an IBM 360, circa 1970. I wrote a tic-tac-toe game in Fortran.
My first computer was a Gateway 2000 386 with 4 MB of RAM in…1990, I think? I was born in 1982…I was using it in the third grade to be one of the few kids who could type his reports…so yeah, I think 1990. I taught myself Windows 3.0 and DOS 5.0, as well as rudimentary Q-BASIC (I learned how to change certain properties in the two games that came with it, Gorillas and Nibbler.)
Man, I loved that thing. I wish it still worked, it’s in the basement right now. I’ve tried to fix it, but no go. Something is wrong with the MOBO and/or BIOS. It had such great games on it…Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, Duke Nuken (the ORIGINAL,) and more. I even learned to make my own batch files, and edited to autoexec.bat file so that right as DOS loaded, a menu popped up with numbered choices for all the programs I used, and all I had to do was type the number I wanted and hit enter. All before age 12.
OMG I wasn’t even gonna read all the posts (I can’t sleep and got up to lurk a bit before trying again…) and was just gonna post my answer…
TRS80
…and when I open up page 2 the first poster MissMapp has the same answer! Too funny!!
“Back in the day” as “they” say…I used to go with my dad to the Radio Shack near downtown on the weekends to learn how to write programs (well dad did most of the work, but I played).
First video game (which I called a computer because it AMAZED me) - was TRON.
First computer my family owned was an Apple IIe - that was probably in 1984 or thereabouts?
Several of my friends got home computers a year or two before I did - I remember a Commodore 64, an IBM, and the Radio Shack TRS-80 I think.
I remember being fascinated by the first printer I ever saw - dot-matrix of course, hooked up to a huge mainframe computer (ca. 1980) - it could print forwards AND then it printed BACKWARDS!
