How long have you been using computers?

[Mara]

How long have all of you been using computers? This is not an internet Q but rather computer specific...using a laptop, desktop....windows, dos, unix, linux, mac, etc etc etc etc!

I've been on computers since I was 9 years old...so lets see..that is 20 years.

I am pretty savvy in terms of able to setup, troubleshoot and make my way around my PC pretty nicely. My parents call me for limited tech support...which is a little frightening.




Our first PC was a PC CompaQ when I was 9...which had no hard drive, booted with floppies. I used Wordstar to write stories, and used to have to call my dad about 1ce a week to ask him 'what's that code I type in to delete things again?'.




Computers have come a long way since then...we still have that original CompaQ and I also have an old Mac Classic as well as my current Gateway computer (a gift from my dad 2 birthdays ago) which runs XP....am proficient on both PC and MAC, but PC is my fave.

 

[kroshka]

That's a funny question. I can't remember the first computer I used - if it was an old Mac that had just the monitor and a floppy drive or an Apple II computer (still have both

. I figure I can keep them for an old computer museum - lol......

kroshka

 

[glitterata]

Just had dinner with a high school friend who's now a computer scientist, & we were marvelling at how it's been 30 years since computers came into our lives (into his more prominently than mine).

Anybody remember the IBM 360? Remember putting your programs on punchcards, and then accidentally dropping the cards and getting them hopelessly out of order? Remember punching your programs onto paper tape and winding them up into tight little tubes, held together by rubber bands? Remember saving the holes from the punch machines and sprinkling them in your friends' hair and telling them they had dandruff? (Yes, we were very mature.) Remember communicating with the computer through a teletype machine?

Remember when your modem had a cradle for your telephone receiver?

Remember before there was the Web, there was Gopher? Remember when the entire internet seemed to consist of tables of contents endlessly linked to tables of contents, with no actual contents ever appearing? Remember when the most interesting sites were library card catalogues?

Remember when the typical high-school graduation present--the can't-go-to-college-without-it gift--was a typewriter?

Remember retyping your second, third, fourth draft of your term paper? Remember writing the first draft in longhand?

Remember practicing hitting the 'a' key hard enough to make an impression on the typewriter ribbon?

Oh, you're all too young, you won't remember any of this.

 

[AGBF]

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On 2/11/2004 1:57:12 AM glitterata wrote:



"Remember when your modem had a cradle for your telephone receiver?

...


Oh, you're all too young, you won't remember any of this."

The first computer I remember using (or seeing used?) was one my husband brought home from work when he was with American Airlines. It must have been in 1977 or 1978. It *did* have some kind of built-in place where one could put the telephone. Could have been a modem .

There were computers when I was in college (before my marriage), but they were big and took up entire rooms and had to be kept cool. No one ever told me that there was some way I could play with punch cards if I found a way to use the computer. I'm not sure *how* one got to use it! I wonder if there were any computer programming courses?

It took seeing the video of "War Games" to remind me that we used to do that thing with the telephone....

Deb, not too young for *anything*!!!!!

 

[winyan]

I started with computers in 1964, when I was 14...worked 20 hours a week after school, for $1.50 an hour...4 - 8 pm.

This was back when the 'computer' had various 'machines' including keypunch, sorters, calculators, and tabulators...they took up the whole floor of the corporation for which I worked. I personally ran the tabulator (printer) and 'computer/calculator'.

win

 

[winyan]

Oh man Glitterata, I used to run reports on the #4 Xbar for AT&T on a teletypewriter machine...that had to be around 1970-72 or so!

I've actually been working on computers for 40 years in June.

win

 

[MichelleCarmen]

My first computer was a Sharp laptop that my mom gave to me when I was 15, so I guess it's been about 16 years that I've been working with computers. My mom opened a small computer business on the island that we lived on so I've always been comfortable around computers and later even helped teach a few computer classes

My knowledge is kind of outdated, though, as my husband does all our upgrades and even built our computer (rather than buy a prepackaged Compaq that would be less likely to be upgradable in a few years), so I usually just "play" on the computer now!

Michelle

 

[fire&ice]

I ticked the 16-20 years. I am unsure whether I am proud or embarrassed to say "I am *still* computer e-literate.

 

[pqcollectibles]

Oh Gosh! I feel like such a rookie! I voted 11-? years it was.

When I was in High School, our school offered a computer class. Our terminal was linked, via telephone, to the local University. I never took a class, but I had friends that did. They wrote programs that were punched out on slender pieces of paper they would spool up and carry around. Heaven forbid that spool of paper get pinched, or crunched, or wet. When they wanted to run their program, they'd feed the paper into a reader and run their program. The computer at the University filled a whole room and used those huge reels. I remember thinking to myself, "Computers will never be anything big!" OH... HOW... WRONG!!

I used computers off and on at work, but never used one enough to do more than write a report. I remember in 1983 or 1984, the programming Guru of our company was so thrilled to get a new "desk top" with a removable hard drive. The hard drive was only the size of a HUGE dinner plate. Nobody at work touched that computer but him. He and the computer shared a locked office and entry was almost completely forbidden. You could stand in the door and look but no touching allowed!

After the kids went to school, I started using the computer more and more. It was so much easier to print flyers and keep accounts for the PTA and other community organizations. We finally went online 7 or 8 years ago. I guess I'm a member of F&I's e-literate league.

 

[rodentman]

When a senior in HS (1966-7) we had a Litton Industries computer. It was a large "L" shaped desk with a typewriter and a drawer with a paper-tape reader. (We kept getting parity errors and stinking paper cuts.)

It came with some juvenile program called "Quickcomp" (sp?) but we overwrote that with Fortran and programmed our own stuff. The teacher was a tad miffed, but she didn't know what was going on anyway.

We ran some programs in college with the punch cards. After that, my first "real" job in 1979 had an IBM 360 in a room in which we were not allowed. We'd submit report requests and if the staff felt like doing them we'd get our info.

Dealt with a few IBM System 36's until the mid 80's when we got our first PC at work, a 286-12mHz. We used Lotus Symphony and 123. Then the PC boom took off and we all know the rest.

Now we use Oracle 11i on Sun boxes and that's about all I know of the tech side. We, the users, have much more control of the setups, and are an integral part of system design and function.

We've come a long way.

 

[PlatinumDiamond]

since 1992

 

[jackieblue]

I began using computers about 20 years ago. I will say that went I went to college, I had the coolest typewriter (ok, at the time!) because it held about a 10 page paper in memory. You had to print it to see more than part of a line though. A lot of folks wanted to borrow my typewriter because not many people used computers then.

I started using the "internet" in about 1990. Remember when you could watch your e-mail travel from server to server? Remember when there was no graphical user interface? Remember those big, floppy discs and tapes? (Yes, I missed the punchcard thing...

 

[jackieblue]

p.s. I also had Pong!! Does anyone remember Pong?

 

[winyan]

I remember pong...I also remember one of the first internet games...wompus, I think it was. "Hunt the Wompus".

win

 

[pqcollectibles]

Oh gosh, RM. I had completely forgotten about Key Punch. I used to do that working in my College library. Another gal and I would punch the cards and take them about once a month to another Dept on campus. I don't really know what happened with the cards. We would go back and pick up the boxes about a week later.

I had one of those kind of typewriters in college too, Jackie. Did yours have the memory to do corrections?? Mine did. Great for cranking out Resumes and papers with. Probably why I didn't get into computers beyond using them at work for so long. I could still do some things with the typewriter that you couldn't do on a computer,.... Until scanners came along.

 

[rodentman]

I used to get an IBM punch card with my telephone bill. Some of the punches in the card corresponded to the amount I owed. I taped over the holes and punched new ones indicating a lower amount. Then I would pay the amount that I actually owed hoping this would result with a credit balance on my account.

It never worked, put it prepared me well for the future since no one has ever given me credit for anything, at least not anything positive.

I never DID wire any boards, however I ran some programs with a guy who did that type of "programming."

 

[jackieblue]

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On 2/13/2004 4:44:06 PM pqcollectibles wrote:

I had one of those kind of typewriters in college too, Jackie. Did yours have the memory to do corrections?? Mine did. Great for cranking out Resumes and papers with.

----------------

You know it! Quite a number of papers were produced on that typewriter. I was so fortunate to have access to a computer by the time I did my thesis...some people were still typing then. The ol' typewriter didn't store that much in memory.

 

[strmrdr]

trash 80 was my first computer.

Then a home built 8086 in college

Then got away from them for a few years and bought a p75 in 95.
The p75 is now my firewall running linux.
I lost the cover to it years ago and it has about 1" of dust all over it lol.
Next time I reboot it in a year or so ill dust it off i spose :}

 

[ClownFishFunk]

Hello all, interesting post! I've been using computers since I was 6 or 7 I think, perhaps even earlier. My mother said I have been using one since I understood what one was haha, so I checked the 11-15 yrs box.

My mothers job revolves mainly around computers, so we have probably had one in the house since the late 70s, and I was born in '85. I remember my mother explaining me how to use e-mail because I wanted to sign up for something involving TY beanie babies - they were my first internet passion lol. I had a computer in my room when I was 7 or so, which is kind of sad huh? I know people who still don't have computers in their own room, let alone when they were 7.

At home, we have something ridiculous like 15 computers, and more are consistently coming in (including laptops), and we are all pretty much addicted (there are 7 of us total - I have 3 siblings, my parents, and then my grandmother lives with us as well). Ah well, that was a lot of reminiscing for only 11:30 in the morning.

I miss my home now, lol.

 

[mike04456]

I think my first exposure to computers came when my mother took me to grad school with her one day and showed me the university computer she had to run her statistics programs on. I have no idea what kind it was except that it used punchcards. This would have been around 1977. All I did was collect and play with her old punch cards, so I don't count that as usage.




My first actual use came with an Apple a couple of years later in junior high. We used some graphics program to create pictures one pixel at a time using x-y coordinates.

 

[valeria101]

It was exactly 21 years ago. This brings my first computer in my first school year

The object was an entirely illegal German instrument (forgot the name, darn!), then the first machine with a hard-drive was a Romanian-assembled knock-off. Six years ago came the first laptop and I could never look back - since my computer has to move as much as I do.

 

[LadyJ]

I actually used computers off and on when I was a kid on school. I remember using them 20 years ago. However I did not really do much on them so I don't really count that. I have really known how to use one for the last five. I am a fast learner and I made a point to self educate when I bought mine. I wanted to know how to do things myself. So now I find that I am frequently helping other people I know with things. You should have seen my grandfathers face when I told him that I was going to delete his temporary internet files. lol He was scared.

 

[95chevy]

Since the introduction of Apple with a tape cassette in 1972, and IBM that was as big as a safe. Technology is wonderful. Just that time goes by to fast.

 

[foundnemo]

I started using computers when there was WordStar and King's Quest games!

Not too long ago I guess, it was already a 286 or 386.

In my C++ classes when the students whined about our projects the professor always reminded us that at least we didn't have to carry cards to punch holes!