Your First...

[WitchAndShaman]

I had the same experience my junior year in high school. The big thing was the lunar lander game, with the teletype printing out each iteration of control input.

I think ours was a cannon game where you had to recalibrate between each volley.

 

[Paintman]

2 Dad computer stories.
He was the first CPA in the county with a computer in around 1980. Apple. It had the capacity to hold up to 10 recipes and would also print out your biorhythm charts based on your birthday.

One day the family went to Comiskey Park for a night game against the Twins. Early 80s. Now many people may think sitting next to a loud mouth sloppy drunk is the worst. Oh no. That belongs to some recently wealthy captain of the universe Financial guy. He was expounding to his wife and children about how the computer age will bring along the paperless office.
Dad elbowed me and shook his head.

I had a 386 that was nothing more than a fancy typewriter. First time on the internet was with Apple - the green one.

 

[Lone Wolf]

The first that I remember that my dad had bought was a Packard Bell back in '94. I was 13 at the time. Wasn't all that bad at the time given our advancements in technology since then.

 

[Bob]

My first computer was around 1981 and it was a Commodore VIC-20.
That system had peripherals such as a cassette recorder which took special data tapes and my brother used that more than I did. It was like a floppy disk, but you recorded on cassettes.

It came with a manual with a lot of BASIC programming included to show you how to create games.

 

[GoneWestUtah]

I had a TI programmable scientific calculator in high school (75-77), it could be programed up to 50 steps. Senior year I learned BASIC as well as FORTRAN, punching 80-column Holarith cards which were run on the local University's IBM computer, which filled an entire room on campus, lol.
A friend of mine then opened the first COMPUTERLAND franchise in Salt Lake City around then, I helped him and his wife get the store up and running and remember all the old brands. Altair, Cromemco, Atari... and some startup called Apple, lol.

I still have my old Sans & Streiffe slide rule, the original pocket calculator lol.

 

[Lynne]

If this is a double post I’m sorry. I may have posted this in the wrong spot. I can’t find it here so I’m trying again.

https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/denver-colorado-january-2-2020-260nw-1613519755.jpg

Does a telex machine count. I spent many hours at my first office job sending shipping info out to the auto companies. My first home computer was a Commodore 64. It was used for playing games , we didn’t have Internet.

 

[GoneWestUtah]

There was no Internet in the 80's Lynne. I didn't even get online until something like 1998.

 

[Duke]

I had a TI programmable scientific calculator in high school (75-77), it could be programed up to 50 steps. Senior year I learned BASIC as well as FORTRAN, punching 80-column Holarith cards which were run on the local University's IBM computer, which filled an entire room on campus, lol.
A friend of mine then opened the first COMPUTERLAND franchise in Salt Lake City around then, I helped him and his wife get the store up and running and remember all the old brands. Altair, Cromemco, Atari... and some startup called Apple, lol.

I still have my old Sans & Streiffe slide rule, the original pocket calculator lol.

I got an SR-56 programmable calculator for Christmas my junior year. I didn't use the programmable feature until we took a structures course where you had to invert matrices to solve problems. This was an arduous, time consuming task by hand, and one where mistakes were easy to make.

With the SR-56, there was a prewritten program in the user's manual for inverting matrices, I think up to a 4×4. You'd punch in the program, enter the individual indices, then run the program. The thing would sit there grinding away, but eventually you'd get the answer, one number at a time. The prof in the course, who was born the same year as the Wright brother's first flight, couldn't decide if he thought using the program was cheating or not.

 

[TexDanm]

There wasn't anything like a home computer when I was young. About the closest thing was a mechanical adding machine. They even made little handheld adding machines. I could usually run the numbers in my head faster than I could hunt and peck on one of those things. I didn't pay them any real attention until they came out with the full-blown modern handheld that did more than just add, subtract, multiply and divide. Extracting square roots by hand was a pain in the kiester. When they moved into that sort of thing and trig functions was when I decided that they were indispensable.

 

[GoneWestUtah]

I remembered this in my mug collection, and realised it is my oldest mug at over 40 years. From my friend's COMPUTERLAND store.