Describe your first computer and your earliest online experiences

[MikeCL]

Ha my first computer was a old IBM 486 system where it had MS DOS you had to type all the commands just to do anything

My first online was back in '95-96 when I signed online using the ISP Brigadoon which has long been disfunct.

[Sanctimoniously]

My first computer overall was a Gateway something, either Windows 3.1 or 95, that was donated to me by the church I attended at the time when I was 11 or 12. I never found out what it ran on because there was an admin password at boot-up that I wasn't given, so I never got to use it.

My first computer that actually worked was a Packard Bell that ran on Windows 95 (with Office 97 and the Plus! entertainment pack). I got it from a middle school teacher when I was 13. About two years later, I connected 2005-era broadband to it. The version of Internet Explorer that was installed was so old it didn't support cookies, which meant my logons to TheForce.net's forums didn't work until I switched to Firefox.

[berberry]

Compaq Presario with Windows 98 First Edition (if you recall, they had to make a Second Edition of Windows 98 because the first one was extremely buggy). It was a decent computer, but because of Windows 98 FE, it crashed on occasion. Played a lot of Humongous Entertainment games on there.

I remember that very well. I think there must have been an undocumented reference somewhere that 98 FE was designed for IBM Thinkpad notebook computers, because that's what I had at the time (only IBM piece of equipment I ever owned) and it worked flawlessly. The computer almost never crashed. I also had 98 FE on my machine at work, and I saw all those bugs you mention, but on my notebook there was no problem whatsoever, not even with USB. I remember trying to figure out why, and I think it led me to something about the way a genuine IBM in 32-bit protected mode handled some drivers differently than clones do. I never figured out if that was true. It would seem to me that whatever reason there is, it would involve the BIOS, but I never got to the bottom of it.

[wanderer2575]

First computer I used (not owned) was an HP-2000.  I was in middle school and it belonged to my school district.  They let students learn to program on it.  You could do anything you want, as long as it was in BASIC.  The computer was in the School District offices across town, so to use it we used ASR-33 teletypes.  They were very loud and clunky, printed on a roll of paper not on a screen.  The modems were acoustic couple - they let out an audible whistle as a carrier, modulated to transmit data.  The telephone headset was placed on the modem to use it.  Since there was no electrical connection, it was considered acceptable to send the data through Ma Bell's wires. 

I don't know if it was an HP-2000 and ASR-33 teletype, but my first computer experience also was in middle school in the last '70s and pretty much the same as you described.  The first BASIC program I wrote was for an assignment where I had to print a restaurant menu (I called my place "The Linguini Emporium"), accept input of menu selections, and calculate the total bill.

First home computer was the family's Commodore 64.  I loved that machine; I still have one and a 1541 floppy disk drive in a closet.  I taught myself the basics of 6502 assembly language and sold a few short utility programs to RUN Magazine.  I still have my copy of Raeto West's "Programming the Commodore 64" and other memory maps and programming books; I can't bring myself to throw them away.

Now I  have a PC running Windows 7 and I know absolutely nothing.

[ZLoth]

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III which was received in December, 1980. It only had 16k of memory, and I had to save programs on cassette tape.

As for online experience, I remember running up a $100 phone bill (1983 dollars) dialing BBSes at 300 baud. My father gave me an extremely hard time, and I had to pay the money back.

[Sctvhound]

We had an IBM computer when I started using one around the age of 3 (I was born in 1992). We had internet at least from around 1995 or so.

We upgraded around 1998 or 1999 to a new computer, I think a Gateway. I definitely remember dial-up internet and the sound it would make when you were trying to make a connection, and being kicked off any time we got a telephone call.

My mom was a computer teacher, so her school in metro Charleston had T1 lines (the fastest available at the time), as early as 1997. We were one of the first in our region to get "cable" internet, as we got @home internet in August of 1999. We had Comcast till about 2005, but the service (cable TV and internet) got really unreliable. One time a wire was cut and the entire Charleston area was out of service for nearly a day.

We got DirecTV in January of 2005, then BellSouth internet. BellSouth was unreliable in the beginning, going out at the same time every night, but it got better as they updated their equipment more.

[inkyatari]

The Coleco ADAM.  Online, CompuServe, baby!

[noelbotevera]

The Coleco ADAM.  Online, CompuServe, baby!

I feel sorry for your printer and cassette tape drive.

For the uninitiated, the printer contained the computer's power supply, and if the printer didn't work, it took the whole computer down with it. The cassette tape drive also had an electromagnetic surge when the computer turned off, erasing all the data on the cassette.

[inkyatari]

The Coleco ADAM.  Online, CompuServe, baby!

I feel sorry for your printer and cassette tape drive.

For the uninitiated, the printer contained the computer's power supply, and if the printer didn't work, it took the whole computer down with it. The cassette tape drive also had an electromagnetic surge when the computer turned off, erasing all the data on the cassette.

It really wasn't a terrible computer, but seeing as how the Colecovision, Sega SG-1000, Sega Master System were all similar to the MSX computer hardware - indeed over the last couple years MSX games are being translated to the Colecovision - I don't understand why Coelco didn't just bring the MSX to the states.  The MSX had one release in the US by another company, but I would imagine that the MSX would have saved Coleco development costs.

For those who don't know, the MSX was a very popular 8-bit computer in Asia and Brazil.  It was created by Microsoft Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX