I thought this might be a fun topic for those of us who've been using computers for a decade or more. I bought my first PC in 1989 and spent a fortune on it. I worked in the industry at the time, and was able to take advantage of some promotional prices on parts that weren't available to the general public. For about $2800, I built myself a 386DX-33 with 4MB of RAM, Soundblaster, 512k Paradise SVGA graphics card and a 14-inch VGA monitor that I soon replaced with a 15-inch that sported a 72 Hz refresh rate, a rare feature in those days which allowed users to sit in front of the screen for a much longer period of time without getting a headache. I kept that machine for years, from MS-Dos 3.3 to 6.2 and from Windows/386 to WfW 3.11. Soon after MS-Dos 5 was released I bought QEMM386, which provided a lot of enhancements if you had more than the native DOS limit of 640k RAM. When Windows 95 was released, I sold this first machine and bought a newer one. By that time I had upgraded the RAM to 16 MB, the SVGA to a Tseng Labs ET-4000 and had added a second hard drive with 330 MB and a 4x CD-Rom drive.
My first online experience was at work, where the company I worked for provided technical support and hardware maintenance on PCs, Novel Networks and Unix/Xenix machines for small, mostly rural telephone companies. We would dial in to customers' machines to make configuration changes and fixes, usually at 1200 to 2400 bps connection speeds. After I bought my PC I bought a 2400 bps modem and started dialing up local BBS systems. Before long I'd discovered a money pit called Compu$erve and sold my pathetic little 2400 bps modem and found a deal on a v.32 9600 bps modem, capable of connecting to CompuServe at the fastest possible speed, a speed which carried connection charges of $22 an hour and required a long-distance call to Columbus, Ohio. Most other cities had only 2400 bps local connections available in the early days.
In order to take best advantage of the fast connection speeds, you'd use automated software that would connect to CompuServe, download all the message board posts you've previously flagged, with comments, download headings for all new posts plus catalog listings for new files made available since your last connection, then immediately disconnect. You'd go through all the information on a forum like this one offline (and there was a forum somewhat like this, about roads and highways and state DOTs) and type any responses or new topics you want to post, plus select for download any files you want from the forum libraries and set the software to make a second pass. It would connect, carry out your commands and immediately disconnect again. For the second time you would go through the information, and so you would continue until you were done for the day. I used a program called TAPCis for the automated routines, and eventually converted to a more robust and colorful program called OzCis which was released only in the final years before the internet and its world wide web became available. CompuServe's forums were made obsolete, and the service became an ISP. At some point they were purchased by AOL.
I think back on how much all that money I spent would be worth today and I don't bat an eye. It was worth it. I'd do it again.
My first online experience actually predates my first computer. I recall from grade school (1986-ish) our class using a very old school modem (that required placing the phone receiver into some sort of device) to log into some place.
We bought our first computer in 1991....a 386SX/16MHz running DOS 5.0 (and eventually Windows 3.1). By the end of that year, I was logging into Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) using Boyan 5.0. In 1993, we started using Prodigy online.
My first experience with the Internet as we know it was in 1996 when I came home on leave. A friend of mine had a dial-up ISP and he let me play around. I recall MnDOT's website was one of the first I looked at.
Quote from: froggie on June 27, 2017, 05:58:02 PM
My first experience with the Internet as we know it was in 1996 when I came home on leave. A friend of mine had a dial-up ISP and he let me play around. I recall MnDOT's website was one of the first I looked at.
:-D That's excellent.
In case anyone was wondering what it looked like back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970404053920/http://dot.state.mn.us
The US-61 favicon is a nice touch.
Quote from: froggie on June 27, 2017, 05:58:02 PM
My first experience with the Internet as we know it was in 1996 when I came home on leave. A friend of mine had a dial-up ISP and he let me play around. I recall MnDOT's website was one of the first I looked at.
I remember searching for Mississippi's DOT pretty early on as well. I remember we had someone from inside the department who would post on that CompuServe highway forum I mentioned. When the web became available, as I recall MDOT took advantage of it pretty early on, with a website dedicated to the I-55, I-20, US-49 interchange reconstruction project, or as it is mistakenly referred to, "the stack". Updates were provided fairly often, saying when crews would be working on what and at which location in the project zone. I remember thinking they were doing a pretty good job with it compared to the DOTs of neighboring states, where in some cases larger projects were underway with little or no information being released on the internet.
Mississippi didn't keep up the great work for the entire time since. For a few years the webpage seemed to languish. Today I would say it is passable but uninspired. You can find useful information on it, but the software is out-of-date and clunky.
My first computer was something outdated in the early 90s. I'd already owned an NES and Super Nintendo by then. My first online experience came around 1994. I distinctly remember saying the internet was overrated. Oops.
My first computer was a Windows 98 Packard Bell machine with Intel Celeron processor purchased in the spring of 1999. We connected it to the Internet shortly after getting it. Since I was 4 years old, we went on a kid-friendly desktop mode featured on the computer and clicked on a webpage marked KiddoNet. This was either IE4 or 5. There was a bunch of games and fun stuff on the site. It was accompanied by MIDI music pieces. Our Packard Bell also had a Navigator Assistant thing, a flight simulator called Fighter Ace, the Windows 98 desktop themes and so much more. I would go on the screensaver menu just to watch the 3D Maze and Flying Windows.
Around the same time, my father's parents got a Windows 98 Compaq machine. When I was about 5, I went to the sounds menu on Control Panel and changed all of the preset system sounds. Not only that, but I also added sounds to system events not normally accompanied by sounds. My grandparents logged onto the computer later and got so confused. I was laughing.
My mom had an old Atari from the late 80's. I don't know the exact model number but I know it lacked a hard drive, relying entirely on 3.5" floppies to store everything. I want to say it had 1 MB of RAM. But yeah there was a computer in my household that was about as old as I was when I was little.
We first got the internet in 1995. Browser was Mosaic. The thing I most distinctly remember was watching the images slowly load onto the screen line by line and going "ooooooohhh".
My parents were into technology when I was young - my mom actually majored in Computer Science back in 1980, and she worked from home once I was born. Because of this, my earliest memories are of her Toshiba laptop in 1991-1992, a giant thing with a tiny screen and DOS. She had Lotus 1-2-3 installed on the thing, and I was a pretty smart kid so she was able to teach me to do very simple addition/subtraction/multiplication on Lotus 1-2-3, and I'd spend hours doing that. She'd write out a list of 20-30 math problems, I'd go over to the computer, punch them in one by one, and bring them back to her.
Here's a picture of me on said computer in 1991 or so with my list of math problems next to me:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.corcohighways.org%2Fyoungcorco.jpg&hash=88ca11cf228c45ceca79bbe948a1d61303434ef8)
I remember that what are now drop down menus would take the full screen, and I remember getting into those and wasn't really smart enough to understand what those did at that point.
Towards the end, we also got a Snoopy computer game on that old DOS machine which was pretty rad.
Shortly after that, my Dad got his first work laptop (a Compaq, I believe) and it had Windows 3.1 on it, and shortly after that we realized what we were missing and got our first family desktop computer which was an NEC Ready with a 486 and Microsoft Office 2.0 on it in 1993.
We got the internet in 1998, after we replaced the NEC with a brand new 1997 IBM Aptiva with a 200 MHz Pentium and Windows 95. That computer sucked, but I remember logging into AOL 3.0, using phone number 208-322-8400. Because I was really into cars at that time, and had a 1998 Automobile Magazine New Car Buying Guide with every car manufacturer's website on it, I promptly went to all their websites. At that time, you could request car brochures from the manufacturers that were the real full color brochures like the ones that you could get from the dealer, and I requested every brochure under the sun. This was nice, because that before I'd have to drag my Dad to car dealerships, and he refused to go to anything but a Ford/GM/Chrysler dealer, so I got to get brochures from foreign cars for the first time (with the exception of foreign cars sold at whatever dealer we'd get our Oldsmobiles/Fords serviced at).
I used Microsoft's Carpoint website a lot too, because it had debuted 360 degree views of car interiors at that time, which was the bee's knees.
The first computer I ever used (didn't own it) was the Apple II when I was in 2nd grade. The memories of BASIC and LOGO programming languages are forever engrained in me; BASIC and its for/next loops, and LOGO for the little "turtle" that you tell to go forward, turn, and create a shaped path.
The first computer I ever owned was one my dad bought: a Compaq 8088 with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives, a little 2" monochrome monitor, and a connected 4 color monitor. We had a hard drive (probably about 2 MB) installed separately, plus we had a dot matrix printer that printed a page every 4 minutes. Eventually, we got a 2400 baud dialup modem which was about the size of today's modem, but required having to plug into the phone jack when needed. The first experience I had with remote reception was not as a dialup internet service, but as a dialup bulletin board service (BBS). Naturally, graphics were extremely crude, with illustrations made from strategically placed letters and numbers. The worst was that schools used Apple computers but I had a PC at home, so any schoolwork other than a paper required that I use the computer lab at school rather than any home computer.
Here is a pic of what it looked like:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fphotos1.blogger.com%2Fblogger%2F5963%2F2007%2F1600%2FcompaqI.jpg&hash=2e395100325750f8f45d56d36286865e6a896a0b)
The first computer I used regularly (not counting some POS Atari 400 and 800 units in grammar school when we were supposed to become "computer literate" doing programming using the asinine PILOT programming language) was in 1987 when, at my mom's insistence, my father finally accepted that their ancient manual typewriter was not an acceptable way for me to type papers in high school. He got an IBM PS/2 Model 30 with an 8086 processor (I do not recall processor speed), 640 KB RAM, and two 3.5-inch floppy drives that could only handle 720 KB disks (not 1.44 MB). No hard drive. He felt we didn't "need" one. We ran DOS 3.3.
I remember running dBase III Plus on that Model 30 to keep track of my record/tape/CD collection.
The first PC I had of my own was an NEC my parents got for me four years later when I went off to college. It had a 16-MHz 386SX, 2 MB RAM, and a 40 MB hard drive. I went through multiple versions of DOS on there, at one point even switching to DR DOS (I forget the version number).
That NEC originally had a 2400-baud modem and it was with that modem that I first experienced the Internet, though of course it was nothing like what we know today. I used it constantly to dial into UVA's servers, all of which were UNIX-based. Most of that was for e-mail and USENET access, but I also used various other universities' online library catalogues when the book I needed at UVA was checked out and I had an upcoming due date (and then I made a road trip to Sweet Briar College). I upgraded that modem to a 14,400 in 1993 or 1994. Back then I tinkered with my computer a lot and the cover was usually not screwed into place except at the end of the semester when I hauled it home.
First time I remember regularly seeing the World Wide Web was in the fall of 1995 when I was at Duke. I had seen it a few times during my fourth year at UVA in the computer labs (accessing it via my NEC with the modem wasn't happening), but I spent a lot more time using the library computers at Duke, and by then I had a laptop with an Ethernet card that allowed me broadband access from my on-campus apartment. That was the fall when the NMSL repeal was pending and I remember the Reasonable Drivers Unanimous site had a daily update I checked every day wondering when it would finally happen.
Now since I'm a latecomer, my first memory of using a computer was in 2008 or so. We owned a "Systemax" piece of junk and a bulky 16 (I think) inch CRT that was agonizing to use up until 2011, when we got those Macintosh computers (yeah, we bought a Mac, kill me). I don't recall the specs of the machine, but what I do recall is that it buffered when you tried to load things like YouTube, and it ran Windows XP (which I used during kindergarten). I later learned the reason why it ran so slowly is because the thing was already 4+ years old at that point, and it sorely needed replacing. I can't find the computer and its peripherals now, since my aunt moved in, but if I do find it I'll revise this post if I can plug that thing in.
I also found an old keyboard and mouse dating to (at least) the mid to late '90s (after cleaning out a closet) that went with a previous computer that I'm aware of, dating to 1994. I just know this because my dad starting writing articles then.
So since I don't have memories of those, I can tell you the specs of "my" current computers. The MacBook Pro that I'm typing this post on is from early 2011 and has a 13" screen, with a native resolution of 1280 by 800. The CPU is a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 (obviously a previous generation, probably a Sandy Bridge or Westmere architecture), and it has 4 GB of DDR3, 1333 MHz, RAM. It's also using its onboard graphics chip (hurrah for CPUs having onboard graphics!), and a 320 GB, 5400 RPM hard drive (HDD of course). For loading software and such, it comes with a slot-loading (basically there's no CD/DVD tray) "Super Drive", which means it can load a DVD and a CD (but not at the same time), a FireWire 800 port, a Thunderbolt port, and two USB 2.0 ports.
Of course, I connect to the Internet using WiFi and not a dialup modem (I probably should try dialup at one point just to see what I can do with it).
I also have a desktop (iMac) that's a mid 2011 model, with a 27" screen, with a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 display. It's basically a more powerful version of this thing with a keyboard and mouse, so I won't bore people with specs.
The first time I used any kind of online net was when Prodigy rolled out regional service in 1988. My Dad was actually a marketing guy at Prodigy and despite us not being in one of the covered regions he had access at his office. The service went nation wide in 1990 and really from there I always had access in one form or the other afterwards to some kind of online provider. I remember the dial modem, tying up the phone lines, DOS graphics based message boards, and even subscriptions having limited minutes.
IBM was a big player in the whole Prodigy venture with Sears and provided my Dad with some home office computers to use. I used to jack up his track paper just to mess with him when he was printing out documents....in retrospect that was probably pretty expensive. :rolleyes: Most of my early computer experience was on the Apple II learning to type or playing games like Oregon Trail or Kings Quest I. Really the oddity is that as early as that all sounds I'm not as old as it may seem. But the thing was that really in those days a lot of the online stuff we see today was more or less just a gimmick and that being the case it is strange to explain why I don't really care all that much about tech stuff today.
We had the Apple IIe at home, since that's what was used in schools at the time. The first time I was actually online was probably when I was a senior in high school or a freshman in college. I quickly created my home webpage, having learned html by just looking at other sites at the time, all of which were in their infancy. I used a local dialup at home, jersey.net, staying away from AOL and Prodigy. My boss at the bowling center where I worked was addicted to Prodigy though. Remember at the time, you got so many hours for a monthly fee, then had to pay per hour after that. He was racking up $300 bills each month just by playing on the internet!
Quote from: jeffandnicole on June 28, 2017, 08:20:20 AM
$300 bills
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Forig03.deviantart.net%2F49ac%2Ff%2F2010%2F185%2Ff%2F5%2Finternet_currency____300_by_chiekku.png&hash=97c5fc25b30e4ee51a31266eadf62d8edd96d527)
My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer (first generation). We eventually got a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, and I got to play on some local dialup BBS's....albeit not very successfully, because our landline sucked.
(The landline was still very noisy when we turned it off in that house last year.)
That was it! My first was also a TRS-80, tape drive - it was awful, so prone to failure.
My first internet experiences were in some computer lab in college in the 1980's - it seemed like much ado about nothing. I vaguely remember dial-up and my first modem - with a cradle that you set the phone hand-set into... still pretty troublesome.
Oh how things have changed.....
I had a HP Windows 98 computer as my first, and my earliest online experience that I can remember was 2008, when I was on PBSkids.com...I also remember watching YouTube for the first time in 2009.
I remember discovering online flash games on March 31, 2004. (I didn't notice any April Fools jokes the next day. I must have just missed them.)
I'm not sure what flash games would have existed in 2004, though...
Quote from: US 81 on June 28, 2017, 09:25:49 AM
My first internet experiences were in some computer lab in college in the 1980's - it seemed like much ado about nothing. I vaguely remember dial-up and my first modem - with a cradle that you set the phone hand-set into... still pretty troublesome.
The year after I started college, incoming freshmen had a semester computer class simply on how to use the internet. One of the big talks was how one of the websites they were to visit was the Jack Daniels website, especially as most of them were underage. No silly age verification thing then!
Quote from: MikeThe ActuaryWe eventually got a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem
Quote from: US 81and my first modem - with a cradle that you set the phone hand-set into...
This very old modem type is what I was referring to in my initial response about my first "online" experience:
Quote from: froggieMy first online experience actually predates my first computer. I recall from grade school (1986-ish) our class using a very old school modem (that required placing the phone receiver into some sort of device) to log into some place.
I come from a print journalism background. I changed jobs in the fall of 1987. The paper I left still set type on the old Compugraphic phototypesetting machines. Desktop publishing was just becoming in vogue and the paper to which I went was on the cutting edge. The first computer I ever used was a Mac Plus with 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB external hard drive. The biggest and best computer in the place was a Mac Plus with 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB external hard drive. The rest of the computers were Mac 512s and everything was connected by PhoneNet cables.
We had a modem that we could use to dial into various sources, including an Associated Press service for weekly papers and the Kentucky Press Association's BBS.
One day, my publisher came into my office and handed me something he got in the mail, and asked me if it was anything that we could make use of. I checked it out thoroughly and said I could not see anything that would benefit us. What he'd handed me was a free trial AOL disc. Boy, did I ever blow that one!
My first personal computer was a Mac Performa 467. It came pre-loaded with a bunch of software, including the previously mentioned AOL. At that time you had to dial in to a long-distance number in Lexington to log onto AOL. Lexington was about the most expensive place in Kentucky to call so needless to say, I didn't go online very often. This was about the time that AOL started offering full Internet access, including Usenet.
I went to work for the agency formerly known as the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet in 1995 and state government was just getting into having an online presence. I was tasked with helping develop Revenue's website, mostly from a content perspective since I had no techie experience. I was one of the few individuals in the agency who was given Internet access because of that, and I stumbled upon a Usenet group called misc.transport.road. We all know where that went...
My first hands-on computer experience was likely in first grade. Nearly every classroom in my elementary school (except the kindergarten, art, and music rooms) was outfitted with a couple of Apple IIe computers (a few had IIGSes). By the time I left elementary school in 1995, the classrooms still had those decade-old Apples, despite our district being relatively wealthy by central PA standards.
That was about the time that my family got its first home computer–after years of my siblings and me begging our parents. My closest friend had recently gotten a Macintosh Performa 6110 (a.k.a. Power Macintosh 6100) and despite my conversion to his religion, my ultra frugal dad bought a cheap AST computer running Windows 95. I had various PC-using friends on CompuServe, Prodigy, and direct dial-up ISPs, but we followed my Mac friend's lead and signed up with America Online–which was my first online/Internet experience.
Still miffed over my dad's decision to buy a cheap PC, I put my little-kid dollars together and bought a nearly decade-old Macintosh SE. Eventually, I got that tiny old machine connected to the Internet using Mosaic as a web browser. I gradually worked my way forward through Mac history with an LC, a Centris, and a Quadra before finally getting a paying job as a teenager and buying a new iMac DV with the proceeds.
Considering that I now make my living with a Mac as a graphic designer, I'd say the influence of my Mac friend (and my friend's influence from a Mac evangelist friend of the family) was pivotal to where I am today.
When I was in college, I had an Atari 800, which was better than a typewriter, which is what most people had. That or you paid people to type your papers. Mostly that and playing better versions of Atari VCS games was about all it was good for.
I took a class in polling and the entire university (14K students back then) had exactly 8 computers for students to use. Had acousic modems. We would meet the professor at the lab late at night (because the mainframe was at another school and there was this thing called long distance) and work with poll data from a 20 year old election. You had to do your sets and then go back in the morning and see if it had worked, which is often did not.
Later, in grad school, I got an IBM clone and there was this guy who went to Michigan undergrad and he was showing me this BB service. All it was was a bunch of Michigan, Michigan State, and Notre Dame fans saying each other sucked. I saw little point in it. Again I mostly just wrote papers on it.
After I got out of school, I had no need for a personally owned computer and the IBM just sat in the garage for years. I was broke and had neither the time nor money to bother with stuff. Always had a computer at work. Missed the roll out of Windows and all of that. Finally gave in and bought another PC with a phone modem. Came with Prodigy, which was kinda fun until it got outdated.
I grew up with computers (born in 1995), and I remember really enjoying Roller Coaster tycoon! I didn't surf on the internet too often, since dial-up was painfully slow and my parents wanted to leave the landline open for phone calls. We got a Bell modem for WiFi around Grade 6, but it was still really slow. I didn't really start using the internet regularly until high school.
Most of my internet use during elementary school (Grade 1 to 8) was on iMac G3's in the library:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg/436px-IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg)
I don't remember what kind of PC I had in my house growing up, but it had that classic 90's off-white colour, and floppy disks of course :-D. I think it ran Windows 98. It's cool how much computers have changed within my lifetime.
Edit: I had a cool flash of nostalgia at my second co-op job (in 2015) when I had work with a laptop running Windows 95 and it required transfering the data through floppy disks! I only had to use it once a month; my regular computer at work was more up-to-date thankfully :-D.
My first computer was some custom built garbage from someone my grandparents knew. It ran Windows 95 fine but had no disk space because 'it was unnecessary'. I remember having to uninstall Internet Explorer any time I wanted to play certain games. Probably a blessing in disguise because I kept tinkering/upgrading the thing and learned about computers in the process. Earliest online experiences were playing games or messing around on Mapquest in the school library.
The first computer I bought was a 386. Because who would ever need a 486?
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. The keys were cylinders that had to be pressed hard and a long way, touch typing was pretty much impossible. The teletypes were discarded from some company that didn't want them anymore. The computer was pretty modest, but usable for beginners.
First computer the family had was a Commodore 64. I mostly remember it being used for word processing (printing, of course, to an old-school dot-matrix printer), and playing Sargon Chess (or something like that). I can't remember what specific year we got that.
While I used the internet at a friends house, and the Pitt-Uniontown campus (probably a junior in High School) - We didn't get the internet till I convinced my folks to sign up for dial-up service (33.6) thru our telephone company (Citizens Telephone Company of Kecksburg)
*We were already 2 computers past that Commodore at this point.
First computer was the cheapo Timex/Sinclair 3000 in 1983. Had very little memory and no discs, had to start from scratch each time.
Fir use of an internet system was at my first job out of school. A 2400 baud telephone connection to a BBS at company headquarters.
The first exprience with computers was in high school using a teletype terminal and programming in BASIC. I used a lot of DOS machinery in the Navy; I actually started getting online in '94 via a Sharp organiser with a sidecar modem; I went from that to an early Toshiba Lappy with 512 mb memory and 1 MB 'hard ram' on a card, and had access to PC"s and Macs via the local college. I finally got a Win 95 PC in '95.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI99/4A! (yikes!). The software was YIKES at best and programming was relatively easy. I do miss some of the programming error messages like:
]CAN'T DO THAT
or
]STRING NUMBER MISMATCH AT 56
I would then type..
>EDIT 56
]CANT DO THAT
Ahh the fun. Then that evolved in to a Commodore 64 (and eventually 128) while my school used Apple ][e.
Man, I miss the 80s. (laughs)
First computer was a C-64. Went online with the net in 1995. I enjoyed IRC and the newsgroups back then. Yahoo's web-based email has been with me since 1998 and has proved to be of good value. ISP's and locations can change but the email addy remains the same!
First online: 1971. We had a modem with a printer terminal at our high school that used BASIC. Imagine that, not even a CRT!
Rick
I learned to use a computer at school back in the early 2000s. My elementary school was equipped with state-of-the-art Mac Classics. I thought they were pretty good! I played the hell out of Oregon Trail on that thing, and it was also what I learned to type on (apparently it was an Apple Keyboard II).
At home, we had some piece of junk HP with Windows XP (no idea what the specs were). It crashed constantly, and the only thing I ever did on it was play SimCity 4, which it ran well enough.
My first true online experience was Xbox Live, playing Halo 2 online. We had internet at the time, but I never used it/didn't know what to do with it. Every now and then, when I visited my cousins (mid 2000s at this point), we would use their HP computer to access AOL and browse things like Albino Blacksheep and flash games.
I was a latecomer to computers; my parents got their first one in 1998, and about the year 2000 I had gone out to visit them in Sun City West (I was still living in California) and they showed me how to use theirs. They had AOL. Eventually I started using library computers which were much faster. About a year after I moved to Arizona in 2004, my mother gave me her old computer, and I hooked it up to broadband--no clunky old AOL for me! :no: She had Windows 98 which I upgraded to XP and had that computer for several years until the monitor wore out, at which point I got a new 'puter and was surprised at how whisper quiet it was compared to the noisy old tower that Mother gave me. That computer in turn died about a year or so ago and I have this machine with Windows 10.
Right now...today...there is a computer in our railroad (weighing) scale house that runs on Windows 98. The weighing program is DOS-based. The program's screen is different shades of green (just like in the old days), but everything else uses color. It is powered by some old IBM computer (I don't remember the model). Some classics are hard to kill off.
We had computers in our high school wing in the 80s. They were in the "business room" where typing class was still taught using IBM Selectric typewriters! The computers were green-screen Apple models that we learned BASIC computer language. Oh the joy of typing 10 PRINT 2+2. 20 REPEAT.
Probably watching a kiddie tv show or playing little kid educational games at age 5 or 6.
Second hand TRS-80. Mostly good for word processing. Upgrade later to a used/refurbished PC, but it only lasted a couple years.
First computer I had access to was a Tandy TRS-80 with the monochrome screen with the 5.25 disks in the computer lab/library in junior high circa 1982-1983.
First home PC (circa 1986) was a Vendex Headstart IBM PC/XT compatible with 2 5.25 gloppy drives, color monitor and dot matrix printer. This was the computer that I started keeping road trip stats and various other spreadsheets on. I also spent countless hours typing papers (high school) and playing Flight Simulator on it. I didn't get to bring it to college, it was shared between my little brother and I while at home, so I used an electric typewriter for term papers in college.
I ended up with that computer at my house somehow in the later years, and it was still working in October 1997 when I got my first internet capable computer, a Packard Bell 486/66mhz with a "huge" 325 MB hard drive, color monitor, inkjet printer, and a blazing fast 14.4 modem, and Windows 95.
I had messed with some Windows 3.1 (meaning playing Solitare) at the rescue squad I ran with, but this was my first real day to day use of Windows files/folders (etc). I had both IE 4 and Netscape loaded on it and used a local ISP for dialup access. It really wasn't as bad as it sounds, for what we used the internet for back in those days a 14.4 modem was plenty fast. When I upgraded to a 28.8 modem that felt almost as good as today's high speed internet-until pages got more and more complex, pictures got bigger, advertising got more pervasive (etc).
I do remember the WEEKEND I downloaded IE5, though. I capped WEEKEND because that's exactly as long as it took, an entire weekend. I was working nightshift, I got online first thing Saturday morning and began the download process. When I woke up to go to work Saturday afternoon it still wasn't done. I worked 12 hours, got home Sunday morning, still no joy. I had made up my mind if it wasn't done Sunday afternoon when I was getting dressed to go to work I was going to cancel the download and order the CD. It was done, though the clicking and saving/installing almost made me late for work, lol.
I have very early memories of computers that are very foggy, which I think involved using educational related websites from PBS on an old Windows XP machine.
I clearly remember that my first computer was an iMac G3 colored lime green. I remember my grandmother bringing it home, I have no idea when this was, but I knew it must have been when I was two or three. I have no memories of that using that one, or any other memories of it. The earliest clear memories I have on a computer would be a three-year-old me playing Super Mario flash games on some site, which is surprisingly still up (onemorelevel.com), around 2005, on what was at the time a brand new HP desktop computer, laid sideways, meant for office use. The early-mid 2000s were nice from what I'm able to dig up from my memories.
It was one of these, but with a floppy drive.
(https://image.prntscr.com/image/aV30-5HJS3Oq6Q4TvnXcLQ.png)
I do remember being a huge PITA to deal with as a little kid with computers. I have very clear memories of myself constantly factory resetting it, destroying saved data. I would get viruses on the system all the time, download copious amounts of adware, and even cause physical damage to that poor old computer by shoving cotton balls and q-tips into the back fan, power supply fan, CD drive, and floppy drive. I'd also try to annoy my older brothers on there when they played their games. When my parents gave me my first laptop in 2008, it got broken beyond repair from viruses. What were they thinking??
It was one of these.
(https://image.prntscr.com/image/7TrBK2uyQ12auJyctJXxdw.png)
Of course, these are nowhere near as old as you all's first computer experiences. I've always been interested in old technology, so this thread was cool to read.
The first one I remember using was a Dell Dimension that ran Windeos XP After that broke, (because yours truly put a Trojan virus, and who knows what else by accident onto it) a Dell XPS that ran Windows Vista. That thing got unbearably slow, so a Dell Inspiron all in one running Windows 8 that was upgraded to Windows 10. My first computer that I owned was a old Dell Inspiron from 2005 or something running Windows XP. Then after that a Dell laptop that ran Linux Mint that was converted from XP. Now I have a very much nice Dell Inspiron laptop that isn't 10 years old.
Quote from: Otto Yamamoto on June 28, 2017, 07:12:28 PM
The first exprience with computers was in high school using a teletype terminal and programming in BASIC.
Did this as a college freshman (the supported languages were BASIC, a form of Fortran IV and PL/I).
The host computer was IBM 370 running a time share system called Call-OS.
A buddy worked in a small data center that had two IBM 360 Model 50 computers, used that some (with punched cards).
Then used a Sperry Univac 1100/40.
Then back to IBM 370 Model 148.
And so on. Have not worked with a mainframe computer for many years now.
Remember when the Pentium processors first came out? 1 + 1 = 1.999995 :-D
My first computer was an NEC Ultralite Versa 486DX-25 laptop with a 10-inch active matrix screen, 2 MB memory and a 170MB hard drive (which lunched itself six months after and got replaced with a 250MB Simpletech hard drive). The laptop had two PC Card slots, one of which I used a 28.8K modem in and the other one was a SCSI-2 interface card for my NEC 3x CD reader (and later, a Syquest 180MB cartridge drive), all run under Windows 3.11. It was the second active matrix screen laptop after Toshiba (IIRC). I paid four grand for that laptop (hey, that's what you get for being bleeding edge). Yes, a lot of folks had serious envy when they saw it... :sombrero:
My first home PC was a special built unit by a company called SAG Electronics based out of West Chester, PA; with dual Pentium 200MHz CPU's, 4 GB memory, two Seagate SCSI-320 HD's on an Adaptec SCSI interface card, two Pioneer CD-R's and a Number Nine video card, finished off with a 17-inch MAG CRT and a 56k modem, all running Windows NT Workstation 4...and paid half of what I'd paid for the laptop. I loved that machine so, but getting games for it was a royal pain in the ass...
And yes, the dual CPU bug is still with me, my current PC motherboard is dual socket...obviously I have more money than sense! :-D :banghead:
Quote from: route17fan on July 04, 2017, 09:33:40 PM
Remember when the Pentium processors first came out? 1 + 1 = 1.999995 :-D
"I am Pentium of Borg. You will be approximated."
Quote from: route17fan on July 04, 2017, 09:33:40 PM
Remember when the Pentium processors first came out? 1 + 1 = 1.999995 :-D
I remember, but not sure how clearly. I think I recall it was related to clock speed. The first Pentia were supposed to run at 66 Mhz, but this math problem kept cropping up during the quality control tests. Intel was faced with major losses until someone had the bright idea of retesting the failed chips at a slower clock speed. That fixed the problem, and so Intel ended up selling most of the initial run of chips as a 60 Mhz product.
Am I remembering this correctly?
First computer I'd used was in 1982, where we had an Apple II in the corner of our 3rd grade classroom (one per grade level). We had a computer lab with about a dozen "brown apples" by the time I'd reached 5th grade, and we learned a few BASIC commands and file saving.
Got an old IBM PCjr which was heavily outdated by 1986, which worked fine for word processing, a few simple games, and some programming. Something in the motherboard refused to display anything (except for the cartridge-based games) midway though my freshman year in college.
First online experience was at high school, in 1988. I don't recall much of the specifics, but you could find extracts and articles if you searched a few words. It frequently dropped characters and sometimes substituted gibberish. Admittedly, I used it a few times to greatly assist research and busy-work writing. When it typically only yielded a handful of results on any subject, we kind of knew you couldn't just plagiarize persistently.
First world-wide-web moment was with Compuserve in 1995, kind of lost interest after six months; found a renewed interest two years later when my future wife said I needed an email address. I took a crack at do-it-yourself HTML, and that all kind of hooked me into everything else.
Quote from: berberry on July 06, 2017, 06:44:32 AM
Quote from: route17fan on July 04, 2017, 09:33:40 PM
Remember when the Pentium processors first came out? 1 + 1 = 1.999995 :-D
I remember, but not sure how clearly. I think I recall it was related to clock speed. The first Pentia were supposed to run at 66 Mhz, but this math problem kept cropping up during the quality control tests. Intel was faced with major losses until someone had the bright idea of retesting the failed chips at a slower clock speed. That fixed the problem, and so Intel ended up selling most of the initial run of chips as a 60 Mhz product.
Am I remembering this correctly?
I believe you are correct.
My first real computer memory was asking some high school chemistry(?) student what was the red lines underneath some strange words were. This was probably 1998. Everything's hazy at this point, but I did play some games(?) online in the computer lab.
I was behind most of your experiences. From age 5-12 I probably had a total of a day on the internet. Seriously though, we kept busy at home and I read *all* the books.
Suddenly at 15, I found a computer magazine (https://books.google.com/books?id=OQIAAAAAMBAJ), built my own computer at 16, and never looked back.
My first site I remember in particular is probably the the World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bl.html)
Had Dial-up (56kbps I'm assuming) for ten years there (-2011ish?) then got laptops with a cellular dongle. We used to spend hours at McD's working on homework (This is when I found this site. :-D)
First computer in my family's house was an Apple IIe.
The first computer I touched was an IBM mainframe in 1978. My mother was a data processor at IU.
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 didn't start using the Internet until we moved to a new house and got Comcast High-Speed Internet and WiFi installed in 2004.
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.
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.
Quote from: I-39 on July 12, 2017, 09:43:24 PM
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.
Quote from: kkt on June 28, 2017, 05:53:34 PM
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.
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.
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.
The Coleco ADAM. Online, CompuServe, baby!
Quote from: inkyatari on August 01, 2017, 09:17:45 AM
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.
Quote from: noelbotevera on August 01, 2017, 09:35:26 AM
Quote from: inkyatari on August 01, 2017, 09:17:45 AM
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