What was your first encounter with a computer?

[kurtzie]

First hands on was a Commodore PET in Junior High, so maybe 1980?
At some point my mom brought home an Apple ][ during the summer…she was a school liberian, eventually we bought an Apple //e.
I brought an Apple //c to college when I started in 1985. Still have it and it fired up last winter, the floppy disks were even still readable.
Bought my first mac in 1991 or '92, a beige IIci…

Steve

[modelamac]

In 1965 during my first job out of college. I had to deal with IBM punchcards. In 1975 I had to work with programmers to develop a better Accounts Payable program. My first "owned" computer was an Apple IIe in 1983.

[rgG]

I used to help some of my business major friends do their Hollerith (punch) cards around 75-76. No computers in the Graphic Design department at that time.

[MrNoBody]

IBM System/360 in 1971 when stationed @ Ft. Holabird.
I later learned they had a massive building containing even more 360's
that were customized to process 'traffic' for the Venona Project before
it was moved to some agency @ Ft. Meade ecret:

First desktop was an Apple II a few years later.

[d4]

RadioShack/Tandy TRS-80.
Might've been a Model III. It was a one-piece.

[jonny]

ztirffritz wrote:
My older brother received a TimexSinclair 1000 that had 2k of RAM. I think he purchased an expansion module that increased RAM to maybe 8k? It had a really crappy tiny keyboard that was made of pressure sensitive touch pads. He had a 3" wide thermal printer and a cassette adapter to save/retrieve programs. He and I would spend days or weeks painstakingly entering pages and pages of basic code from magazines to make a crappy game work. 9/10 times there'd be a syntax error somewhere in the code either made by us, or in the copy in the magazine...used to drive us crazy. Eventually he upgraded to an Atari 800xl, like a Commodore 64 but better.

Oh man... I wanted one of those soooo bad! I am sooo glad I didn't get one. Got a ][+ a few years later.

[S. Pupp]

It was some form of mainframe using punch cards, during a school outing to a votech facility in 1981. I got to print out my name on a punch card. Wow!

My first truly hands-on experience was with an Atari 800 in 1982.

My first computer was a TRS-80 CoCoII in 1985.

My first Mac was the next year: A Mac Plus in 1986.

[srf1957]

1975 high school science teacher started a computer class . We would go to the local college once a week .
Punch out our programs in BASIC . Then we would run them online to Oregon State University by teletype.
We only got 30 second runtime codes at first in case the program looped . Would set a 10 second shutoff time so didn't burn them up . Some of the college kids played a game called lunar lander where you could tell the rocket when to fire to slow your descent . We never had enough time online to play it . Then didn't do anything with computers for about 20 years .

[RecipeForDisaster]

My sister had a Mac SE for her college work. There was a mainframe!! A BBS, I think? I swear we didn’t have a modem, so I don’t know how she got online in the early to mid 1980s. I used to play with it, pre-kindergarten, and I had a blast. There was some chemistry program where you put together molecules. Awesome. I eventually got drawers full of disks - once we got a 1mb hard drive!!!!- with useful programs and stuff like pinball games, Crystal Quest, and man, I don’t remember what else I used it for other than Paint and word processing (was it Claris, Word Perfect...?). It was wonderful.

[Lew Zealand]

1980 in grade school. 3 black Bell+Howell licensed Apple ][ clones made the rounds and I remember a lemonade stand program and something else. A year of 2 later the school got some permanent ones and I started learning BASIC and the weird way that those machines displayed color.

I was years later when I realized that Black wasn't the color of Apple computers, those Bell+Howell Apples were ubiquitous in our school system.