What was your first encounter with a computer?

[JoeH]

First time was in the mid to late '60s during a family day at the GE division my father worked in. They had some terminals set up with rudimentary command line based games.

Then there was the PDP-8 or -11 that belonged to the local community college, I had some access to that while in high school. That was around 1970, did some programming in Basic on a Teletype terminal.

Also In high school they had an IBM 1130, programming course in Fortran on punch cards.

First university I went to had an IBM 360, programming in a variant of PL/1 and more Fortran. They upgraded to an IBM 370 between the first and second year. They also had a connection with the PLATO system being run at UIUC.