What was your first encounter with a computer?

[Mr Downtown]

Went to see one on a high school field trip, but summer after high school (1975) I took programming at the community college. They taught us Assembler for the IBM 360, on punch cards of course. Because the college also taught keypunching, the keypunch machines nearly all had blank keyboards with no characters shown on the keys. Very frustrating for most of my classmates.

When I got to college that fall, the University of Tulsa's computer was a Xerox (!) mainframe, and the assembly language was called Metasymbol. I suspect I may still have a box of punchcards in a storage closet somewhere.