What was your first encounter with a computer?

[neophyte]

Mainframe at Drexel U in 1970. No idea what model it was, but I remember the compiler rejecting my 100 or so punch cards 2 or 3 times before I found every last error.

I thought at the time we would never run out of confetti.

[Will Collier]

Probably a punchcard fossil during a field trip to the local junior college. First one I got my hands on was most likely a TRS-80 Model 1 at the local Radio Shack. I remember the Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville, AL had a Commodore Pet as part of an exhibit, that one might have predated the TRS-80, but it couldn't have been by much. Both models were introduced in 1977.

[raz]

1973 or so. We had an IBM 1470 (?) for Fortran and an HP time share machine running RSTS for Basic in my High School. I'd show up for zero-th period just to get more coding time in.

[ztirffritz]

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.

[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.

[davester]

I took Electrical Engineering 1 at UC Berkeley in 1972. We programmed using Fortran IV on a CDC 6400 mainframe which was hidden behind windows off a hallway in the basement of the math building. Most programs were submitted as boxes of punch card decks to the high priests than ran the computer. Late on we were able to use more advanced input devices like teletypes, and eventually Hazeltine cathode ray terminals (which seemed Star Trek like). At times, the turnaround time from input submittal to output retrieval could be measured in days.

[Fritz]

PDP11 shared in district. ~1975

[Markintosh]

Probably playing the Star Trek Text Game from 1971...would have been around 1976 at Cal Poly SLO on a high school field trip for math whiz kids.

[Lizabeth]

IBM Selectric on special paper and a dedicated typesetting machine (who's name I forget at the moment) that you saw less than one line on a tiny screen. Changeable film strip fonts. Compugraphic 7400 or 7500?

[Rick-o]

Back in '76 I was a high school senior. They had just set up a computer room and I would stick my head in there every once in awhile. No way with my grades I could have taken that class. It comprised of 4-5 eggheads who were at the top of our school. I was a typical slacker in those days.

My first real computer, (after several Atari consoles) was an Atari 400 in 1980. Man, did I ever spend some time on that thing! What was cool it could run my old Atari carts from my console. I dabbled with almost every version of Atari until I got sick of the lack of hardware and software. It seemed anything announced would always turn into vaporware.

I had enough by 1990. I bought an Apple Performa 400 from all places, Wal-Mart. It was the closest to my beloved Atari. I didn't have much love for DOS, and later Windows.

I haven't looked back since.