I started with the vic20, moved to the commador 64. stayed there for a lonng time. the stared using pcs in the early 90's. got hooked on bbs's, hosted a few,got into ansi art, found out about the innernetz, started making websites, and the rest is history.

27, started with a 286 with 1MB of RAM when I was 6. It's been a long ride since then. I'm now a professional systems admin.

I'm 48. I got started with mainframes and teletype machines with paper tape. My first job was running programs on a Honeywell machine by using punched cards. Ouch!

I've been on TRS-80s and PC-ATs Commodore PETs and programmed in FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, and all the rest.

Man, am I grateful for ITs and Python!

FWIW- When I was a teenager my Mom would drive me to Radio Shack where I would spend an hour testing a bushel basket of vacuum tubes on their tube tester. Later I'd go home and fix TV sets for neighbors and family.

I predate all the Commodore VIC20 and C64 enthusiasts. I was building Lear Sigler ADM3A glass teletypes in my parents basement from kits in the 1970's. It had approx. 110 dip IC chips on a huge PCB. Thousands of solder joints, everything was socketed too. Even the QWERTY keyboard had to be soldered together from dozens of individual pushbutton switches.

Anyone remember S-100 systems? I made money soldering those together too. I sold the assembled systems, tested with my personal guarantee to a local computer retail store (the first such store in Rochester,NY) in the '70s. Sol, Vector Graphics, IMSAI, Cromemco, Ohio Scientific, Apple IIe, Apple LISA, Atari. We got a PONG game (TV tennis) when they first came out. http://www.pong-story.com/ My first computer was built from scratch based on surplus parts, I had collected......punched paper tape is how I loaded the operating system, and my applications. The operating system had to be loaded from tape every time the computer was powered on, that took approx. 45 minutes of noisy teletype clunking / chugging at 110 baud (ten bytes per second). ASR33 Teletype was a step up from the antique baudot (5 bit) paper tape device I orginally had. What is odd is no one in my family was into things technical. My Dad was a plastic mold maker, and my Mom stayed at home feeding us.

My first "real" computer had a surplus ASCII keyboard that I paid $200 for (just the keyboard was $200). The kbd had no enclosure, and put out 7 bit parallel bytes and a strobe pulse for each key closure. The kbd only sent upper case alpha. I had this connected to my own S-100 system which had two 8 inch floppy drives. Each double sides, double density disk could hold about 180K of data. They were "hard sectored". The computer had two 8K static ram boards. The RAM and other boards in the machine ran so hot, that I had to open a window in the winter time or the room was too warm. The CRT display was made by Ball Brothers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The same company that made canning jars for fruits and veggies. I was one of the few computer hobbyists in those days that had a printer connected to his computer. My printer was a GE Terminet. It was a belt / chain printer which could print up to 120 characters per second. It had a very unique sound.

I'm older than dirt. I was fooling around with computers when they used OCTAL coding. I wish I still had my HP25 programmable calculator (it got stolen). That calc. was $200 in 1976 dollars.

If we had ever seen something like the Nokia N800 back then we would have flipped out.

I recently sold a core memory plane from one of the early Cray Super Computers (pulled out of Xerox). That core plane was 8K of fast storage from the 1960s, and belonged in the Smithsonian. 8K = .000008 gig LOL. My Nokia N800 has 8 Gig of removable storage, and I carry two 4 gig USB jump drives on my keychain. One of these USB drives has Damn Small Linux and Skype for Linux and Skype for Windows. I can boot just about anyone's PC to DamnSmall and use the machine without their OS or HDD involved.

All this VOIP stuff today and Internet Tablet / pocket computer gadgetry is awesome.

I was 7 years old when JFK was assassinated, I remember watching the funeral on our black and white TV. The picture was snowy because all we had was a set top rabbit ear antenna for reception.

Anyone have a MOS KIM-1 or Intel SDK-85 they wanna sell?

I'm 39 until 8:20pm in late march next year. And there's not a doggone thing you can do about it :P.

But seriously, on the topic(or off as the case may be) my first computer was an atari 2600 with the basic programming cartridge. Does anybody else remember that steaming pile?

Commodore P.E.T. , now THERE was a computer !

I still have a C-64 with 5-1/4 floppy drive.

Man. According to the poll, next year I guess I get to move in with the retirement home folks. I'm 45. Now GET OFF MY LAWN!^H^H^H^H^HRUG!

Just practicing.

Started computing with Apple II Integer BASIC and MuMNF on a CDC Cyber 73 running KRONOS in high school, workd my way through college on VAXen and an 1100/82 from Sperry UNIVAC, and now play with Fortran, C++, Perl, Java, and various other weird mainframe things for a living.

Started my PC life with MS-DOS 3.3 and Windows/286 2.1, then hit PC/GEOS, OS/2, BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux along the way.

Only have one tablet, but I have more older PalmOS devices than I can eat.

UNIVAC 1100 mainframes rock! MAPPER. SSG. FURPUR. FANG. 36-bit words, ECL, SIMAN, and the WONDERS of Negative Zero.

You Windows and UNIX weenies don't know what you're missin'!

@FIN
$$CLOSE

I'm reasonably young. Turned 50 this month. Cut my teeth on Hollerith cards and Fortran, but got started writing games for the Atari 800 with an entire 32k of RAM.

Back in the '70 I thought it would be a hoot to get a 1k RAM chip and solder together a box that had would display a couple of sentences from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A sort of pretend HHGG box.

Little did I dream that one day I'd have a Nokia 770 with FBReader, and entire novels in my pocket.