That's an awesome quote!
One day it'll be the same as "I remember the first motor vehicle"!
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OLDER crowd (20+)? WTF?
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That's an awesome quote!
One day it'll be the same as "I remember the first motor vehicle"!
I think you mean you remember when the World Wide Web was new. The Internet predates you.
I predate you all. For I am He, The One Who....ahhh, never mind.
Haha
Oh, and to the OP, yeah, I laughed when I saw TheFam's statement in that other thread as well! I'm 33, and have 3 kids of my own.
Let's see now.. I'm 38, my first computer was the ZX81, and my first online experience was Micronet running at a fantastic 1200/75 (75 baud upstream! No P2P in those days ).
I've been programming since then, more or less.. apart from 'Games Tape 1' (none of these newfangled floppy disks here, unless you mean the 8 inch ones in the school IBM terminal) there wasn't a huge amount to do except learn to program it myself.
).I've been programming since then, more or less.. apart from 'Games Tape 1' (none of these newfangled floppy disks here, unless you mean the 8 inch ones in the school IBM terminal) there wasn't a huge amount to do except learn to program it myself.
I'm 27, and still remember how excited my brother and I were the day my dad bought a Packard Bell computer with Windows 3.1!
are you out of your demographic on MacRumors....? well, look here for the results:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/501712/
i would say......no!
35 with a family here. My story is similar to others - word processing etc in high school and some programming in college...COBOL anyone????
My first PC was a Commodore 64 as well. Brown with chocolate brown keys...NICE! 5.25 Floppy drive, monitor, printer...the works. I was the coolest 7th grader around!
In high school I used my neighbors Mac all the time to play games and type papers. Once I got to college I was a PC person until december of last year. Now I'm back on a Mac and I don't intend on switching again!
My first PC was a Commodore 64 as well. Brown with chocolate brown keys...NICE! 5.25 Floppy drive, monitor, printer...the works. I was the coolest 7th grader around!
In high school I used my neighbors Mac all the time to play games and type papers. Once I got to college I was a PC person until december of last year. Now I'm back on a Mac and I don't intend on switching again!
First computer experience ever: programming an IBM 360 with boxes full of cards, in college. Similar stuff in graduate school, although there was some work with a terminal that ran like Selectric typewriter - no display other than a paper record.
First personal computer at home: some Texas Instruments thing, model lost in the mists of my memory. I was out of graduate school and had two kids who are now the age of many of the contributors to this tread.
First computer at work: Apple ][+, about 1981. Apple //e followed there and at home. On to MS-DOS stuff and its various Windows successors since, both at work and at home. Windows XP still at work.
iPhone: One year ago today.
First Mac (at home): about 11 months ago, aluminum iMac.
I don't want to think about my age.
First personal computer at home: some Texas Instruments thing, model lost in the mists of my memory. I was out of graduate school and had two kids who are now the age of many of the contributors to this tread.
First computer at work: Apple ][+, about 1981. Apple //e followed there and at home. On to MS-DOS stuff and its various Windows successors since, both at work and at home. Windows XP still at work.
iPhone: One year ago today.
First Mac (at home): about 11 months ago, aluminum iMac.
I don't want to think about my age.
Its funny when 20+ is considered the older crowd.
I am 35. I remember when there was no internet.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. I also had a
Commodore 64 and Amiga. I thought both were great for games!
Anyone remember playing Mechwarrior or Warcraft on the internet over dialup? Those were the days.
I am 35. I remember when there was no internet.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. I also had a
Commodore 64 and Amiga. I thought both were great for games!
Anyone remember playing Mechwarrior or Warcraft on the internet over dialup? Those were the days.
Ah, the old days. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 (with 16K ram pack, oh yes). Then a ZX Spectrum, 48k RAM. Commodore 64. Acorn Archimedes 410 (1Mb RAM!!!) - yes, I was there at the dawn of RISC processors. Acorn RISC PC. Various PCs, them MBP. So no, you're not old.
Ahh good times... I followed the Acorn path too.
Mine went:
Acorn BBC Master Compact (6502 CPU)
Acorn Archimedes A3000 (ARM2)
Acorn Archimedes A5000 (ARM3)
PC (Pentium II 350)
PC - (AMD Duron 1.2GHz)
PC - (AMD Athlon XP2100)
PC - (Pentium 4 2.4GHz)
Apple iBook (G4 1.33GHz)
PC - (C2D 3.0GHz)
Next will probably be a Macbook Pro to replace my nearly 3 year old iBook.
Well, I think I have you all beat. I'm 58. I got my BS in Computer Science at N.C. State back in 1973. Believe it or not but there were computers then (we had to use punch cards though, remember them). I also got my MS in Computer Studies from State. I'm retired now after having spent 30+ years as an IT manager. My first PC was a Sinclair (I bet not many of you remember that one). I then went thru about everything - Tandy TRS80, Commodore 64, Atari 400, Apple II and any number of IBM compatibles. I have a small computer museum in my home including a Tandy, a Atari 400 and an original IBM AT (which still works). As I've grown older though I've come to appreciate the importance of keeping things simple and that is what attracts me to Apple. I believe anyone could use an iPhone. That's why I also plan to move to Mac whenever my current Compaq laptop dies (where is that hammer by the way ). Well that's my story.
PS - I just saw someone mentioned programming a System 360. When I was a Freshman, I was at East Carolina University before transferring to State. Our computer was an IBM 1420. The computer was so small, they even let me have a key to the computer room to do testing at night. Came you imagine that happening these days - a Freshman being given a key to the computer room and having sole use of the computer at any university?
). Well that's my story.PS - I just saw someone mentioned programming a System 360. When I was a Freshman, I was at East Carolina University before transferring to State. Our computer was an IBM 1420. The computer was so small, they even let me have a key to the computer room to do testing at night. Came you imagine that happening these days - a Freshman being given a key to the computer room and having sole use of the computer at any university?
I am 34
I built my first "computer" from a Heath Kit kit. It was programmed using buttons on a keypad. I believe it was an old H8 8080A from 1977 or 1978... I started to build it with my dad in the early 80s (I built a crystal radio at age 5 or 6 too... burnt myself a lot with the soldering iron though.) I have worked with and designed vacuum tube circuits, used punch card entry systems... tons of old school stuff
I wrote my first high level language program in 5th grade on a little black TI (sinclair?) in basic.
I ran several BBSs in the NorthEast way before the WWW existed, and had 9 nodes running which I eventually connected to CompuServe to allow emailing on the internet to others beside local node users and the sysop (me.)
I remember acoustic couplers... I remember buying a 300 baud modem at Radio Shack. I remember when Radio Shack sold enough electronic parts in stores to be able to actually build stuff.
I can code in assembly, write a boot loader, even an OS... and have an electronics background.
I think the major difference between my generation and the younger ones is really understanding the low level components of a modern computer, and how to make them work. Most people now have no idea that each chip has a spec which tells you how to interconnect and "program" it... and that you are sending individual commands to it to have it do what you want, when you want (machine code FTW!!!!.) They also don't care It's too old school for them... other people take care of that stuff for them now... they just plunk away in C or C# or objective C.
It doesn't much matter now except I feel more powerful knowing you can hand me just the hardware and give me a ton of alone time with it, and I can make it work and even create my own high level language if I was so motivated
A lot of the low level stuff doesn't matter to the majority of programmers anymore.. it has been a wild ride watching it go from needing to be an engineer to write programs, to being schooled only in a high level language. I don't see anything wrong with it, and it doesn't make the new generation of high level only guys lower than me or anything, i just find myself being stared at blankly sometimes when I start to talk about low level under he hood stuff as it pertains to programming
Anyone ever program a comtran or bitran 10? I have
Now after programming for about 20 years (started pretty young) I know ~10 high level languages, 20+ proprietary scripting languages (automation and robotics industry too), and yes... even machine code and MASM assembly. I also know some mainframe languages and things like RPG for AS/400, as well as PLC ladder logic and Schneider concept PLC languages.
All that being said... I feel like I am probably in a pretty large demographic group here on MacRumors.
I built my first "computer" from a Heath Kit kit. It was programmed using buttons on a keypad. I believe it was an old H8 8080A from 1977 or 1978... I started to build it with my dad in the early 80s (I built a crystal radio at age 5 or 6 too... burnt myself a lot with the soldering iron though.) I have worked with and designed vacuum tube circuits, used punch card entry systems... tons of old school stuff
I wrote my first high level language program in 5th grade on a little black TI (sinclair?) in basic.
I ran several BBSs in the NorthEast way before the WWW existed, and had 9 nodes running which I eventually connected to CompuServe to allow emailing on the internet to others beside local node users and the sysop (me.)
I remember acoustic couplers... I remember buying a 300 baud modem at Radio Shack. I remember when Radio Shack sold enough electronic parts in stores to be able to actually build stuff.
I can code in assembly, write a boot loader, even an OS... and have an electronics background.
I think the major difference between my generation and the younger ones is really understanding the low level components of a modern computer, and how to make them work. Most people now have no idea that each chip has a spec which tells you how to interconnect and "program" it... and that you are sending individual commands to it to have it do what you want, when you want (machine code FTW!!!!.) They also don't care
It's too old school for them... other people take care of that stuff for them now... they just plunk away in C or C# or objective C.It doesn't much matter now except I feel more powerful knowing you can hand me just the hardware and give me a ton of alone time with it, and I can make it work and even create my own high level language if I was so motivated
A lot of the low level stuff doesn't matter to the majority of programmers anymore.. it has been a wild ride watching it go from needing to be an engineer to write programs, to being schooled only in a high level language. I don't see anything wrong with it, and it doesn't make the new generation of high level only guys lower than me or anything, i just find myself being stared at blankly sometimes when I start to talk about low level under he hood stuff as it pertains to programming
Anyone ever program a comtran or bitran 10? I have
Now after programming for about 20 years (started pretty young) I know ~10 high level languages, 20+ proprietary scripting languages (automation and robotics industry too), and yes... even machine code and MASM assembly. I also know some mainframe languages and things like RPG for AS/400, as well as PLC ladder logic and Schneider concept PLC languages.
All that being said... I feel like I am probably in a pretty large demographic group here on MacRumors.
Ah, the old days. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 (with 16K ram pack, oh yes). Then a ZX Spectrum, 48k RAM. Commodore 64. Acorn Archimedes 410 (1Mb RAM!!!) - yes, I was there at the dawn of RISC processors. Acorn RISC PC. Various PCs, them MBP. So no, you're not old.
I'm surprised the OP had no computers at High school, as I too am 41, and we had computers. But you've reminded me that through the ZX80, 81, Spectrum, and the Acorn BBC micro (not forgetting the classic Memotech MTX512, my own machine of choice - 4MHz CPU - "Memotech users do it four million times a second" said the free bumper sticker) we in the UK were slightly ahead of the US in terms of REALLY CHEAP home computing.
Our school computers though were two big black boxes called Research Machines 380z I believe. A maths teacher also did the one computer studies class, only available in the lower sixth year. And we qualification we took wasn't an O or A level, but a County Diploma, which wasn't worth the paper it was written on, but did at least teach practical programming in BASIC. Then I want to work in a bank for five years, a job filled with mainframes, dumb terminals and just two IBM PCs.
Then to college, for an Art Foundation, where I first met a Mac. University followed and I bought my first Mac (a Classic II) in the second year with my Student Loan.
God, I remember those giant floppy disks! I'm 22 and remember playing oregon trail on the old school apple comps in elementary school. My first computer was a Packard Bell my family bought at SEARS. It was fast for its time. Think it ran 3.1? Remember trying to dial up AOL and half the time it never worked. Then we finally upgraded to windows 95 which was a massive jump. Then we got cable internet when it was first available in our area. The modem for it was $1000 plus.
I'm 32, and my first computer was an Acorn Electron 32K back when I was 8 or so. Several people in my family had Apple II computers when I was a kid.
There are a few people on MR who are well into their 60's, and one very frequent poster, MultiMedia who was a colleague of Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple). That's going back quite a few years.
(MultiMedia alas recently fell down a mineshaft and had a tiff with the MR moderators, and no longer posts here).
Also there are a large number of posters here who like me have children. MR is an all-ages forum
There are a few people on MR who are well into their 60's, and one very frequent poster, MultiMedia who was a colleague of Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple). That's going back quite a few years.
(MultiMedia alas recently fell down a mineshaft and had a tiff with the MR moderators, and no longer posts here).
Also there are a large number of posters here who like me have children. MR is an all-ages forum
I read that the same way.
I'm thirty and my first experience with a computer was the Amiga 1000. In school we had a few Mac's (don't remember the model, but they were the all-in-one monochrome model) but mostly PC's running DOS.
Looking back it really is amazing how the technology has matured in the 12 years since I graduated.
I am 22 and I honestly can't remember a time without my family having a PC.
When I was very little my dad used to have an Amiga (or was it a commodore? Totally can't tell) which we hooked up to the TV as it had no monitor.
The most awesome stuff happened around the time I was 6 or 7, though: my dad got himself a very badass PC (Pentium 100, 16 megs of ram, Sound Blaster 16, Matrox Millennuim 4 mb vram, 1 GB hdd, 4x cd-rom drive and a lovely 17" CRT screen) and I would spend days playing DOS games (Indiana Jones and Day of the Tentacle were my all time favorites) or watching my dad use "the useless os", AKA Windows 3.1.
I also have memories of him having to use a program called "Trumpet" to go on the internet as Windows had no support whatsoever for modems (the first one we had was a 14.4kbps); the browser was Netscape and it still had a lighthouse for icon.
The first time I actually saw a floppy floppy was in 3rd or 4th grade, as my primary school's PCs were horribly outdated.
God I feel old
When I was very little my dad used to have an Amiga (or was it a commodore? Totally can't tell) which we hooked up to the TV as it had no monitor.
The most awesome stuff happened around the time I was 6 or 7, though: my dad got himself a very badass PC (Pentium 100, 16 megs of ram, Sound Blaster 16, Matrox Millennuim 4 mb vram, 1 GB hdd, 4x cd-rom drive and a lovely 17" CRT screen) and I would spend days playing DOS games (Indiana Jones and Day of the Tentacle were my all time favorites) or watching my dad use "the useless os", AKA Windows 3.1.
I also have memories of him having to use a program called "Trumpet" to go on the internet as Windows had no support whatsoever for modems (the first one we had was a 14.4kbps); the browser was Netscape and it still had a lighthouse for icon.
The first time I actually saw a floppy floppy was in 3rd or 4th grade, as my primary school's PCs were horribly outdated.
God I feel old
I'll be 36 this year and I'm an MR lurker . Actually, the only Apple product I own is an iPod Mini and for years would have had nothing to do with any of their products given the choice. I even won the iPod in a charity raffle.
My first experience of computers was actually a Word Processing Unit. my Dad worked in sales for some spin-off company owned by Exxon and would bring this thing home. It consisted of an orange monochrome screen, a HUGE central processing unit and an equally massive line printer. The whole thing would not fit on our dining room table and there were 8 of us in our family! I was hooked.
I remember using a zx81 and attribute my manual dexterity to its wonderful key combinations. At high-school we had BBC Micros, I remember the computer studies class being basically pure maths which put me right off (I was 12!)
From there I was exposed to things like the ICL OPD (One Per Desk) with a built in phone handset, we used to program it to work as an answer phone with some very mechanical synthesised voice! Sid the Snake was *the* game and everything came on miniature tape casettes.
My first real job involved inputting chemical structures into ICI Agrochemicals' Burroughs Mainframe using WLN (Wiswesser Line Notation?).
"Cool" consisted of command line BBS which you could literally dial up to (yes I have used acoustic couplers) leave messages and download programs people had written.
Before long we were all getting excited about this new computer that was all but portable and you could actually *draw* chemical structures into that. It was an Apple IIe. It was great, but quirky.
After that came a Digital VMS system with a VT4200 ? Colour(!) terminal, I somehow managed to get onto an X.25 PAD which told me I was on a network called JANET. I could make that VMS system do pretty much whatever I wanted, following a fairly lengthy manual reading session!
Norton Utilites taught me the beauty of reading in HEX.
I remember creating RAM drives which improved the financial simulation runs from about 24 hours to just over 2 hours.
I have programmed in 8086 assembler, BASIC and Pascal (even Turbo Pascal!). I have translated Fortran into C; and made a mockery of all that is sacred by creating applications in Visual Basic.
I have been "formally cautioned" for scaring the college tutor beyond all belief by writting a "virus" (I learnt what you could do with an AUTOEXEC.BAT)
I remember the turning point in terms of Internet use being in about 1991 when the small company I worked for agreed to get me a 14,400 modem and using Mosaic I would to connect to FTP sites and download updates for our Netware servers. Come to think of it, that was probably just after the birth of the WWW.
I negotiated 30 free copies of MS Windows for Workgroups on its original release due to an MS administrative error.
I have written internal corporate whitepapers on the potential of ISDN and telecommuting. I have stood next to a DEC Alpha 8400 TurboLaser and stared in awe trying to comprehend how only two of them could run the entire Altavista search engine. My current home PC is now more powerfull.
I remember when AltaVista was synonymous with Internet search!
I feel as though I've been around computing from a very early age - 8, or 9 years old perhaps.
So it's only taken Apple 28 years to produce something that I really want to buy Apple FTW!!!one
. Actually, the only Apple product I own is an iPod Mini and for years would have had nothing to do with any of their products given the choice. I even won the iPod in a charity raffle.My first experience of computers was actually a Word Processing Unit. my Dad worked in sales for some spin-off company owned by Exxon and would bring this thing home. It consisted of an orange monochrome screen, a HUGE central processing unit and an equally massive line printer. The whole thing would not fit on our dining room table and there were 8 of us in our family! I was hooked.
I remember using a zx81 and attribute my manual dexterity to its wonderful key combinations. At high-school we had BBC Micros, I remember the computer studies class being basically pure maths which put me right off (I was 12!)
From there I was exposed to things like the ICL OPD (One Per Desk) with a built in phone handset, we used to program it to work as an answer phone with some very mechanical synthesised voice! Sid the Snake was *the* game and everything came on miniature tape casettes.
My first real job involved inputting chemical structures into ICI Agrochemicals' Burroughs Mainframe using WLN (Wiswesser Line Notation?).
"Cool" consisted of command line BBS which you could literally dial up to (yes I have used acoustic couplers) leave messages and download programs people had written.
Before long we were all getting excited about this new computer that was all but portable and you could actually *draw* chemical structures into that. It was an Apple IIe. It was great, but quirky.
After that came a Digital VMS system with a VT4200 ? Colour(!) terminal, I somehow managed to get onto an X.25 PAD which told me I was on a network called JANET
. I could make that VMS system do pretty much whatever I wanted, following a fairly lengthy manual reading session!Norton Utilites taught me the beauty of reading in HEX.
I remember creating RAM drives which improved the financial simulation runs from about 24 hours to just over 2 hours.
I have programmed in 8086 assembler, BASIC and Pascal (even Turbo Pascal!). I have translated Fortran into C; and made a mockery of all that is sacred by creating applications in Visual Basic.
I have been "formally cautioned" for scaring the college tutor beyond all belief by writting a "virus" (I learnt what you could do with an AUTOEXEC.BAT)
I remember the turning point in terms of Internet use being in about 1991 when the small company I worked for agreed to get me a 14,400 modem and using Mosaic I would to connect to FTP sites and download updates for our Netware servers. Come to think of it, that was probably just after the birth of the WWW.
I negotiated 30 free copies of MS Windows for Workgroups on its original release due to an MS administrative error.
I have written internal corporate whitepapers on the potential of ISDN and telecommuting. I have stood next to a DEC Alpha 8400 TurboLaser and stared in awe trying to comprehend how only two of them could run the entire Altavista search engine. My current home PC is now more powerfull.
I remember when AltaVista was synonymous with Internet search!
I feel as though I've been around computing from a very early age - 8, or 9 years old perhaps.
So it's only taken Apple 28 years to produce something that I really want to buy
Apple FTW!!!one
The University of Texas had a BSCS degree plan at least by 1971. The first graduates may have been '75 or '76.
I am 52. I had one of the first BSCS ( BS in Computer Science) degrees given in 1978. It was the first semester it existed at NAU. As far as I heard at the time only MIT and Berkely also had a BSCS.
My college computer had 98K TOTAL memory. That ran the whole campus. What they called a Personal Computer was $100 and delivered as a box of chips you wired together yourself just to get it to run simple counting programs if you were lucky to get it to work.
I bought the first Macintosh model that came out and I think I was the first consumer in CA to get their hands on the first Mac Hard Drive. I forget the size but I think it was about 2megs and it cost me about $2,000. I had to use connections at Computerland Corporate to get my hands on it. At the time is seemed like all the memory in the world.
I even got one of the first Newtons (like you did not guess
Now flash forward to the iPhone. I have seen it all and it is the most amazing thing I have ever owned. I used to drag around a cell phone, Ipod, and camera. It does just about everything I would ever need when I am away from home. I did not need to drag a laptop to Europe last summer. I could surf and do all my email from every Hotel Lobby using wifi.
I am excited to get the 3G speeds. I love to use the phone to surf the web while I am waiting for anything when I am out. Now all I need to be totaly content is a decent Texas Holdem card game.