What was your first experience with a computer?

Oregon Trail! I loved that game! I remembered feeling so stressed but excited as I steered my wagon through the water. We had that and Super Munchers.

I can’t say for sure if that was my first experience but it’s my earliest memory.

My first experience was when I was about five.
It was at home, and it was when I got my first computer game, Mathblaster. [Which, let me tell you, was actually really fun, despite its mathematical focus. =) ]

I also had an Easy Bake game around the same time.

I can’t say for sure what the computer was, but I believe that it was either a Gateway or Compaq.

Don’t laugh. I was 60 and learned how to play solitaire. I’ve come a long way, baby.

I was in my 20s and working for the company that had the largest mainframe computer in private industry (second only to Nasa’s in size). Needless to say it did not sit on my desk!

Yes…at my elementary school, they had this computer “van” (RV) that came by and the kids who were well-behaved got to go there and play games and program in Basic. Green monochrome screens and Apple IIs…awesome! Thanks for reminding me (c. 1983).

The neighbor’s Commodore64, playing games and trying (and failing) to write programs in basic.

i was 7, my brother had a 486 with some basic games like T.I.M. but the first thing i really got into where the lucas arts adventure games about a month later, that was a pretty good boost for learning english, and why do i consider myself a hardcore kid ? never bothered with easy mode on monkey island 2…

it was the start of something that would end me up spending my entire day with computers, seriously, i wake up at 9, woken up by my mbp, then i go to work, fixing mac’s and selling them till 6, then i get home, and sit behind my machine, sometimes cooking, playing a game on a console, but it’s always there for me, just the way i like it

I want to say it was a Commodor or an Apple 2C, around 1982 or 83. We had a field trip to a computer lab, and they taught us how to make those swirly geometric shapes that keep going and going and going. After that I didn’t touch another computer until about 1994 went I went back to school; by then it was windows all the way. Now I’m back to a Mac

Apple (something) before the Macintosh was made. Oregon Trail and Logo. “I made the turtle make a triangle. Neat”

There was another game too, but I can’t remember the name. It was about reproduction and you had to figure out what color eyes the baby blob would have.

@john ; I remember Logo…I used that in fifth grade…I loved that thing!
My favorite parts were the light shows…

@gail Good for you. My parents are in their 60s and have no idea what the internet is. I always tell them, my mom especially, that they would enjoy it, but they are too scared of the new technology. They just call waiting about 5 years ago.

Mine was Oregon Trail in elementary school, too! First grade… Ah, to be six or seven again…

@flyawayxxballoon I had Mathblaster, too! And it was pretty darn fun, even though I hate math and have dyscalculia.

If the Sears home Pong console (‘75) doesn’t count, then it was the Apple //e in Miss Sargenti’s class in 8th grade (‘78/‘79). She had braces and when something would go wrong, she’d run over screaming “Control-shee!”

I programmed it to do a graphic of the “Don’t Panic” text from HHGG in rotating colors. It took two days to plot all the X/Ys.

@Macbean; Haha, yes! Mathblaster was a great game, though the best ones were for first graders and such. They got progressively worse as they tried to accomodate older players. The old school ones were so much better…

And Oregon Trail…a lot of other people have mentioned that…it sounds familiar, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it is…could you please elaborate?
From my memory, I think it was a sort of roleplay-ish game where you were pioneers? But perhaps that was another game…

Control, open apple, delete :)

@ flyaway: The Oregon Trail = you have died of dysentary. Game over.

in the mid nineties playing commander keen on a DOS computer

@flyaway This site describes the game and shows screenshots. But it sounds like you know the game.

@dragon ; Thanks! That sounds just like the game I remember, though the screenshots don’t look anything like it. I played the game in third grade, which would’ve been around 2003, so perhaps I played a newer version?

Play Oregon Trail here!

It was the computer in my dad’s office in Honolulu. The airline that he worked for had just opened a route there and he was the manager. He brought me in to see it as they were installing it because it’s office was bigger than his. It had a special air-conditioned room and I first saw it when the cables below had just been installed. They took the entire floor of enclosure and at least a foot off the ground. The rest of the area (to the ceiling was the blg blue computer. It was part of the beginning of the Sabre (reservations) system. It also had the reel to reel system on it.

Our first home computer was a Commodore 64. It also had a tape type data recorder with it. When we first got it, it had no programs, only a small booklet to put in your own. We spent hours putting in the code for a baby cry. All it did was a faint “eek”.

@all; I lied. I learned Fortran in the early sixties (when I was in my late 20s), wrote some programs and knew that there were a group of women locked away somewhere who typed punched cards. G*d help you if you dropped the pile. The print-out covered an area the size of a fairground.

Windows 95 I think. I put everything in the C:/ drive in the startup-folder, so every folder on C:/ would open when you started the computer. Hehe…

@all you MathBlaster fans: I also remember using the early version of that program in elementary school. Now I teach 2nd and 3rd grade, and you should know that MathBlaster has stayed hip to the times! We purchased it as our math software for my grade level and it looks just like a video game. A cute one. It even includes an opening animated sequence with a theme song. (Some of my less self-aware students sing along to it very loudly as they hear it over their headphones – it’s quite annoying. :-) ) The kids get so busy trying to hit the right fraction target (pies held by clowns) or fill up the right basket of hundreds, tens, and ones that they barely realize they are practicing math skills. It’s awesome.

Guess I lied as well, gail, you jogged my memory. I punched some of those cards at the San Diego county fair when I was in HS. They were recruiting for jobs. I decided it was so boring, I’d better go to college.

Old school Apple in PEG classes and writing B RUN codes . . .

Oregon Trail was some fun.

Okay this is awesome to see the collective geekdom-I’m definitely feelin’ the “Mac-Lovin” in the air!

My first was around the age of 13, my aunt had one of those old ones for text editing and I got to play with it. No idea what kind it was and it didn’t intrigue me to level of finding out. After that it was PC’s running Win 3.11 at middle school.

I didn’t convert to “macdom” until ‘99 – latecomer, I know – and am proud to say I haven’t used a PC since.

Pretty sure it was about 1995–6 playing WordRescue on a DOS. Possibly why I was always a better speller than those my age at school :P

Remember the KayPro? One of the first personal computers. A whopping 32K (that is kilobytes) of RAM. No hard disk. A 3-inch monochrome display. And all of this was before Microsoft and before DOS. It was about the size of a suitcase and you could carry it, but you had to plug it in.
I still remember some of the keyboard shortcuts for the wordprocessing and spreadsheet applications!
The first game the really grabbed me was the original SimCity.

Yes Argle, we had one (for a day or so) before the Commodore 64. The screen was so small, we took it back. After the C64 outlived it’s usefulness, we bought a Mac and have had Macs ever since.

SimCity was the first game I realized that my son was actually learning something useful by playing it. He was very upset when he ran out of money and couldn’t build anything else. A great lesson in life at a young age (unless you want a career in politics, that is).

It was an old Commodore with no hard drive and we owned no software for the thing. We used to write two lines of program ”insert name here is cool” and “goto insert name here.” Then our brilliant work will fill the entire screen. I remember wondering what the big deal was with computers.

1982 Junior year of High School, learning MS-BASIC on an Apple ][ e

My eldest brother bought one of the first MacIntoshes in 1984, and I’ve also used PCs since Windoze first came out.

My dad bought a Commodore Vic 20. You hooked it up to your tv and spent hours writing stupid, simple code that made lines flow across the screen. We played pong on it.

Oregon Trail!

I remember using an Amiga to play a few games and then working with a music synthesizer program when I was about 6 or so. Nice computer, the Amiga…years ahead of its time; they were using them to do video editing back in the late 80s, when PCs and Macs were both comparatively in the Stone Age.