Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

tl;dr don't, just don't.

A curious little me (12-14 years) just stated using the family shared computer.
And he thought: It's so slow! Maybe I can make it faster, my parents would be happy!

So he looked at this little switch on the back and he switched it from 230 to 115.

Not knowing what he did, he turned the PC on... for the last time.

Smoke, a nasty smell and a loud bang were the last memories left behind.

The parents were not happy.

Coming home after school , just to relax and play pinball on the PC ...windows 98 ..good times ..the quest of being Fleet admiral and avoiding the "Tilt"

Roadrash

I don't remember much but I think I was sitting on my dad's lap while he was using word or something.

Windows (95/98?) though 🤢

Gladly we all use Linux now (le family)

"What's a computer?"

- iPad user

how i spend so long on this as a child i dont know, but i wouldn't change it for the world, damn this brings back memories.

wk89 - one pic :)

10 PRINT "HELLO ";
20 GOTO 10

This one isn't as interesting.

I was probably 6 years old when I first used a computer. A commercial played on the TV about an online game called Fantage.

I wanted to play, so I begged my mom if I could use her Dell inspiron 5100. After hours of begging, she finally said yes.

I've never touched a computer before, so when my mom typed her password and left me alone I was confused.

I didn't know how to get to the game so I stared at the screen until my mom returned. She was annoyed and said to go on the internet and I stared at her. She was about to yell, but refrained herself from doing so, and clicked on IE before typing in the game.

She made me an account and then left.

I figured out how to use the trackpad and keyboard so I was really excited. Then there was a pop up box that said something like, "click OK if you promise not to give anyone your personnel information."

As the stupid kid I was, thought I was going to give her a virus if I clicked OK, so I stared at the screen until my mom said computer time was over.

I never got to play Fantage.

I wanted a computer for my Christmas. Must have been 1987 and I just have been about 8.

A few days before Xmas my aunt gave me a card with £5 in it. I asked my dad “dad, if I was getting a computer I could use the £5 to buy a game”

My dad explained to me that we couldn’t afford it and maybe next year.

Woke up the next morning to a shiny new Commodore 64 AND my own little tv.

Never been happier.

Symphony

Playing Civilization on my dad's 386 running Windows 3.11.

I remember installing various games from like 8 floppy disks each. What really confused me was that in every single game I installed, the language was really weird and I could hardly understand half of it. Always asked myself why the hell every single game developer put the same horrible German-ish fantasy language full of errors in their games.

It was much later that I realized I've always been setting the language to Dutch, thinking it was German ("Deutsch"). Yeah, my English skills were horrible back then.

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

Since childhood I was extremely creative. At ~7 I took my family's laptop and started downloading level editors for Super Mario.
After that, I discovered a strange site to create games (similar to Scratch).
One month later the PC had too many malwares and adwares. 🤗

Probably the first time I ever saw a picture of a semi-naked girl on a screen and had a moment to myself.

Oh, that's not what you meant by "exposure"?

My dad's old MS-DOS computer (can't remember specs) when I was 5 or 6 years old. This got me into gaming. I always had to ask him to execute the games I wanted to play cause I didn't know how to do it. One of the first games I ever played was Wolfenstein 3D. Was so scary I didn't want to exit the first room :D

First contact with computers: draw a square using LOGO language. No idea which was the computer back then.

I wasn't the brightest when I started with computers...
I had one in my room for homework and such (an old one that mom had for work and then upgraded to a laptop).

It ran SO FREAKING SLOW and didn't have Internet (I was maybe 6, no need to pay AOL anymore than we already did).

I had a floppy disk that said" Quicken" on it... Brilliant little 6 year old me thought that JUST BY INSERTING the floppy, I could speed my computer up. Not by installing THE FINANCIAL SOFTWARE, just by putting the floppy in the drive...

I've come a little ways since then...

Note: I accidentally installed it and thought I was going to break my computer because I couldn't uninstall it (pulling the floppy out obviously didn't uninstall it)... All my experience prior to this was watching my teacher use Mac at school

My wk89 post got literally one upvote, but that single one came from dfox. So I got that going for me, which is nice :)

Rollercoaster Tycoon

When I was a little boy my father who was an entrepreneur back then hired a computer programmer to develop some kind of administrative software for him. He was programming on the Commodore VIC20. I was very interested in what he was doing and he gave me some books about programming basic on the VIC20. I read them, started programming and I've been hooked ever since!

As I do still remember this man's name I searched on the internet now and then to see if I could find him. End of last year I found him on FB and wrote him a message to thank him for what he did back then. It's because of him that I found out what I love doing most and have a great working career and life because I do what I love to do and get paid very well for it.

Thanks, mr. Stomp!

In grade four my teacher had a vic 20 and he let one student per week borrow it to take home. It didn't have any software but the book that came with it had some instructions on how to write some small basic programs.

>First grade
Teacher: This is a Keyboard, this is a mouse... blah blah blah
Now play Mario!

There was also some space racing game or something installed on the computers. We weren't allowed to play that game, so of course, we did what we weren't allowed to. It was always fun to sneak in a game when the teacher wasn't looking or wasn't around.

We were also taught MS Paint. I "painted" a squirrel in one of the lab sessions, the teacher loved it and showed it to everyone. Everyone applauded and then I became the MS Paint Guru (for them). Fun times..

I was like 4 at the time, it's one of my earliest memories.
My parents called me into the room with the brand new computer and my name was on the screen and they "yelled" at me for writing my name on the screen. I don't remember my reaction I assume crying and saying I didn't do it. And they just laughed and showed how they did it with ms paint and how I can play with paint too.

Re-Volt

It's only day two of wk89 and damn, what a trip down memory lane.

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

I don't really have a notable successful project yet, but I'm working on a small game with my friend and I'd say that that's already a success. Doing something you love with people you love is amazing.

My first contact with a computer was in 1997, I was close to 9.
My parents bought it together with a 17" screen and a color inkjet for about 6000.- CHF if I remember it correctly.
It had Windoozle 95, Pentium 2 233MHz, Radeon Rage 128 something.
At first I was not allowed to use it, but after watching them write documents for some time, they allowed me to draw random stuff in MS Paint and use Word.

It did't take long until I figured out to do more stuff on the system.
I think I crashed Windows a few times by installing some random demo software or shareware and execute just anything to see what happens.

When I turned 10, my godmother gave me Age Of Empires 2 as a present (I wished it so badly) and since this gift, I was somewhat addicted with computers and gaming.

My mother forbid me a lot of times to use the computer for weeks. 😄

But it all made me know computers better and even start programming with Quick Basic! (later VB, C++ and C#)

I grew up with a hacker for a brother, always tampering with shit and my dad was always taking computers apart and repairing them. Although I was too little to be of any help, I was dumbfounded and couldn’t get enough. To be cool, I took all my toys apart to see what made them work. My brother taught me the dark side of a computer and my father the light side. I could go on and on, but meh.

DISCLAIMER: I don't remember this, my parents told me the story

So, when I was 3, my father brought a computer back home and I instantly loved it. It wasn't our computer, he brought it home to fix it. It had Windows 95 on it. After he fixed it, he oppened up MS Paint, or something, drew a line and handed me the mouse, where I proceeded to draw.

Mundane and boring, yes, but a week later, my parents bought our own PC, and explained how to install Win98, a process I actually understood 13 years later.

It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.

Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.

It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.

God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂

When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back.

Anyone played this game as a kid? I've loved this game as a kid!

Dad showed me how to build a computer when I was three. Then he spent the next ten years explaining how variables work over and over.

Then I freaked out about being poor forever, applied to one of the cheapest 4-year colleges in state, and am doing my best to do that whole Computer Science thing.

My introduction to programming and computers is quite different than most as in I didn't start programming first, I started by taking electronic parts from my toys and repurposing them or using them in different things, we had a computer I used to play games with but at age 7 my father died and my mother needed money so she sold it, the next laptop I got was at age 11 and then I started coding.

i was coming out of my mom and i looked to my right and it was that computer that always beats with her heartbeat and stuff

My first PC was a USSR clone of the IBM XT 5160-086 PC, but with a different design, and beefier RAM. I was shown a game in it (barbarian), and the next evening I really wanted to play again, so I inserted the floppy disk, booted up into DOS and Norton Commander, and was stuck. It's my first ever interaction with a computer. So i typed "computer, please give me barbarian".
I was way ahead of the time you could say :)

I really can't remember, but what I can remember is that we had this little kids computer which had the alphabet on it and whenever you pressed a letter it would get pronounced and that's the story of how I learned the English alphabet before I went to school.

My father showed me MS Paint when I was five years old or so, and I still remember I thought it was incredibly awesome.

I grew up as internet became a thing, so I had a very early exposure to computers. There's actually a video of me crawling onto an old computer which still had a 5.25" floppy drive. By the age of 4 I actually started using it properly, my mum said I once talked about pressing enter in my sleep 😂 I'm glad I was born in
a time (94) to witness technology evolve at such a crazy scale. Kids these days will never know what kind of privilege it was to have a 128MB pendrive 😛

I remember seeing my dad's computer and modem. He never let me touch it, so I made my own pretend laptop and modem out of scrap paper. 😂

Back in 1999, when I was like 4 years old, my grandparents got me one for my birthday because i was quite intelligent for my age apparently, so they thought it might be a good idea. Today i m wondering if it really was a good idea xD

Year: 2006

Dad bought a 2nd hand computer from his office.

Configurations:
OS: Windows 98
RAM: 256MB
HDD: *Forgot*
15" CRT Monitor
Floppy Disk Drive

And the best moment of joy was when my then best friend who had 2 PCs with one of them was the best configured system of that era with wireless mouse and keyboard (wireless was extremely costly and rare then), comes to my house with a PC Game (WWE some year) and tells me that this game only works in 98.
Also, one of the most Proud moment I ever felt for my computer.

Do arcade games (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Berserk) count? I got my allowance in quarters.

Atari 2600? Ti/99 with a tape drive to play a game at my friend's house?

Having to buy a 5.25" floppy in the HS bookstore for typing class on the TRaSh-80s and finding a way to put a break in the program and save it to disk so I got top score on assignments?

Tron. That's what really did it for me. To this day, I like to imagine there is a vast world inside the computer.

After a BASIC programming class in HS, I got an Apple IIGS and started writing my own load menus for these little games I'd find around FIDO and newsgroups. Instead of "PR#6, brun gumball" a nice styled menu would show where you could press the number of the game you wanted to play.

I bought a book on Apple assembler and promptly got disillusioned with full blown programming (in 1988), instead sticking to BASIC and, later, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, CSS, and Python.

Who remembers sharing hacked PCP accounts to dial out of state BBSes?

Applied Engineering customers and 300 baud chatroom lurkers represent.

User #243, God's Country chat

My cousin showed me this. My life was never the same

I was 7 and the night before Christmas my grandparents asked my mother if she could give me a computer for Christmas, my mom said no. I woke up Christmas morning to a computer sitting on my dining table :p. My mom was pissed

My dad was an IT and as a kid when our NES broke and I couldn't play Mario he showed me F-22 lightning (an aerial combat game) and I thought the missiles were fireworks. I always called it the airplanes and fireworks game. Good memories.

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

Windows 3.1, MS-DOS and Paint.

When I was 6 years old, my dad brought home a computer. It had windows 95 and he gave me 3 floppy disks to work with and here we are now.

Took up computer course, never used nor seen a computer in my life. Was good at written tests, now first time to use the lab and first time seeing a PC

Prof: Today you're going to create your own bootable micro floppy disk. Afterwards you're going to load it with SideKick and PC Tools. Turn on the PC in front of you and insert your double density disks as soon as you see the C: prompt
Me: my disk won't go all the way in
Classmate: just push it in until you hear a click then it will lock
Me: still won't *pushes really hard until I heard a crack... my disk was inserted the wrong way... it did lock though*
Everyone in class looks at me and I start questioning my life choices. I could've sworn our Prof's face turned white

It was back in 1996, when dad taught me how to run games from DOS it was a mind-blowing thing and for me a black screen and white text was a "wtf it's too hard" thing. Then he showed me how to format and I felt like he was doing rocket science 😂

First thing I did on my first computer is to play Need For Speed Hot Pursuit. I really like NFS series since 1998, but I don't have productive PC to play the new NFS games now.

The first PC I was exposured too. At the begining I was just playing games, but then I learned about BASIC and was intrigued enough to start typing the sample source codes which was listed in popular sience magazines.But when I run a simple pong game which was written as 2 player game and decided to make my first AI to play against me which at my first attempt got so perfect that I got not chance to win and then slowed it's reactions so I can actually enjoy playing against it and win some times... well that's the moment I got really hooked.

My grandad visited and he and my dad built a computer. 100MHz, 133 if you pushed the turbo button, 4x cd rom drive, Windows 3.1. My brother and I fought over it nearly every day.

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

My first real exposure to a PC was when my father and me built one for myself. Y'know, some AMD Athlon 64, some MSI board, 2 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA 8600 GT, everything was nice.

I never put malware on that thing even though I heavily used it for things like games, I was really cautious with that even when I was like 6 years old (but my father once accidentally did, he killed it by damaging the filesystem on the harddrive which, funny enough, only took the malware with it)
I still have that PC, but it now has weird issues with memory management ;-;

TL;DR My parents should have known that I was made for computers
Note: I am pretty young. Most of you were probably at least as old as I am now when it happened.
My parents told me about the first time I used a PC. They left me and my older siblings home alone with a movie on and returned later than they wanted to. We were still watching the movie, and when they asked how that was possible we told them that I restarted the DVD twice. I had never touched a computer before.

The first thing I actually remember is me playing Age of Empires II on a PC our family got for free somewhere. Although AoE3 was already out by that time, it ran slow af, but it was the most fun I had in my life up to that point. I was and still am pretty bad in both AoE3 and AoE2, but that was the first step into my preference for RTS games.

Me and my mom played an online farming game together when I was about...4? We still were running Windows XP.

First exposure to computer?

Back in 2005, I think. Windows PC, I think. The rest is very blur.

All I can remember is it was white and monitor was big like a television. First ever computer of our family. No internet. No game except solatire and craps. Mainly just used it for porn-purpose. Did some programming assignments. Did some poems writing and then printed them out with all-in-1 printer and tried to sell the booklet to girls in public. (Obviously sold zero).

Duke Nukem

After Kosovo - Serbian war (1999) ended, we did end up with absolutely nothing and a German KFOR soldier surprised me with an old Windows machine, and that day I got hooked.

When the company my mother worked for was arranging computer courses and could not leave the computers in the borrowed classrooms.

They brought them home and I got to play with them :)

Sinclair ZX80 with 512 bytes of RAM (no hard drive, diskette or CD).

This was 38 years ago ;)

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

I wish I could tell my story of my first exposure to computers, but I was too young to remember

First exposure...
When I was a kid, my parents would put on Tom & Jerry and other cartoons on an old family computer (you know - yellowed plastic, big, bulky tower, and an even bigger CRT monitor) for me to watch (Windows 95 didn't cut it, so they booted up Geexbox from CD)... Sometimes the playback would stop / the volume would be too quite - so I had to figure out how to control it by myself, without the help of my parents... Slowly, I was able to boot up Windows, and use my father's CD collection of All-In-One CDs (utilities and games). Later we were able to afford connecting to the internet through our phone landline - it was all downhill since then. Nowadays I'm helping my dad when it comes to computers (he's currently learning how to use Excel properly). :-)

!rant

I was 4 years old and it was 1998. A shiny new computer, with plastic covers so it would not get dusty.

It came with Windows 95 and I damaged that installation of Windows after installing a game made for an incompatible version of the C++ runtime. Good times.

I took a computer apart despite my mom and dad telling me no and that I'd electrocute myself. After I took it apart cleaned it up and put it back together, it was at this point I knew I had the control over these things.

Not sure if it's my first encounter, but definitely the most memorable, when I was young we had a windows xp pc (quite new at the time) and we had a program called Nero burn (used to burn images to cd's)

The pictogram of neo burn was a pc on fire, and so I thought for the duration of my xp time that that program would blow up the pc if I ever started it...

My first exposure to computer was at age of 6years.
My father had a very bulky laptop built by HP (I Do not remember any name of it).
It used to have sliding switch to open ,I used to put my whole power into open it.
It was running windows 98.

All I knew that time is
Start -> All program -> Accessories -> Games -> 3D Pinball !!

Then ,my father saw I was quite liking the games ,and he dual booted with fedora. I remember there was game tab with lots of flash games in fedora.
Like Tetris, games similar to candy crush, snake etc

BTW I got to know it was dual boot many years later.
I remember fedora because of that "f" logo.
I still remembered that After dual booting to Fedora, I was unable to start windows to play pinball (due to the boot option u get), I used to complain my mom that pinball opens if father starts the laptop, it doesn't open when I start!
I feel stupid now ,for that😄

My first experience with computers was when I was in school when i was in third grade we had a computer lab and we had to take our shoes off to "prevent virus" that's what we were told anyway...
There were 10 computers and 50 of us so the one who could run to the lab first would get the computer where we learnt something called as logo and while the teacher wasn't looking we would play a game called Dave. man this shit takes me back

When it was "bring your children" day at my mums work she took me to London, I used to draw houses with paint on her work PC and sending them via fax to my grandma miles away. It was pretty magical to me.

My first experience was in 1998. My grandfather had a computers and even tho he was hesitant to let me use them my mom convinced him saying that I may eventually turn into an engineer like him. I used them mostly for paint and a couple of space shooter games he later got for me. It was great. They always had computers, they even had a c64 at one point and i remember playing with that one as well.
My first computer tho, it was in 2010 while I was in the Army. Still have that lil hp in my office although it does not work anymore.
Nothing speciall really. I've had computers all my life and a mother that was passionate about them. I owe everything I am to my mom. I think that it is because of her that I became a computer scientist.

My father had a PC with Win3.11 where young me was allowed to play solitaire and an educational programs for kids, later on, followed Win98. I was fascinated with this big grey boxes which could do so many things, especially connect you to the Internet where you could find knowledge about EVERYTHING. (Someone remember the "Blinde Kuh" search engine?)

I remember my father connecting the modem with a long cable all the way through several rooms to the TAE-outlet and the weird sounds the device made.

I often heard "Get away from the PC or your eyes will become rectangular!" when I was sitting there for hours over hours reading and playing.

When I was ten, I got my first own computer, a trusty 486er (386 with logical coprocessor! 8MB RAM if I remember correctly. Weeee! :D) which was my uncle's old PC with Win95.
I started writing on the PC and got into several online communities ... it went downhill from there. :D

The only notable memory is when I downloaded my first trojan 😅😅😅😅

School computer lab with programs in BASIC and those big ass floppy disks.

Dad's coworker (he was a software engineer, I guess it runs in the family) was selling his pentium 2 computer for 100$ and my dad bought it for me to play chicken invaders. Those were simpler times...

I was at a car boot sale (mix between a flea market and yard sale for the Americans out there) the stall next to me was selling a PC tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse for £10. So all day I was trying to sell my old toys (I was 9 at the time) but only made £5.

At the end of the day I went to the stall and asked if he would take £5 for it, he then game me it for free as he saw me trying to sell my toys all day.

I was about 8. A family member was like a secretary, but not exactly. There are was a term used, but I can't remember. It's not really that important.

Anyways, I was like 8. Their job consisted of backing data up on.... Floppy disks. The software they used to back this data up just used a console and you had to input commands. Well this was amazing to me at the time. So they taught me the order of the commands and let me do it. Was the most fascinating thing to me. And it definitely planted the seed of interest in computers.

Some other early experiences also involve me hanging around the IT guy that worked with my relative. He taught me a little bit, such as some keyboard short cuts.

Year 2000. I was 6.
One day my parents bought an assembled PC with Windows 95.
That day changed my life, a new passion has born.
I had internet for the first time only 6 years later, in 2006.

Until today I've also had Windows 98, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and now 10.

2007. I was four. We had a dell pc as the family computer. My dad and mom borh had laptops for themselves and their work. It ran windows xp I think and I used it to cartoonnetwork.com and play games on it. We still have the PC so that is cool. The first time I programmed though was 5 years later on my dad's laptop when he started teaching me c#.

I was small and there was a computer at the counter of my dad's hotel. I think i was 4? 5? And somehow i managed to download the original doom and then spent the majority of my time playing that.

I don't know exactly what year my dad bought the PC with a hard drive of 4GB, but it was not in the year 2000 and following. I'm not sure if it was running win98 or win95. Probably win95. Aaah those were golden times.
I remember having no internet, but still having fun drawing images on ms paint.
Oh and there was a game named sesame street for that os. Sometimes I miss those times.

Sokoban on DOS.

Does spectrum count?!🤔
Jumping jack, loads of tapes & other silly games, my radio & kidnapped tv in the living room 😍😍 yay!

We had a zx spectrum with a rubber keyboard.

Later we switched to the c64 and we wrecked a shitload of controllers 🤪

I was probably about 5 when I got this. It took 8 AA batteries and all I knew was how to get it to do tic tac toe. All other games confused me but I loved it. I wanted more.

Pressing F2 and poking around with BIOS settings in Windows XP

All the cool kids in the neighborhood owning a Commodore 64. I was about 7-8 I think. Piracy was big back then, the kids swapped those large floppies and tapes containing hundreds of games through the mail. And all those cool hacktros, trainers, intros and whatnot got me interested in computer graphics and programming.

Entering the computer lab for the first time in my life when I was in class 3. Each computer was assigned to 3 children (I know). We saw and played perhaps the most awesome game ever made;

Will never forget those 30 minutes of my life. (although I lost all my lives on the very first level)

My dad in 2002 to 7 year old me: "I got you your own domain, this is how you upload files to it. Good luck!"

But the first experience was him recording some of my first sentences. I love my dad <3

My first exposure was a Windows 98 computer around 2002 (i was ten at the time). I got to play classics like Prince of Persia, Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbbit, Duke Nukem, Doom + other sharewares. My favorites was the point and clicks like King's Quest, LucasFilms stuff and The Longest Journey.

Edit: I'll add Willy Beamish as another favorite

First exposure, nice question!

I've been told an Amstrad was my first computer (showing my age..), apparently taught me to read and write.

The Commodore64 was the machine I first fell in love with. I was just as interested in learning BASIC as I was with the games. Tried to use the books which showed page after page to write in the code but that took me so long, TL;DR...

Through the years, my parents did what they can to nurture this passion. Was blown away when I got the 486, even more so with the 686!

mIRC scripting followed, that had an amazing community, made a series of add-ons and chat bots.

Then got in to VB6 quite heavily and made a range of programs.

Had a friend who needed a web project done, so I recommended PHP based, and to help him out, I smashed as much learning in to it and pulled it off in a week, whatever the language, I've loved sinking my teeth in to it!

I remember that my granddad and I built a computer with old crappy hardware that we disassembled from other computers.
I mostly used it for playing games like Age of Empires or Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I really don't remember a lot about but I remember I also had internet. Never got any Malware tho haha.

Then sometime my friend came over and he showed me a website named "Scratch". We made a lot of crappy games and a cat that farts when you press a button.

So yeah I instantly fell in love and did a lot of "Scratch"-ing with my brother.

That's was the time I found my love for programming.

I think about 2 years later I got a MacBook (the old from my father) and finally started with real programming!

Now, after 6 years I have an awesome little ZenBook and am programming everyday.
Love it!

Tecnically not my very first experience, but in primary school I had to solve a math problem for my homework and an error in the book made it so that you couldn't solve it by hand (I think the solution was in the order of magnitude of 10^20). My calculator wasn't of much help either so I asked my dad to help me use basic to solve the problem. The next day I came in with a 2 page print out: 6 lines of code and the rest was the solution. The teacher didn't understand what it was.

Asking my mum to answer the child safety questions to Leisure Suit Larry.
"Here you go. Oh that looks fun.."
"Can you go now?"
-- I was 6.

My first exposure to computers?

My father had bought this new machine (windows 98 "new" of course) and we put it in a very moist place (some kind of halfway balcony) in our old flat.

...which was pretty stupid.
One day it made a loud nois, started smoking and stopped responding.

I loved the animated paperclip though!

My first exposure to computers was the TRS-80 (a.k.a. TRASH-80) my mom (the city Library Director) bought for library patrons to use. It’s data store was on a cassette tape and programs came on cartridges, IIRC.

Around the same time I was learning to do Logo and BASIC on an Apple IIe in 5th grade.

My cousin’s Commodore 64 came next and my grandma saw how my interest in computers was blooming, so she suggested I use the savings I had built up from birthday money and mowing lawns to buy an IBM PC/AT 8088 clone. $1,300 later and lots of time in my basement figuring out how to build it all from separately-shipped components, I was on my way to learning Assembler, BASIC, and DOS.

Father bought a computer for the family in 2011. A HCl Dual Core Pentium 4 machine with 21" TFT screen. I was allowed to use it only under someone's presence for at-most 20 minutes each day for the next 6-9 months.

After that we got a network card (plug-and-play internet dongle) for the internet services. That's when I entered the world of internet and made a Facebook account. I was 12 then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

After two years or so, we're playing games on it, watching movies and using MS Word for school related stuff. Then my brother entered college, and used it for stuff like coding and image processing on Matlab, while I watched him doing so and getting yelled at for doing what I liked to do, at the same time.

After 5 years or so, I got a personal laptop with decent configuration for college work. The old computer still worked like charm.

Now, the old monk is at rest with old memories, unknown files and lot of bollywood songs.

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

So my first computer... My dad got a Laptop somewhere around 96-97 for work as he had to travel a lot abroad. He also used to take work home and work there in the evening or on weekends. I kindof asked if I could play with it and he just opened defragmenting and I loved the animation. At least I think it had some animation. I know another computer I got later had it. However like the second or third time he left me alone with it, I decided to find something else and somehow managed to instead of defragment the hd, format it. Or atleast delete like a few folders on it. However that game was "lame", so I went out to play with a friend, as the computer wouldn't respond after some time. I've never seen him as angry as when I got home.
Long story short, me and my brother soon got our own computer, like a really " old" one the company where my aunt worked sold. It didn't had a cd rom drive, just a 3.5 and a bigger drive. My dad later took the big tape out and replaced it with a cd rom drive. It ran win95 I think. And we later upgraded it to 98

I remember when my sister borrowed the original Sims from one of her classmates. She would play and i would watch. One time she recreated our entire family as well as our home. Everything was fine and dandy until she tried cooking something. The kitchen burst into flames and burned the whole family alive so me, being 5 or so, literally cried for the rest of the day and never dared to play the game again. The end.

14 years of age, couldnt go with to the beach with my sister the weekend (all older friends and they wanted to have fun) spent the weekend:

1. Waking up
2. Cleaning yard and garage
3. Finding old pc of my fathers
4. Him telling me he will tell me how to install windows 95 (we were not that up to speed with the latests trends at the time)
5. Running in and out installing and asking for commands on how to install things and run things

Fast faward a few years, im now a web developer working from home (recently retrenched) and my sister asking me to get a job where i work.

My childhood basically. Saved up all my money to buy Pokémon games. I had one that was red tho. The amount of hours I spent on this thing... If not thousands of hours... Tens of thousands...

Then moved to Minecraft, and that's how I got coding 😇 (batch but still)

It started with 30min max per week on spieleaffe (child game site) on our oldish slow HP windows vista machine.

We also had an even older pc at elementary school.

A year or two later I got that family Pc when we got a new laptop for our family.

The following years I had two laptop generations.

In my grade 3 first exposed to computer and uses MS Paint in Windows 95

Really missing that 😭

My first exposure to computers was when i was 7 in 98. Hp Palvillion with windows 98. Got it from walmart and it cost around $1100. Brought it home and i hooked it up on my own on the living room floor. First program installed was "who wants to be a millionare", fitting that a game be the first thing installed since it was for homework. I lived 16 miles from town at the time so i really had no friends and the isolation made it hard for me to adjust in school to the point that i was a loud kid seeking attention. Then we got dialup and i found invisionfree forums which my first programing experiance with javascript started. And no I'm not talking about jquery I'm talking about the real thing.

Fast foward a year. I find an opensource arcade and learn php while writting an arcade from scratch that uses curl to mitm login to verify the user. Later that month i create a small project that dynamicly creates a signature image for the top 1000 posters on a coding forum i liked.

Then all hell broke loose when i found osdev.org, thought i was going to be a badass and make the ultimate operating system that would combine linux, windows, and mac where it could run anything. Reality Check hit me like a semi and train hitting at full force trying that and made me look into hacking. Spent alittle while breaking windows in so many ways and talking to others on irc until i was about to turn 18. Switched to ubuntu 12.04 my senior year while that was occuring.

I was 4 when I was allowed at school to be on the single computer in reception. It came to break time the teachers just left me on it.

I think that’s because when my brother was kicked off 2 years prior (similar situation) he kicked up the biggest fuss possible so when it came to my first time they just went “nope not touching that”

And then a programmer was born

Not exactly a story since I was too young to remember, but my parents told me that I was really enjoyed playing with the games my father made for the good old commodore 64 we had.

He basically had two 5" floppy holders full of his own games and programs he used to make. Unfortunately we only have the disks now. :(

The first memory of me using the computer though, is when my father bought a computer for his office (was win 95 with the "you are now safe to switch off your computer" message) and I was sneaking in to play with paint because it was so cool back then.

I think the linux live CDs with games on it, that my dad had compiled for me, were one of my first exposures to computers.

I remember how if you passed some specific argument, it would talk to you in a pretty sci-fi female voice too.

When I was maybe 3 years old my dad built a PC with a server case, it was huge! The processor was probably something like 386/486 - not sure. I used to play DOS games on it all day long. And the best part is that we still have the PC and surprisingly it still runs!

(Meanwhile I am cloning my secondary 1TB HDD to a 6TB one)

Mac Plus and booting from a floppy disk. What a sound that was!

I was 4 I think. Managed to reconfigure the IP and DNS settings and got the internet working again (it was a dial-up, in 2002). My entire family thought I was a prodigy of sorts (I am not).

Now all I do is restart the wifi if it's not working.

Hmm... My first experience with computers was in 1991 or so, when my then best friend had C64. And I was 7. My first PC arrived in 1993. Prince of Persia is the first game I remember from that time. I started programming in 1995 or '96, writing useless things in Pascal. Using PHP since 2000. Still that’s my main programming language. And sadly, my kids have different hobbies than me, so they aren’t even trying to program.

I remember the sound of modem connecting thru phone line to some BBS systems and later to the first public and free internet service in Poland. I remember simple, really „computer-like” voice of my dad’s speech synthesizer (he’s blind person). I remember, when our time to „play on PC” was limited to max 1hr a day... What will our kids remember?

My parents gave me a old laptop and I would play games like Adibou (Good times)

And my first exposure to Linux (or GNU/Linux, call it how you want), was my father’s ubuntu server (with gui) and I found it ugly

The first Computer experience i can think of is when i was ~4 years old i used to draw things on paint I could print them as well, i think the computer was running windows 98 or 2000.
A few years later i remember my uncle showed me a irc server for pirated software, the client was a CLI so it looked all hacky but i had no idea what was irc,i thought it was just a search engine like google but for piracy stuff.

Dad's office when I was 7 years old. Saw his employees use MS Office. Saw an unused computer.

Monkey see, monkey do.

It was when i was 4th grade. We had windows 95 computers in school. I used tk do assignments on them and submitted with a floppy disk. Yeah, copy paste started there...

When I was in 2nd grade in my school and it was a mandatory course for all the students.
I'm glad it was mandatory.

The green text BBC Micros at my first school, circa 1992.

I was pretty good at Snake.

My first memories of the very first computer i got?

Not sure exactly when that was but all the first memories are of me playing games:

Some paper plane game on the really old macs (giant screens i think it was highlighter orange)

My auntie also had a computer when i was little i'd visit her for the holidays and j played some kid game about dogs.

When we got our first computer i remember some 2d metroid like game but it was where you play as some lady with a whip.

Also duke nukem 1, one of the games me and my dad played together.

Then later on we got a win98 computer i played age of empires and solitaire!

(i used to ride around on my bike with a sword pretending i was a cataphract LOL, i was never very good at RTS games when i was little so i'd build things and not have room for units to move, i kept building houses thinking you need a lot lol, me and the AI were at a stalemate, most because the buildings were in the way)

I remember my teacher giving me tips about age of empires when i was in primary, one of my favourite teachers too.

Good times

My dad bought a computer when i was 6 or 7. Trying to launch games via ms-dos.

But we also had the “minitel” a french thing that connected you to a network. I played games on that too.

My first computer experience was when I was like 4 or 5 I didn't really understand it yet. My first programming experience was when I was 8. I really wanted to make my own website login system so I copied some PHP code and tried to open it😂. Ofcourse it didn't work.

My first exposure to computers was at my dad's factory when I was only a few years old. I remember figuring out how to turn on the computer, open Paint and make a masterpiece.

Over the next couple of years my Paint masterpieces only improved, while I also learned how to connect to the internet and explore other interesting things.

Fast forward 20 ish years and I've graduated with a double bachelors degree and pursuing a career in software engineering.

Woo computers!

Would visit my auntie to play RoadRash when I was 6.

The computer would always get hot after half an hour; if only I could last that long...

Mine was at my school when I was 13 or 15. I didn't have a computer at home because my parents could not offered a one. Back then I didn't know any thing about computers but always knew that I wanted to do something related to computers.

So, when I went to the computer lab in my school I was so dumb, I couldn't even click on a button using the mouse. We were partnered up two students per computer and me try so hard use a computer and my partner take over and show off his talent how he can use a computer.

I was sad and devastated even though I love computer I couldn't use a computer but my willingness to learn about computers science never faded a away!

Few years fast forward; I'm a web developer and I'm happy with what I do. The fellow student who showed off still contact me for his trouble shootings regarding computers.

Never give up on you dreams

My first experience with a computer was in the eighties, with a commodore 64. I was more or less 8. I remember nothing about the basic language 😑 remember only peek and poke (?)

Not the first I used a computer, but I remember playing this game called Dave. Oh god, brings back memories. My parents used to tell me it's virus. 😂

I remember when I was child spent a los of time playing Mario. I think I started to code cause my love to videogames.

It was some Toshiba laptop with Windows XP (back then fairly new) when I was 4. Playing Internarional Rally Championship.

It was one cold winter night, lonely and sad, until my mom's coworker brought to our house an old computer from their company.

It was like heaven come down to earth, when he assembly all parts together.

I was filled with joy and excitement, until I saw Windows start screen.

Worst day of my life. Linux for life!

My dad's commodore 64 was my first exposure to computers and I have loved them since.

The first time I got in contact with computers I apperantely sorted all of the Desktop Icons by color, since I couldn't read at the time.
The first thing I actually remember is playing this game: "Knightmare". Loved it 😍

Pretty boring story really. I was very young and don't remember any details, but one day my father let me use his pc. The only thing I really remember is playing some games and using Paint. (Feels a bit uneccessary to add, but I naturally clicked on everything and tried to understand how everything works.)

My dad used to make me draw things on Microsoft Paint when I was 4 to 6.

I'll never forget all those "firefighter helicopters"

The first computer I used as a youngster was an iMac G3. We made flow charts and it was magical. I used any excuse possible to get on the computer and make a flow chart.

I had a relative that used to come to our house to study because her home was kinda far and also because we had a computer .
She was studying computer science at the time and I was only 13-14 years old. One day she came with 3 CDs of red hat. I asked her about it and she told me it's something like windows. My reaction was wow it must be something huge because I knew at the windows XP was only the size of one CD .
My relation with computers was only to play games and some music that's why I couldn't hold myself not to install it. I fucked my computer endless times, It was like playing puzzles let's try this option and then switch to another... It took me like 4 days to install and I was really impressed with it you know seeing the terminal and stuff. Weeks later I switched back to Windows because I couldn't install my games and play mp3 files (require to install some libraries and I had no internet).
Fast forward 8 years later and I was studying linux system for CS degree and guess what? I was the major in class because I knew about many stuff like partition systems (ext2, swap..) and how to install linux on a computer...
This was my feeling 😎 at class.

When I was in 5th grade, my school had bought few computers (I don't remember on which OS they were running back in 1999) and they'd installed Logo on it.

For those who are not familiar with Logo, it was a programming language for educational purpose. The main highlight of this programming language was, it had a graphical on-screen cursor called "Turtle". Users had to type in commands to make this cursor move on the screen. Like "Right 90" would turn the cursor by 90 degrees.

This was my first official exposure to a computer.

Super Mario

So... My brother got his computer when I was 6 years old... It was a 286 with the new 64mb HD and the screen had 16 gray scale color...
Latter it was given to me when my brother got his 486dx2 and I did a course in ms-dos and batch scripting.
That's it, lots of sfigher, puzzle bubble, Dina blast, wolfeinstein 3D...

When I accompanied my Dad to buy a laptop. I listened to the conversation between him and the dealer an I was like "will I ever understand anything to do with pc specifications".

probably that blinky display in the room I was born in.

At first, I didn't understand computers or internet or why is that dial up modem making noise. And then one day, I was playing with my dad's PC with games he bought and interactive CD quizzes for my studies. Something about teaching me about a Bill named Bill who sat on the steps to some court house singing how a bill becomes legal or something.

Then a few months after that I discovered internet and then a friend of mine introduced torrents, neopets and anime. Heck yeah!

I was at school. Should be around 7 years old. They bought some new computers: XTs with green monitors.

I saw it as asked: how can I use one of there? They answered it was just to mid school to students, so I asked to have some typewriter classes.

A few years after, when I was finishing the typewriter classes, I used a IBM 286 for the first time at a friend's house. I've been using and studying it since that day. I just loved to use MS-DOS and the 5" disks.

I had my first config with a 286 CPU (dos only) machine when i was like 6.

My father brought the stuff in around midnight... i supposed to be sleeping already then...but it was my first fucking pc! Got so excited that
i was played the shit about a game called JBird like no tomorrow.

Had to upgrade it to a 486 dlc when win 3.1 released and some text editor's response time was over 10sec (for a letter or character to display on the screen from the point you pressed the button). Also it was needed to place a piece of paper between the two ram slots so it can recognize both ones. Seems funny with nowaday's hw and stuff.

The year is 1999/2000 and my parents bought my brother a PC. Pentium processor, 128MB of RAM and a Sony Trinitron monitor. Sweet machine. Used to play Delta force, Heroes on it. My brother played Civ 2/3, Heroes 3 etc. Lovely times, no worries, no stress, the only pain was the champagne.

Playing "de boerderij van Piet Precies" on an old windows 98 machine of my parents. It's a game for little children about this farmer, "piet precies", who is quite a perfectionist and has everyting on his farm go in orderly fashion, but one day his animals start to "revolt" or something, and make a big mess (a cow in his bedroom for example).

Yup, late 90's kid ☺

Some professors at my university just come to the class and read out the pdf/slides.

Now I know how came the idea of Audio Books and Text-to-speech PDF readers !!!

The OG Xbox!

I was 7 years old and my father bought our first PC, something like a 286, 386 or possibly even a 486, don't remember... Anyway, the guy that was setting it up was a programmer and I watched him first set it up and then I watched him program something into the wee hours on our new PC, I've no idea what he was doing, but I watched him for hours, was dazzled by it as much as by the games he installed :)

I played around on the school computers, creating "viruses" and stuff to log my friends off their computers, or open command prompt infinitely 😂 I also tried to make a Jeopardy game with batch for a project. Let's just say I should have used PowerPoint

There's this ceremony in my family performed after a few months of our birth where we are "taught" the basic alphabet to be symbolic of our commitment to learning and education and there's this part where we use a random book as part of the ceremony. My grandfather asked my uncle to get a random book, and turns out the book that he got for me was 'Unix System Programming'. 😂😂

Probably Dangerous Dave.
I used to play and draw shit on ms paint before I got into programming.

Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.

At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!

Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).

The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)

Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.

Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.

Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!

I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95.

I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.

I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).

I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.

As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.

These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.

When I was 2 years old my grandfather sat me down in front of his desktop and he taught me to play games load software and go on the internet. I remember playing this Atari emulator a lot and a lot of other children games I loved at the time.

Playing on the Atari 800xl and playing Prince of Persia at home on my win98 computer

Resident evil 2 I think on my dad's computer, I was like 6-7
😁

Back in 2004-2005 when I was 2-3 years old, (I guess that, from this statement, the fact that I'm 15 rn can be inferred), I would sit on my dad's dinosaur computer. I don't remember brands and stuff, just Windows XP, Dial-up internet and the heap of CD-ROMs I had my parents buy me. They had all kinds of games, software, etc. It was a time when sharing that kind of stuff over the internet was, to say the least, impractical. It kind of makes me feel older than I am, looking at the cases full of those CDs, remnants of a past era. But what I consider my first actual exposure was in 2007, when I got my first laptop (netbook) and started diving in, exploring. It was the computer through which I learnt programming (My first lang was cpp), and the one that got me interested to dive deeper into the matter.

In year 2000, I was 10, Tunisian government had made it possible for middle class families to get cheap computers and pay later. So my dad brought one home.
I played with it then I got more interested in what was inside.
Think of it as a 10 years old with no prior experience playing puzzle with computer parts.
It can't end well.
But the thrill I felt while doing it definitely had something to do with my career.
Hint: I don't do hardware :v

I used my first computer at school when I was 12, a few years later, got a 486dx, then a pentium 3 and then a dual core and then a core 2 duo and then an i5k series computer in succession.
Learnt to code and build my first product on them. Game and watch movies.
Good times.

My first exposure to computers was in 4th grade (18 years ago!) when we started having "computer classes". Most lectures they would simply ask us to sit and play games on the computers. My favorite was a game called Dangerous Dave, because I had played nothing better till that point :D

Tux paint on MS windows vista

Playing Aladdin and Tarzan games on Windows 98

Modem dail out. Multiple failure attempts. The sound of it beep---beep---beep still rings in my ears.

My father had always been a computer enthusiast: in the 80s he was the first student in his faculty to write his diploma thesis on a computer (in social sciences, so not quite a scientist dominated area). When I was 3 or 4, he bought a Macintosh (I think it was the Classic or Classic II) and the rest is history. I learned to type and more in general to be around computers very young. That computer is still in my parents' basement, I should dig it out. 😍

Even though I am only 19, I got introduced to computers pretty late. We always had an old Win98 machine in our house and when I was 8 my dad introduced me to Command & Conquer on it. And the first contact I had with the internet (which I really didn't care about until then) was when social networks became a thing at school, that was around 2010, when I was 11-12.

Parents got a computer home when I was 7 years old.
Used to Play Serious Sam,Rally Trophy and Freedom Fighters on it. Alaways wondered how these games were made just to follow that Passion and make my own 12 years later :P

Well I used to play games at my Father’s computer, it was an old FPS online game really fun, I played it like everyday when I was 6 yo. Two years later the computer broke and we had to buy a new one, so my father insisted that we buy two computers, one for him to work and one for my own computer and assembled it myself. I thought myself to do it by a book and took me like 2 weeks to figure it out and assemble the whole thing. I love every minute of it.

Jazz Jackrabbits 2!

My first exposure to a computer was about the time I was on second or third grade. I remember of being at a library where my aunt worked and she taught me how to use a computer. It was running windows 95 or 98, I can't really recall which, and I was messing with paint and word mostly. Maybe played some games too?! Those that came with the OS I think 😅

No need 512MB of Ram, I 'll buy it with 256MB ! 8 months later installed 2nd slot of 256MB in 2000. 8 months of suffering!

As far as is can remember, we always had a family PC on which I started later on playing some games (win 98 later xp which finally died last year).
The first PC I got for myself was an old win 95 from my neighbour which he got me for my 9th birthday. At that point I started experimenting all kinds of things, first games and later I started to modify things to see what it would do 😅

I first started off with a pentium 3 machine in 2004, started gaming on warcraft 3 and maplestory and eventually got addicted to it because nothing else was interesting in my life. Okay extending this story, i eventually got banned, dad smashed 1000 bucks of his money by kicking and throwing it. Years later (i think it was 2011), i got hold of my first Android device. This time round, things were different and I spent 6 months with it problem free and then it started lagging. Google search led me to XDA, started modding the device, eventually startedgetting interested about how people do it and voila, C prog, write some management drivers for malloc and etc. Eventually i dropped kernel development 3 years later and now im in .NET Core.

My family bought a Windows XP pc when i was around 12. The first thing i did was play a game called F22 Raptor. While playing I pressed some keys due to which the screen rotated 180 degrees. No one knew how to fix it. I wasn't allowed to use the computer after that.

When I was about 10 years old, my maths teacher at school brought his Sinclair ZX80 into the classroom at the end of the Summer term to show his pupils. He'd written a couple of Math quiz programs that he showed us, and for 99% of the students that was enough - it was nice curiosity and diversion and the end of the school year. I however was fascinated by this little white lump of plastic.

When I came back to school after the summer holiday, everything had changed in that classroom.

Around the edge of room were about eight brand spanking new ZX81s with 16k RAM packs. They were all connected to a single tape deck in the corner of the room, into which our teacher could insert a cassette with the latest Maths program he'd written. All the pupils would be instructed to type LOAD "" and he'd press play on the tape deck - early networking!

From there I got my own first machine (a 16k ZX Spectrum) but I've never forgotten that initial contact.

I remember playing games like wolfenstein3D, supaplex, sokoban etc. on our family computer 486 which had as I remember around 100mhz processor. (120mhz in TURBO mode)
Yeah and I did created a few levels in wolfenstein, there was a simple editor.

From programming view I did code my first website only using html and inline css in early 2000s. However internet was a thing of a rich people back then (in my country), so my brother downloaded the whole website with docs and basics of html/css/js for me in collage. My first website was coded on 300mhz pentium2 (or 3?) with no internet connection, took me about a two months to complete and was total mess. But was graphically satisfying with nice gifs which took tens od seconds to download. Main container had 600px width and looked pretty good on my 800x600 resolution.
I still remember messing with BOM signature because of notepad could not save a file without BOM. Leaving all utf8 chars as mess after saving.

Good old times.

Dad brought home a i386 based desktop with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 back in 1993.

Learned how to use basic command line to run video games like Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, Kilo Blaster, Wolfenstein, Doom, Raptor. All the classics. Good times.

I think we still have the computer somewhere.

My first exposure to computers was when I was a kid.. as I was on a vehicle I saw a computer shop full of this computers.. that got me interested because I like to play games.. specially counter strike.. My father knew the owner so it was easy for me to go there and so I ask if I could go and play some games it was really fun I remember I spent 4 hrs every week.. which led to my parents buying a computer.. for all of us to use..

Well, mine is pretty different.
Year 2006.
I was in class (grade) 5 when I first introduce to computer, it was mostly restricted to windows painting software (I forget The exact name of software). It was fun. At that, computer are not used widely use. In my school, we only do painting, making colorful picture. No internet available!

It was the mid 80s, and Dad had a Spectrum. I played games like Pud Pud and The Secret of Levitation.

Well it was when I was still small. I was like two and we had a windows 2k pc. We have lots of pics me watching stuff on that. When I got a lot older I got a pc onto which we couldn't install windows xp. Then again a few years passed and I got a pc that ran windows xp nicely.

Playing The Secret of Monkey Island on my uncle's computer in 1991. I asked my parents for a computer that year instead of a Super Nintendo... for school of course.

My first exposure to computers was my mom’s Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I used to love playing “Impossible Mission” and “Way Out” on there. Eventually I started programming in Basic on it.

Tandy 1000SX. 1986. I got home from school, and Dad had set it up. He got us a subscription to 321 Contact magazine, so we could learn some programming on it.

I remember playing the space quest games, King's Quest 4, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Carmen Sandiego, and a lot of others. Eventually we got a 10 MB hard drive for it, but for years, we booted its dual 5.25" floppy setup with a DOS 3.2 floppy.

Labs in school where we were taught to write small programs in LOGO and BASIC.

Not a rant, just a story.

We never had a computer, maybe one for a few months, and the only thing I remember about it is playing "brick breaker". My next encounter with a computer was when my dad bought a laptop in 2007, but I didn't use it since I was young and had no idea about it. We still have the laptop (Compaq) but it has some battery issues. Then the next and last until now is my first ever proper computer, my XPS 13. As for interaction with computers, we had computer class in 11th and 12th grade in my school, but they had the crappy old computers with pirated Windows XP running on every machine. (This is 2015-16).

So, I never had a proper interaction with computers in my childhood.

The first computer I ever had interaction with is my XPS 13.

Started with the TRS80 MC-10 and then went to the Commodore 64. I still have the C-64 in a box in my garage.

Going to the Gateway store with my parents to pick up our first PC and pirating a bunch stuff, also pinball!

I love this weekly group rant, it made me think back when my mom started to work in a kindergarten and she used to take me to work when i was 4-7 years old ('94 - '97).

There was this "TV" and all the kids used to smash the buttons on it. It also played sound, but there was always a lot of kids there so I was shy to ask them if I push the buttons too. But I was the teachers son, so I didn't had to sleep in the afternoon, and then I discovered this computer thing I was amazed, it was like nothing I saw before, you push it and it does what you pushed and, *_* this smiley is exactly me back then. It was probably an old commodore with green text on the black screen. It was the moment when I decided to get more information about this wonder.

In elementary school (around '98) we had this computer room and as I was one of the best students back then I was granted access to it. It was a huge success in a post communist country to get money for new computers to teach us kids to use them back then, so only the chosen ones could use them, and I was one of them, one of the best time time of my life, honestly. At this moment I knew for sure, I want one and when I grow up I gonna work with them. I had no idea what you can do with it but every adult is talking about how well paid are the people who use them at work. :D it sounds funny now

In '89 or '99 we visited our family in a town far away. My grandfathers sisters boyfriend had a computer and he said, look I also have internet. This face again *_* what the hell is internet. So he explained me this internet thing which "makes all computers connected, but you have to pay for it and it kinda works like wired phones you know. Here you put the address and you can open the website"
me: website, whoooa *_*
8-9 year old clever me: "but how do you know what are the addresses, do you have a phonebook for these addresses?"
he showed me google, and a slovak and czech search engine, I remember searching for "funny pictures" on the slovak search engine, because I was thinking If I search google, its english so he would pay too much :D

I didn't had a computer until I was 13 years old, but then I started to messing with Microsoft Front Page 2003, was amazed with the html and css generated by it and started to editing it.

Now Im a front end web dev

I was a teenager when my father bought me my first computer desktop, Windows XP times, and days passed on doing whatever on it, both from software and hardware inspection\acknowledgement

In the 90s i was in elementary school, my biggest question was "when you unplug a computer how it knows what time it is when you turn it on again, how its not reset like a digital clock we had", and there it all started....

When I was 7, I got my hands on an Amstrad CPC-464. This was my first exposure to code, copying examples out of the handbook. Shortly after that my school got their first IT suite, with thirty machines running Windows 98. I remember lunchtimes spent playing ZipZaps, a game that shamelessly capitalised on the first Fast and Furious films. I learned how to create macros in Office, and after getting a machine at home with Windows 3.1 I also learned some basic DOS. When I was 12 we got our first XP machine, which I spent hours on with MSN messenger and mucking around with scripts. That machine eventually succumbed to my brother repeatedly powering it on/off, something I still kind of hold against my mother to this day.

After going into care, I bought an old XP laptop from a friend, a machine that I used extensively. I mined my first bitcoin on that machine, bitcoin that could have made me a rich man today if I had only taken backups seriously.

My next machine came with Vista, which was upgraded to 7 shortly afterwards. This is when I got a bit more seriously into code, contributing to a game written in C++ (Armagetron Advanced, if you're interested). I also learned a great deal about automation using this machine, and when I got my second desktop machine at 18 (which at the time was still extremely out of date), I built my first working web server with IIS. I've been through four desktops since then, one of which just about survived a house fire.

Now I run a company of my own, doing development work at a lower cost for social enterprises, and developing a SaaS platform that will eventually make me a living all on its own. This year I hope to finally stop having to worry about debt, income, where I'm getting my next meal from and when I can finally be self sufficient, almost seven years since the care system spit me out after conveniently forgetting to tell me I could have stayed there until after Uni.

I am proud, though, of coming so far with no college or university degree. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd call myself proficient enough in a couple of languages to be capable of making a career of it.

I think i was like 7 or 8 yo. When school vacation started, my mom joined me in this computer centre near her workplace.

I belive it was a Windows 95 system powered probably by Pentium 2 and i remember playing Aladdin, mario and a fun racing car game.

I remember i liked a lady teacher there and being scared of the male teacher from whom I learned about basic computer peripheral terms like CPU, floppy disc drive etc.

It was when i was 5, and my father put me on his leg to play Rayman. It is always my prefered game and whenever i run it i think to my father. Lovely day 😊

1) Reader Rabbit on an Apple IIGS in the late 80s. I might've been in Kindergarten. Found the boxes stored in an unreachable storage area at my dad's house recently. Knowing how he took care of things, it probably still works. He won't let me touch it.

2) Fast forward to early middle school, Ultima VII on an NEC desktop, 90s. That game was great but also a pain in the ass. Had to make a startup floppy disk to help with memory allocation and something else. Learned DOS things. For some reason the disk wouldn't work from one day to the next so would have to reconfigure it frequently. Also learned the hard way not to fork too much with autoexec.bat during this period.

I remember tiny me just sitting in front of the computer barely reaching to the mouse clicking all the icons on the desktop of my dad's Win 98, seeing what comes up until i found something cool to play with like a game or MS Paint. I guess I picked up the «play around with stuff until it works» strategy pretty early.

I was in the first grade and my dad worked at the government as a budget officer. We didn't have a computer at that time, though. So, my Dad let me use his PC at his office. My first interaction with computers, started with just one program, Microsoft Word, which Dad used most of his documents.

What I did to immerse myself with computers for the first time as a first-grader was by typing my name in Times New Roman and printed it with my dad's printer. I was very impressed of how a computer can do at that time.

And that sole program was my starting point of my fascination with computers and how it motivated me to learn more about computers.

The ski game on windows 95/98 (i cant remember).

Playing lego.com games on my family's PowerBook G4, if my memory serves me correctly. I started programming with a Lego robotics kit.

DOS and Wordstar, I was one of the few kids who submitted assignments on printouts from a dot matrix printer while everyone else was using typewriters. But what really got me hooked on computers? SimEarth and SimCity.

Was like 6 when my parents bought their first computer. I don't really remember much of it besides countless hours of playing Need for Speed Hot. That and Diddy Kong Racing on my Nintendo 64. How I miss those times.

P.S: reposted it because I forgot the wk tag and the 30 min edit had already passed .