Ask HN: How old were you when you got your first computer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=601191

by AlleyRow • 17 years ago

17 56 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was 9. It ran windows95, and I waited a gazillion years for every web page to load just to have my connection broken every time someone answered the phone.

mcav• 17 years ago

Our family had a DOS PC when I was very young, but the one I remember was an old Compaq running Windows 3.1 and TabWorks.

digispaghetti• 17 years ago

I think I was about 7 or 8 and I got a 48k ZX Spectrum. Was my first experience of coding - oh how I miss the old tape loading noise.

makecheck• 17 years ago

I think I was 10, an Apple II+. It wasn't the first thing I used to program (I'd dabbled in LOGO and BASIC before), but it was a surprisingly complete computer. I used it to learn about a lot of different things, such as input from peripherals like a joystick, as well as memory management -- from that damnable "out of memory" error when my overzealous BASIC programs got too big. :)

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

I was 17 1/2. It was 1979, it was a TRS-80 with a whole 16KB of memory and a Z80 running at 1.77 MHz.

After two months I got fed up with how slow it was and wrote a compiler. It was written in BASIC and compiled itself. In the 16KB I fitted the BASIC source, two copies of the compiled version, and the tape saving program.

I think the compiler was 3810 bytes ...

bgnm2000• 17 years ago

I was 4, dos pc. Space invaders for life.

gills• 17 years ago

We had an Atari 800 as early as I can remember. Eventually we got the fancy-pants external cassette tape drive.

LOGO rocks :)

pierrefar• 17 years ago

I was 7 or 8, it was a Sharp machine that had a tape (as in cassette) drive and no screen (they were expensive). Using the manual, we used to boot up the machine from the tape, type commands on the keyboard in something like BASIC, and get a roll printer to print out-into two colors, black and red!- a car.

The second machine I got was an IBM XT clone, with DOS 2 or 3 and green CRT twice as deep as the desk we had it on.

zandorg• 17 years ago

Ditto, the family bought Sharp MZ-700 when I was 7 (c.1985), and only I became interested in it.

I upgraded to a Commodore 64 in about 1988, after my aunt didn't want it, and then a disk drive 2 years later with freezer cartridge. I had a lot of fun. The 16-bit machines (I had an Amiga/Atari ST) were fun, but it took until I got a 486 PC with 16mb RAM (1996) to actually make good use of a computer. Mainly web design work and email.

Luc• 17 years ago

A VIC-20 when I was 11. A box of wonders it was!

aschobel• 17 years ago

TI99/4A , probably one of the only ones on Cayman Islands in those days.

Beanblabber• 17 years ago

Once my mother was working on a big project for her work in word. So, she was pretty much done when she hit Ctrl-A + spacebar. She panicked. All that work wasted. My 4 year old self heard her yelling in the other room and I came in. She explained what happened and I just pressed Ctrl-Z. Everything was back. She thought I was magical.

My first computer was about when i was 3. Well, I always had computers around but I started using them and surfing the web at around 3(which pretty much amounted to silly little games). But I knew the ins and outs of Windows and how to get around and figure stuff out.

I got my own personal computer at around 10.

Now, I'm 14 and I'm just getting into programming and Linux.

swombat2• 17 years ago

If you're for real, you're one scary motherfucker. I'm glad I'm not in the job market anymore.

sanjayparekh• 17 years ago

I was 7 and got a TI-99/4A. I rocked it out by saving and restoring programs to cassette tape. You read that right, cassette tape.

hotpockets• 17 years ago

Me too. I loved playing parsec on that bad boy.

trevelyan• 17 years ago

Parsec rocked. Tunnels of Doom was also fantastic. The disk drive made the sound of a small jet engine.

davidmathers• 17 years ago

Cassette tape was also the format of choice for my Atari 400, but I had the computer for a year before I got the tape drive. So for a year I had to retype my BASIC programs into the 16k of RAM every time the computer got turned off. On the membrane "keyboard".

Cue Monty Python sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13JK5kChbRw

I remember wishing I had an Atari 800, which had 64k of RAM and a real keyboard!

MoeDrippins• 17 years ago

My 400 DID have 64k and a real keyboard (both add-ons).

I was 16, but that was 1982. No intertubes. No printer. No RS-232. Cassette tapes.

fcoury4• 17 years ago

I was 6 and it was a Brazilian MSX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotbit. Man, those were the days, using MS-BASIC and drowning on GOSUBs and SPRITEs ;)

It was a time where the knowledge was a lot harder to be obtained, you had to buy books and magazines to know the new programming tips. Hard times :P

felipe2• 17 years ago

Wow, I'm surprised!! I am Brazilian too, though my very first computer was a TK-85 (aka Sinclair ZX81), when I was 13... At the time Brazil was under a "market block-out" that blocked all imported computers, so we were forced to use the crappy Brazilian knock-offs!

A few years later I got an Expert (MSX) and in fact I ended up writing the first anti-virus for MSX computers (Viru-Boot, not sure if you ever seen it, it was featured in the magazines at the time)

Are you from Sao Paulo? In Sao Paulo the default hang-out was either Paulisoft or Disprosoft, the best places to get pirate software.

The good-old-days!!

fcoury4• 17 years ago

I am from Campinas, but I bought a lot of pirate software from those stores, and others. Since I was really young, my father used to drive me to São Paulo, to a joint on the Nacional building I think, where there was a software house that used to sell MSX floppies with software.

I remember it was one of the happiest moments of my life when I entered that office, picked the softwares I wanted from a list copied using a "mimeograph". Soon after that, guy that was helping us came back carrying a paper box full of 5 1/4" disks on it. I couldn't wait to be home and test all that :-)

Yeah, good old days... Playing Magical Tree, Nemesis, Penguin Adventure between MS-BASIC hacking. And I was 6! :-)

fcoury4• 17 years ago

And your name is Felipe too? :-) Now that's coincidence...

munrpa• 17 years ago

13 years old my ZX Spectrum, bloody marvellous it was too

ninguem2• 17 years ago

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum too, but I was 20.

ScottWhigham• 17 years ago

Probably 8 or 9 - had a ZX80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80) and bought a book on BASIC so I could learn to write games. I learned GOTO and thought it was just the absolute sickest thing EVAR!

omarchowdhury• 17 years ago

8 years old, Windows 98 on an IBM PC with a CRT.

1998.

rms• 17 years ago

Macintosh LC III. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC#.22Pizza_boxes.22 It was snappy enough with 36MB of RAM but the 80MB of HD was kind of killer. I was probably 7 years old when we got it and 10 when we maxed the RAM and bought a modem. I'm surprised that no one else had a Mac but my mother was a school teacher. I got a real computer at 13.

Tichy• 17 years ago

12, ZX Spectrum.

ivanstojic• 17 years ago

About 5 or 6, ZX Spectrum 48K.

Raplh• 17 years ago

I didn't have my first personal computer until I was 30. It was a Sun 3 "dickless" workstation on my desk, POS. I gave it to my grad student and got a Mac II the next year.

I read a Fortran (66?) programming lesson book when I was 15, and wrote some programs on paper, but had no machine to try them on.

I wrote Basic on a dial-in (120 bps acoustic coupled) teletype (with paper tape for saving/restoring) at high school when I was 16 (1973).

endtime• 17 years ago

13 - a Dell I believe. I want to say it had a Pentium 1, 133 Mhz.

Zak• 17 years ago

My parents bought an Apple IIe when I was 8 or 9. When I was 11, I got a computer of my own - a Powerbook 140. A laptop with 4M RAM, 40M disk, a 16 MHz 68030 and a built-in trackball was quite impressive in 1992.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

14. It was a Vic-20. Cassete tape storage, 3.5k of memory. It did have a wicked fast centipede game, though in Ireland I wasn't able to find any decent books on writing machine code instead of BASIC. And Gridrunner. Oh yeah.

swombat2• 17 years ago

I was 9, it was a Commodore 128D. Windows 95? You must still be a child!

AlleyRow• 17 years ago

haha...I'm 22. That was back in '96.

meqif• 17 years ago

I was 6 and got my uncle's old 486DX2 when he bought a new computer.

Calamitous• 17 years ago

7. Commodore Vic20.

marcocampos• 17 years ago

Around 1991/2 so I was around 8. 386SX 33MHz beige box running DOS. Learned programming by altering the source of Gorillaz and Nibbles.

utku_karatas• 17 years ago

A broader answer here.. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327973/how-old-are-you-an...

I suppose the user profile on HN and SO is more or less comparable.

SamAtt• 17 years ago

I was 4 when my family got a computer. All I really remember was that the storage media was a cassette tape.

My Dad worked for weeks to get the Cheers theme to play on it (using some DOS midi program I assume) and I remember wondering why his crappy sounding version took a whole tape to store on the computer while a regular cassette tape could store a lot of regular sounding songs.

Gibbon• 17 years ago

I remember my neighbour had an Apple II+ that he let me use all the time, so I would have been 4 then.

The guy that lived in the basement apartment had a zx-81 and later a Commodore 64 and I programmed a couple of skiing games on the zx-81 before getting my first computer, a Tandy TDP-100, which is the same as the TRS-80 color computer 1 but with a white case. I would have been 6 years old I think? I remember it had a cassette interface and I was obsessed with mazes at the time and programmed it to generate new random ones for me.

Later on I gutted the TDP-100 for parts a robot that could sketch stick figure drawings controlled from some program on an Amiga.

Now that I think about it, I was a hell of a lot more productive when I was in public school than now.

zcrar70• 17 years ago

About 7 or 8, it was an Apple II GS :-)

kenver• 17 years ago

I think I was about 10 and it was an Atari STE, I really wanted a Falcon though! I used to buy ST format and mess about with the programming listings that they put in there. I even managed to hook it up to a BBS a few times when my parents were out!

Eventually I managed to persuade my parents to get me a PC, I think it was a 486 with windows 3.11 on it.

All the cool stuff and technology that I get to use now, never comes close to giving me the feeling which those first couple of machines gave me.

jancona• 17 years ago

KIM-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) in 1979. I was 23.

silencio• 17 years ago

I was 7, it was one of the very first sony vaios...and only because i had installed linux on my parents' computer. :)

nileshk• 17 years ago

I was around 8 or 9 when my family got an IBM PCjr. We got it for only $400 because we had a friend who worked for IBM and got discounts and it was already an older machine at that point (around 86 or 87). We never upgraded past the 128K of RAM it came with which limited what apps and games I could run on it. I spent most of my time on it writing in BASIC (which came on a cartridge, which meant I had a good portion of the 128K to work with) and later making attempts to learn C and assembly using some freeware compilers.

The PCjr must've had a bit of a following, because I used to get this catalog with all kinds of interesting upgrades for it that were intended to breath new life into it, long after it was obsolete. They had things like hard drives and replacement CPUs that were twice the clock speed.

Around age 13, I finally got a 1200 baud modem for it that I could only successfully run at 300 baud. But we finally got our next machine shortly after that: a 486/33 w/ 4MB RAM and a 2400 baud modem which blew the PCjr out of the water. The 4MB of RAM was a limitation when I tried to install Linux on it.

It seems I was short on RAM for most of my childhood. Though when my parents bought me my own computer right before I went off to college, I finally could breath a sigh of relief because I actually had enough RAM to run the things I wanted - it was a Pentium 1 with a whopping 16MB of RAM. Linux ran beautifully on it and I was pretty happy with it (as long as I didn't boot into Win95 on it, that is).

Gertm• 17 years ago

9, It was a Philips MSX. Programmed LOGO on it. :) so much fun making the turtle move around.

Pandafox• 17 years ago

About 8 years old. 'twas a windows 95 desktop computer. I feel like I missed out on a lot of great old hardware though.

froo• 17 years ago

My dad used to tell me stories about how I used to load up various programs on our vic-20 at the age of 2 (there was a spelling one with a black bird/raven, I don't remember the name of it)

My first earliest memories of computer usage was loading up Ghosts n' Goblins on my Commodore 64 at around the age of 6/7, I still have my old C64 sitting in my back shed :)

rsayers• 17 years ago

I was 12, and it was an Apple II+. Now this was 91 or so, so it was really old even then.

artificer• 17 years ago

I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the Amstrad CPC. I got one when I was 11. Here in Europe this machine had amazing market penetration those days (80's-early 90's), especially the 6128 model that featured a double-sided 360 Kb diskette (wow!) Simply amazing.

Kollner• 17 years ago

11. Commodore +4.

wlievens• 17 years ago

7 or something. An Atari ST.

arien• 17 years ago

I got my first computer as Xmas gift when I was 7 years old. I read some sci-fi magazine and I soooo wanted a robot... But my mom told me they didn't have house-robots yet, so I asked for a computer instead. And I got it! A shiny Commodore 64, with the cassette and such. It took ages to load programs, and then most of the time they didn't work :)

Ask HN: How old were you when you got your first computer?

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