Where did you get started?

Started playing such wonderful games as "tennis" and "tanks" on my dad's old old console (pre-atari). Started programming in basic at the age of 8, and here I am.

Tanks? Like Combat (for Atari 2600)?

very first experience with computers was after school in the math room in 7th grade - 1980. programming games (verrry simple ones) on an apple 2 while i learned basic.. hehe..

i remember when a friend got one of the first macs, and when i saw it the first thing i tried to do was get a command line.. haha.. i dismissed it because i couldn't 'really' -use- the thing..

My now ex-wife talked me into buying a computer to run my landscaping business. I bought a $600 Radio Shack Color Computer with a casette drive! Took one look at the book for programming it and said "forget this crap." Three months later I decided to either learn it or sell it. I've been working in the computer field for 15 years now.

By the way, I also messed with OS/9 for the color computer which was supposedly a hacked version of Unix.

Programing in basic on a Timex Sinclair 1000 with the 16k expansion.

My dad made me take a summer class programming the TI99/4A back in like 1981. It's been downhill ever since.

I've got cartridges from my old Atari 2600 that have the year 1979 printed on them. Can you freakin' believe that? I still think I'm a kid... but then I was buying games in 1979.

Yikes!

Became addicted when pong hit the shelves. Then was estatic when I got my first Atari 800 and learned to do small graphics if you can call them that in DOS. Expanded to the powerful osborne portable computers...Which a TI scientific calculator is now more powerful. So all in all started when computers where the size of small stores and running on vacuum tubes and have been lost ever since.

I got to hang around the invention of computer graphics in 1970 at Ohio State where three artists and the entire math department were creating crude monochrome line drawings on a UNIVAC that cost thousands of dollars per hour to run. Several years later I studied fortran and cobal just long enough to decide that I was not a programmer at heart. Worked with a Motorola Four-Phase system in '78 and then with Visicalc on an Atari for doing retail shop records. Breifly played with a Comodore and then got my son an Apple IIc in '85 (I think).
I managed to avoid becoming a computer fanatic though until '88 when I finally bought a PC and a modem. I've been squandering my life savings on computer equipment ever since.

About 1970...paper clip and punch cards....4-tran University main-frame at school....

Graduated 'down' to a Commodore 64....many years later....[still got an emulator]....
Programming in basic...P.I.T.A.....

Then just one clone after another....

Draginol - I can't remember, this would've been in the late 70s/early 80s. What I do remember is that there was a grey square, and a slightly darker grey square, you could move up and down AND left and right (better than tennis!), and you had to somehow destroy the other block. Based on the TV at the time being most likely 640x480 resolution, I'd estimate the resolution put out by this machine to be somewhere in the region of 32x24.

Got my own c-64 as a kid, used an apple-II in school, VAX and UNIX machines in college.

my babysitter used to bring his c-64 round every wednesday... I either got to watch dallas or play on his c-64

I started on an old Amstrad CPC464, got my first PC a few years back for nothing, from a friend.
Now I seem to be regressing, as I'm now getting obssesed with SNES, Genesis and Mame emulators.

A second-hand Amiga 500, only to play better RPGs than the Genesis or NES ones. I was so hooked I bought a 1200 3 months later. Then I wished I had a real monitor, a hard drive and some more RAM. And I realized it was going to cost me as much as a PC. Seeing as Origin had just released Ultima 7 on PC only, I bought (reluctantly) an AMD DX40. And I never looked back...

Ummm...I got a ZX Spectrum for Christmas, back in...1983, 84? Damn, I can't remember, it's been so long Moved on to a C64 after that. Then came an Amstrad-Schneider CPC 6128, after that an Amiga 500 I think. I had an Atari STD 1640(?) as well. Geez, I've gone through a lot of computers in my relatively short life span Never had an original IBM PC though, had a PS/2 Model 80 A 286 after that, followed by an IBM PS/1, jumped to a 486 clone, followed by a Pentium 90, killed off by a Pentium Pro, which got replaced by a P166MMX, but that one didn't last long, until the 233MMX and I think I've gone through almost every Intel CPU since then until I leapfrogged 800-933Mhz to get a 1Ghz. Now I've got a P4 1.5 and a 1.8 and keeping an old 733 for benchmarking. That about does it I think.

Learned a cool little drawing language called Logo in school, borrowed an ancient 386 from my uncle and played around in Basic a bit (and then decided I didn't like it at all). Bribed my parents into finally buying a computer when I was 19 and that's the same machine I'm working on right now (the infamous p75).

Always been more of a console guy really, moved from NES to SNES (incuding a ProfighterX to play all the FF games that were never released here) to N64 and got me a PSX to play FF7.

In 1992, we were using wordperfect 5 for dos and When we were offered an opportunity to lease a computer through the agency I did. Up until then, all I could do was turn it on. I have been hooked ever since. I am not on the programing end but I am one of the few unofficial computer experts in our agency. My background is art so the computer gave me the medium I was looking for.

My first computer was a Radio Shack's Coco, back around 1982 or so... I think...
Learned a bit of basic with it. My first program was an alarm clock. Hehehe!
Then, after that, I really didn't touch computers until about 1989 or so when I went back to school in college; I then bough a Mac Plus (black and white) for my homeworks. I kept it for a number of years, then bough a 486 in 1995. That's when I discovered the Internet and started building web pages.
The rest is history.

Waaaayyy way back in the late 70's early 80's got the Pong unit. From there I got the Atari 2600 and amassed a huge collection of carts for it. As far as actual, programmable computers, I bought an Atari 400 when they first came out (complete with membrane keyboard yippee!), moved up to an 800XL, expanded it heavily (through addon products and some soldering - had a completely separate keyboard that I could pull down onto my lap), bought a $1200 20MB Seagate HD for it for my BBS (yes, that tweleve hundred). Ran the 3rd largest Atari BBS in the world for a while (there was an 80MB one in England and a 50MB in Texas).

After that I moved onto a 1040ST then to a Mega/STe8 (the 8MB model). Upgraded the 50MB harddrive in it to a 540MB. FOr those that remember TOS, there was a physical limit to partition size so I had drives A:-R:

Once I started University (the second time around) for Comp Sci I picked up a Packard Bell 75MHz Pentium computer that was shipping with Win3.1 but had a free upgrade to Win95 as soon as it came out (about a month after I bought the cpu). From then on I've been with M$ o/s with a brief period of using Solaris on the systems at school. Now I've got 5 computers all running Windows of various flavours and no looking back...

What a strange a colorful trip its been...

oooh, forgot about a programming stint in public school on the Commodore PET computers with tape drives. The one program I wrote had about 2000 lines of code and took about 15 minutes to load in...hehe...

This may surprise a few of you, but, I didn't get my first computer until I was 42. That was about 2 years ago, and believe me, it's tough being a newbie when you're my age! I had never LOOKED at a 'puter until the delivery guy dumped it on my doorstep and I had to put it together and get it working. Initially, it was for the kids, but I use it more than anyone. I guess I've learned quite quickly, as I had Litestep running only 2 months after I got the computer. Then I got Photoshop, and I've been pulling my hair out with it ever since. lol.
I also completed an MCSE course after 6 months, but it was for Win95, so that was a waste of time!
Oh well...........
/me turns to page 65 of "Windows ME for total and utter complete idiots".

It goes back when I was about 6/7 y.o. when I got an Atari 2600. Shortly after I got a Timex Sinclair, which thought me my first lines of Basic. Then, when I was about 10, I got the ancestor of the PC generation (thanks to my dad) : an 8088 PC XT, 4.77MHz, 512KB RAM, 2x360KB 5 1/4" floppy (no HD and no mouse) with DOS 2.x. Oh, let's not forget my mamooth CGA monitor that goes with it! I was really the king of the hill ! Let's not forget that at the time, most of my friends had only Vic20 and Texas Instrument! After that, I switched for a 286, 386, 486, and so on.

I'm now 28 and I love computing better than ever I'm working in the IT business as a technical specialist for a telecom company down here in Montreal. I'm about to complete my MCSE 2000 along with my Network+ and A+ (then I'll head for Cisco certs). A long road since my childhood but how fun it was!

BoXXi, your story and mine are quite similiar. Although previously I worked within a couple of apps on work computers, I've only had my own for about 3 years.
I very shortly discovered Litestep and using that practically forced me to figure out what I was doing on the computer.
Lucky for me

It's nice to know that I wasn't the only geek in the late 70's. I got very good at Combat and Break-out on the Atari 2600. My favorite was River Raid, but that was years later.

My first real computer was the Timex Sinclair, and then I got a "Trash 80". But it wasn't until the Commodore Vic20 that I found my calling in life. That was a beautiful 8 color 40x24 screen (know what I mean?) But then in 1985 or so I got a C64 with a tape drive. I was in heaven. I had that computer until 1991 when its video chip died while I was playing Castle Wolfenstein.

My dad built his 8088 but didn't let me touch it.

I went to college to learn CAD and solids modeling, but gave it up when I learned C and Unix. I did that until 1999. I got my first taste of the web using Mosaic v1.0 in 1994. By 1995 I knew what the future held for me, Web Development.

Now I wonder if that was a bad move. I've been unemployed for over a month now, and although I interview at least 2 times a week, my phone isn't ringing (not even from recruiters). So I may have to go back to my old C programming experience, but I'll have to learn C++ just to get my foot in the door. What an odd world we live in.

Power to the geeks!!! We know who really runs the world.

I started out on an Atari VCS (wasn't even a 2600 yet). Thought the 400 and 800 were cool, but too pricey.

When the 800XL came out, I jumped on it. Had a 300 baud modem, but no storage at first, so I was basically typing in programs from Compute! magazine for entertainment.

Later got a 130XE and upgraded it to one whole meg of memory. Added an MIO 1 MB RAM board and four DD/DS drives and had quite a BBS there for awhile.

Later I got a 1040ST, then a 1040STE, then a Falcon, and finally my current Compaq PC.

It's been quite a ride!