At least I'm 67 so more into old fart territory.
First computer I programmed was IBM 1620 and 1190 mainframe (think punch cards, Fortran).
Worked at a lab in college with a DEC LINC-8 (paper tape, mag tape but booted by manually entering 32 x 12 bit instructions into "core"... yes, it had real core).
First microcomputer was an Intel 8008 (not 8080) which I hand wire-wrapped (lots of free time on my OB rotation). Octal readout and 256 bytes memory (bytes, not kilo or mega bytes).
I've owned Apple II, Apple ///, TRS-80, Commodore PET in the early days.
That's more like it! Age-wise, anyway.
I am nearly 74.
the first I knew about computers was through my best friend in school, whose father worked for Datamatic, which was later absorbed by Honeywell. My friend's dad had little or no advanced education, but was clever with machinery and had somehow become a key man in the development of the Datamatic/Honeywell tape drive. I can remember going into the company's facility in Boston (in Brighton, maybe?) to see the tape drives, which stood 6 or 8 feet high and handled tape that was about 3 inches wide. The tape handling was (primarily) by cushions of air, not physical bearings or rollers. I remember seeing memory cores with gold wires, and they were huge by later standards -- the size of a pencil eraser, at least!
My first hands-on quasi-"computer" exposure was to build a device to convert decimal numbers to octal, using scrap parts including telephone system stepper relays. It was my own design (I think) and it worked up to some modest point (less than 100). I won a prize in the high school science fair, as a junior. In my senior year, I tried to build a computer, again as a high school science project. I had a book with instructions and got donated parts, assembled them, but it never worked. I could explain what I was trying to do, so the judges gave me slack, but they really shouldn't have. I suspect I fried the transistors when I soldered them into the circuits.
Then in college, I took a one-week Fortran course in the break between semesters one year, which was my entree into the school's IBM machine (no idea what model it was -- this was 1964 or so). I did some very basic number crunching on census statistics, and learned how critical it was to type those IBM punch cards "just right." No margin for error!
But I was not destined to be a computer geek. After that Fortran course, I did not play around with any computers for a few years. the next opportunity I had to use one was in a job, circa 1974. The company had a weird-looking computer with nixy (no idea if that is spelled right) tubes that lighted up -- it may have been an early Wang. And later at another company, we had a mid-size computer that introduced me to the famous spreadsheet program, Visicalc. I used it for a couple of years until we got access to some early Apple PCs. Macs, I think.
My first home computer was one we bought for the kids -- a Commodore 128. I still remember we paid $300 for the PC and $300 more for a monitor, both at Toys-R-Us, as I recall. We ended up adding two floppy disc drives and a mouse. i used that things for several years to do the bookkeeping for a side business I ran well into the late 1990s and possibly past 2000.
Oh, the "good old days...!"
