Tell us about your first computer — or the first one that you went online with — and what was that experience like?
I was working as an electronics retailing journalist at the time and my first computer was a laoner low-end Acer “386″ machine running Windows 3.1 with a dial-up modem (Acer never asked for it back). No idea about RAM. And of course it had a 3.5 floppy drive.
When I figured out how to use the modem, I initially joined some bulletin boards and actually got into my first internet argument with somebody.
I think I got a Prodigy install disk sent to me at work, and I gave it try. It was a lot of fun, especially when I discovered their “TV L-Z” discussion area that included a section on MST3K.
What about you?
The first computer I ever saw in person was the Trash-80 at my local Radio Shack. It cost $800 (fully loaded with 4K, a cassette recorder drive, and a 80×16 B/W screen) and I immediately ordered one ($800 back when cars cost $4K and my house was only $20K, so it would be around $4K or more for the computer in terms of today’s money). I got the second one sold in the state, but it took six weeks to arrive (since they had to make it — I guess they figured no one would actually buy the things so they only had the one demo model in the store) but for those weeks they allowed me to take the manual home and read it (a really funny manual that I loved).
The whole experience turned me onto computing, and led to a career that lasted 30 years in the industry and eventually head of the IT department for the whole state. Oh, and there were no such things as modems or online back then — it was about two to three years later that happened (and many more computers past that).
Well- my first computer was Commodore 386, 1993- we could not get on line, but, it did have a neat bowling game. From ’94-’96 it was an Apple with floppy discs, again, no internet- but a lot of neat games. Finally, in 1996 we got a desktop with 1.5 GB, Windows 95 and internet access- first site for me- Sports of some sort.
By 2000 we got a Sony VIAO (or was it VAIO) with 80 GB and a video capture card (I installed Movie Star) and DVDit! software and a burner. It was then I began to migrate my MST VHS tapes to DVD-R. I cannot believe it has been 13 years. Now, I have a Dell notebook.
I remember having the old Commodore Vic 20 at home, way back in the 80s. I seem to recall that my first internet experiences were at University, where I would use the school computers to peruse the old usenet newsgroups (primarily Dr. Who and MST3K). Alt.mst3k, I believe it was.
Happy times.
My first computer was B.I. (before internet). Can’t remember the make or model. It was essentially a typewriter with a screen, had an old black floppy disc drive which was seperate from the main computer and an Atari port on top of the keyboard. Many Pac-man and Return of the Jedi hours on that thing. First time we had internet was two computers later. I only used it for email because there were about no intetresting websites i knew of, bleh.
First computer interaction I recall was when our K-5 school got a
roomfull of computers and us classroom teachers (with virtually no
familiarity) had to teach students basic uses. Eventually many schools
(that was when Philadelphia schools weren’t stiffed by cheap Republican
governors of funds) were staffed by computer teachers.
The first Mysty experience I recall offhand was when it was shown that a few floppy disks held
the secret to time travel and that if you destroyed them you would foil
the E-VIL plans of GenCorp.
Mine was a 66/386 with DOS as the primary operating system. These were the days where memory upgrades were in the 1 MB denominations, and 4 MB of ram might run you a few hundred dollars.
Radio Shack Color Computer 2 [1 had the 'chicklet' keys, so avoided that], with cassette memory. Had several plug-in modules (Backgammon, word processor, etc.), then added multi-module unit and 5.25 floppy. Expanded to dual drive, got 300 baud modem that required dialing phone then turning modem on. Joined various BBSes, including The Stables [which I helped the Sysop by fixing the boot to include the CD unit when Windows for Workgroups went bad on his server]. First Internet was text only, via a local BBS that had access to various systems that were connected into the early ‘net – no Web at the time.
Running dual core Win 7 machine now, with 1T HD and external 2T HD, cable modem and wireless network.
I started a data entry job in 1987, so technically I suppose that was when I first used a computer, but they were not quite a regular computer. My first experience actually getting on-line was with WebTV back in early 2001 (Hey, it was fine for what I wanted at the time). I didn’t have the space or a real desire for an actual computer, and the WebTV served me well for a few years, even though I could only use dial-up with it. In late 2004 I upgraded to the MSNTV2 set-top box and was able to get broadband for it, which I managed to hook up myself. The box has some major limitations now with most web sites (Satellite News can be a little slow but it works just fine although many other sites now cause the box to crash) since it’s basically stuck on IE6, has very limited memory and flash capabilities and I can’t download anything with it, but for those years when it was my only internet device it served my needs and wants just fine. It still works and is in fact what I am using to type up this post. It’s hooked up to the TV in my bedroom and if nothing else it serves as a very nice nightlight. In early 2008 I finally broke down and got a refurbished IBM T41 laptop with XP Pro and a wireless router to hook up to my broadband modem, which I also managed to do myself. That laptop lasted me for a couple years until it died, and then I got my current laptop, which is a Toshiba Satellite A505 S6980 with Windows 7. When I have the laptop turned on I can even listen to the music I have on it through the MSNTV2 box over my TV. I can also get pictures from the laptop to the box. I added a Kindle Fire to my WiFi family almost a year ago, although I mainly use the WiFi on that to download apps and library books. I have an old printer hooked up to the box which I don’t use all that often, but the laptop uses a WiFi printer/scanner/copier. My cell phone is not a smart phone, but it does have internet. I just rarely use it for even phone calls.
Timex Sinclair Z81,1K onboard memory expandable to 16K! You had to load programs for it off a cassette player. 1981 computing power!
Didn’t get on the net till ’99 with it’s dial-up and blurry videos. I really miss the old MP3.com and horrible sites strewn with animated gifs and bad midi music.
Great topic!
Radio Shack Color Computer 1. It really was a piece of junk, even by 1982 standards. About the only thing it had going for it was 16K memory which a lot in those days. Now, I have jpegs are that are bigger. Programs were stored on cassette tape. No discs, no modem (although it seems like you could buy them separately). I did learn BASIC programming on it, though. And like many here, I work in IT now.
My first merge onto the information superhighway was in 1996. Seems like I had a 70 MHz Pentium 1 running Windows 95, the OS that finally allowed the PC to catch up with the Amiga for multitasking. And a 28.8K baud modem.
My first computer experience was in 1978, in college, when I started learning Fortran. I wrote programs that had to be submitted to the mainframe computer on campus, and I had to write them on cards. It was VERY important to keep all your cards in order; the loudest cursing you would ever hear would be when someone dropped their stack of cards, particularly on a windy day between classroom buildings. In 1980 I had a summer job at Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was there that I got to use a full-screen editor for the first time (WOW!!!). That job was a blast, as I helped out on a project to replace the old mainframe computers then with the next generation computers that were used for the start of the Space Shuttle missions. High-level computing has been part of my career ever since. And yes, I still use Fortran, although I have since also used C++, Java, and a few more obscure computer languages.
My first computer was a custom built PC w/ a 386 CPU, 4MB RAM, WIN 3.0, DOS 5.0, 3.5 and 4.25 floppy drives, and (I think) a Sound Blaster sound card and 100MB HDD. I eventually upgraded to a Cyrix 486 CPU, 8MB RAM, WIN 3.11, DOS 6.2, 1GB HDD, and a 14.4k dial-up modem.
I remember being frustrated trying to configure comm ports just like Crow. Does anybody else remember having to set the “teeth” on the back of the modem? It always drove me crazy. I also ran a WWIV BBS called “On Vacation” and used Telemate to log on to other BBS’s.
My favorite games were Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blakestone, Corridor 7, Scorch, One Must Fall 2097, Epic Pinball, and World Empire.
My first computer was the Apple IIe. A family purchase. I swear there was some sort of “modem” apparatus attached to this thing (we’re talking about 1982 or 1983), complete with a very ancient but active chat room. I was about 8 years old at the time and I really don’t remember any details about that chat, except that my mom said “No more modem” immediately afterwards and held firmly to that. Hmm.
But my real first online experience was, like Sampo, Prodigy. I remember him well and many others from the MST3K bulletin board at that time. It was the first time I’d ever discovered anything really weird that I loved and actually was able to interact with people that loved the same thing. That is, until the dreaded Prodigy “hourly rates” announcement.
I don’t know the make or model, but my dad bought a computer when I was about 9 or 10 years old (1994/1995). I don’t recall exactly how old I was, but I can still remember connecting to the Internet with that harsh modem dialup sound. The screen was large and boxy and it flickered a bit when we surfed the web for some reason. We also installed Civilization II and Myst onto the computer along with a few other smaller games. That’s about all I can remember!
My first computer (being the young lad I am) was a 1989 NEC computer with a combo DOS/WIN 3.1. Not sure which version of DOS we had. Some games we had included Math Blasters, SimCity (the original, and, in my opinion, the best version), and my personal favourite game at that time, “Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?”. Despite having only a 16 Mhz memory, she ran fast! And from what I have heard, that computer was one of the first that came with a colour monitor (you didn’t have to buy one separately). I think my dad had a word processor, too.
The first computer I bought was in 1993. It was a low-end PC knockoff from a company called Ambra that probably vanished before the warranty on my computer expired. I don’t remember the hard drive size, but I do remember it came with 2MB of RAM–I was promised 4MB, but the store did a bait-and-switch; they kept promising me the extra 2MB, but never came through, and I couldn’t afford to buy extra memory (we’re talking two whole megabytes, people!). It came with Windows 3.1 and I got a deal on WordPefect 6, which was the first software I ever installed myself (about eight 3.5″ floppies, and an afternoon of waiting around and changing disks). The best thing about the system was the monitor, which was an SVGA that weighed a ton–I actually used it through about three other replacement systems, and it still works, although right now it’s in a little computer graveyard in one corner of my basement.
No internet at home in those days, but the university where I was teaching (and still do teach) had just installed e-mail, so my first experience of the Web was through e-mail discussion groups. The computers at work just had those amber screens, so no graphics for a few years: the full Internet experience was still a myth to me. I remember trying (and failing) to access something called the WELL–the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. Does anyone else remember that, and am I right that it was an early search engine?
@Lloyd’s Lungs
I think I am your brother, because that sounds exactly like my experience with the apple IIe.
Ours had a green screen switch on the monitor and two shoe box sized floppy drives. We used to play Zork, and the Bard’s Tale. Finally, we got a tape drive and were able to play Zaxxon after 30 MINUTES of loading time. You kids today with your iPhones and the pierced I don’t know what, you haven’t seen slow until you’ve used a coupler modem and a tape drive.
I didn’t think to look on the Internet for MST until around 2005, when I wondered “where are they now?”
My first computer was actually my dad’s, a Commodore 64. I was too young to enjoy any of the other aspects of the machine, but there were a LOT of great games. Batman: The Caped Crusader and Ghostbusters are still etched in my memory.
Dad got rid of the C64 and got a PC at some point in the very late-80′s or early-90′s (unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact model of the PC), and while I’m not sure when we first went online, dad has always been very up-to-date on that sort of thing, and I remember getting ‘Hint Guides’ AKA walkthroughs for games though some kind of relatively primitive internet/modem/whatever. The PC, though, I remember it was powerful enough to run anything Sierra would put out (dad was very good about updating that machine). The King’s Quest and Space Quest series’ are still some of my absolute favorite games. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom & Doom II, Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem 3D, many hours were logged on all of them, but nothing like those Sierra ‘Quest’ games.
I do recall us being online by at least by the mid-90′s, 1994/1995, maybe. AOL dial-up. In 1996/1997, I was discovering the internet for myself. I remember that MST3K, after moving to the Sci-Fi Channel, was my first real internet obsession, and I eagerly pored over the updated episode guide every week. Believe it or not, TV Land.com was also a favorite (this was back when the channel played Retromercials and a wide variety of classic TV shows, and there was actually a lot of fun stuff to do at the site).
Of course, growing up there were also the Apple II’s at school. A few years back, I salvaged one from a School/Church rummage sale and happily played the original Oregon Trail for longer than appropriate.
Great memories. Like Maynard G. Krebs used to say, “I’m gettin’ all misty!”.
Earliest computer experience for me was in the first computer course taught in the Royal Oak, MI high school system back in 1978. We learned some BASIC programming, and I mean basic. We were really excited when we could print out a ten foot long banner with the school’s name on it using a dot matrix printer.
@ AlbuquerqueTurkey – I can relate completely to your story about he punch cards. My first computer class at the University of Michigan was taught using FORTRAN and COBAL and we had to run programs using punch cards. I remember going in at 2-3:00AM to try to avoid the crowd. A couple years later the University got a bunch of Apple Lisa desktops and those are when we used for a senior design projects.
First job after graduation had just bought a couple Compaq computers with that weird orange screen. I had to teach myself how to make spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3 and to use Word Perfect. No such thing as internet at that job.
My next job had desktops for each department and I was the lucky person chosen to receive email for the whole facility and then I had to distribute them to the recipient. We received maybe 10-20 emails a week. At first no one was authorized to use the internet, even for business purposes. I honestly had no idea what I was missing because none of my friends or family were using the internet very much at this time either.
The first I really experienced the internet wasn’t until the Spring of 1997 when I asked my nephew to show me how to view the Satellite News on line. True story. Once I saw that there were updates daily and links to other MSTies all over the world (North America any way) I decided to get my own computer. I picked up a really simple 286 with a phone modem around Christmas 1997 and a couple months later I realized I needed to upgrade almost immediately. I built my next computer for more speed and memory and the day high speed internet modems were available in my area I got it connected (probably about 2000)…and I have never seen the light of day since. (OK, that last comment isn’t really true. I’m still really not that computer savvy.)
The first computer my family had was a TRS-80 Model I (my father was into amateur radio to start with and the opinionated publisher of a magazine he subscribed to started covering computers; my mother sewed dust covers for the various parts of the system), and we stuck with Radio Shack equipment through the Color Computer 2 and Color Computer 3 up to some time after they’d stopped selling them. (To quote “Radar Secret Service”: “I thought Radio Shack stood for quality!” “It stands for failing mall.”) Then, we splurged on a Macintosh LC II, a considerable jump in performance from what we had for all that it was one of the slower models of its time.
While I did dial into a local BBS a few times back towards the close of our Radio Shack days, I started noticing computer magazines making a big deal of the Internet around 1994. It wasn’t available way out where we lived until the summer of 1995, though, when some local companies started setting up. I managed to get myself involved with testing their hookups, and later that year (at university), my interest in “text adventures” led me to discover a competition for them that included an “interactive MSTing” that made me aware of Mystery Science Theater… (It does all tie together neatly, at least for me.)
I went to work for a Radio Shack Computer Center in 1983 (yes, they had separate store for that way back when) and my first computer was a Color Computer II, with 32k of RAM (which I upgraded to 64k). They had some pretty nice games. What I remember most was training for Vidtex, an online service that connected you to AP and other shared new services. I can remember watching it print (didn’t use a screen with it, you used a roll of thermal paper) and thinking “this will revolutionize the world if the average user can get a hold of this”.
I’ve always been late when it comes to technology. To this day I won’t use a cell phone. I could never afford a computer and didn’t own one for a very long time. When I moved out to Los Angeles from Boston about 11 years ago my roommate had one and I started playing with it casually from time to time. Eventually I found I’d like to have one but still I just wasn’t ever very good at saving up for something (I’m afraid I’ve learned nothing from “Money Talks”). So… I decided I’d buy a PC one little piece at a time intil I finally had all the parts to put one together. I basically built my own PC – collecting just the right parts over a couple of years til I could put it together. It wasn’t a bad little computer – a bit slow at times but it was MY little Frankenstien’s monster. I did eventually decide I wanted a “good” computer, so I got a Dell credit card and with it ordered an XPS and I am still paying for it to this day.
You know, I don’t even remember. I’ve had so many since then. I remember the “dial up” days and how slow the internet was but we didn’t know any different at the time.
My parents got an Apple Macintosh Plus around ’86. Black and white monitor, but it could show very good detail for the time and the sound was really impressive. My father got a hard drive for it and set it up to play movie quotes when you did things. My favorite was setting it so that when you selected the option to shut down, it was set to say “Are you sure you’re making the right decision, Dave? I think we should stop.” I played some fun games on there too. My favorite on that computer was probably Dark Castle. It did have a modem and I did a couple of chats with a friend. It didn’t work very well because the program didn’t let you see what you were typing. Only what your friend was typing. I occasionally tried some online bulletin board and gaming services when I was at other peoples’ homes. But I didn’t get to try out the World Wide Web until they set it up at my high school. I mostly just used it to look up video game strategies at the time.
My first computer experience was with a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, which was strictly monitored in my 8th grade math class. It was really only there for learning BASIC, but since it didn’t have a tape drive, any programs I wrote were lost when it was shut off.
The first computer I actually owned was a Commodore 64, which included the massive 5 1/4″ floppy drive. Somewhere around 1985 or 1986 my parents bought a 300 baud modem for my birthday and friends introduced me to the joys of Bulletin Board Systems. Shortly after came a brief stint with CompuServe and the rest is (somewhat foggy) history.
I couldn’t tell you the first computer my family had, I’m not a computer nerd (a term used lovingly) and don’t recall the numbers, make, model, etc. I do remember us getting it in the early 90s, maybe 94?.. and it was a beige PC thing and it was huge. All I would do on it would be mess with the Painting or art program (whatever it was) and play video games (on hard disk), usually Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, and Doom.
Then when I was in High School, sometime in 96 or 97, my family got the internet (dial up). Now, I can’t recall correctly if I used the internet at school first, but I believe that to be the case. My at home usage of the internet was pretty basic; email, I’d look up movies, things like that, and also, MST3K.
I’ve been visiting this website since about then, been a regular reader since then, but only starting participating in the discussions and comments since 2008 or so.
While in High School, maybe in 97 or 98, I had a computer class and we were supposed to be printing off papers for some assignment, and instead I printed off a complete episode guide (which at the time went through Season 8) of MST that I found on some other website. It helped me figure out what episodes I didn’t have (which at the time was a lot) and which ones I wanted to try to get off of the internet, tape trading style, which I did for awhile.
So yeah,
computers.
I also had the Commodore 64 with the giant floppy drive,and I still have it in storage with dust on it,I would put the floppy disc with a game on it in and then go get a bite to eat and wait a bit while it loaded
My father had a Commodore 64 as well sometime in the 80s. I wasn’t really on the Internet until later but my father frequented the Prodigy MST boards in the early 90s under the name Mr. Roman, some of you may have knew him (including Sampo), and I would tag along with him.
Some say the internet is for porn, I say it’s mostly for finding people to argue with. In any case, it was an IBM Aptiva. When I first heard that modem sound I thought it was magic. By the 2nd time…I thought it was annoying. Addiction and the tying up of phone lines soon followed. As far as I can remember it was pretty much the same basic set up as Crow’s. Although it was eventually stolen I still have the software package that came with it. Ahhh nostalgia.
In high school circa 1975, we had a terminal hooked up to the mainframe over at IBM, and we learned programming from a wonderful teacher, Miss Janicek (Miss J for short.)
I wrote a program that would print out “Miss J should go to” and put a syntax error in so that it would print out as “Miss J should go to (illegal command in line 120)”. A few of us had the idea to put this in her mailbox, with those cubbyholes for each teacher. I accidentally put it in the wrong cubbyhole, and another teacher got it.
I had named the program “Miss J”, and the syntax for running these programs went “Get Miss J / Run Miss J / Kill Miss J”, which was on the printout. The teacher that got the printout went frantic for a little while, until he found Miss J and she told him what it was. Everyone had a good laugh.
My first experience online was with Compuserve in the ’80s, with a Radio Shack Color Computer and a 300 baud (I think) modem. Everything was in text, of course. Today I do programming and web development for a living.
Oh man, what a trip down memory lane…
I think it was ’95, I’d just gotten married and my wife was pregnant with our oldest. I think we bought a Compaq at Best Buy and I remember being ecstatic that I could finally find out if the bands I liked were coming on tour or if they even existed any more.
It makes me long for the days when web apps were lightweight and memory gobbling Flash apps were just a twinkle in a some demented developers eye…
Of course there was the porn, but that’s a given.
First computer — Commodore 64. Played more Castle Wolfenstein and Spy Hunter that should have been legal, but I also used that computer and a really bad dot matrix printer to produce my Master’s Thesis.
I cannot recall specifically my first venture onto the “information superhighway.” My best guess is that it was on the public computers in the library at a university looking for job openings. Envetually I had an Apple LC (40 meg hard drive, who could use all that space?) and got into a variety of AOL chatrooms, spending countless hours cyber-babbling with strangers.
Like several other fellow fossils here, my first computing experience was with the college mainframe back in the mid-1970s. First you had to go to one building to laboriously type out each punch card. Then you had to physically feed them into the system. Then you went away and did something else for several hours at least because that was how long it took to get results. Then you went to a different building and got your printout. If you typed even one character wrong or fed the cards in the wrong order, you got to do it all over again.
Does anyone wonder why I love my current gaming laptop so darn much???
I think I looked a porn.
What? What?????
The first computers I remember using were a Coleco Adam and a Commodore 64. The Adam used cassette tapes and it was used mainly for typing out school work. The 64 was my first foray into floppy disks. Played a lot of Ultima on it.
My first computer was the Apple //e, the state of the art machine of the early 80s because it came with 64k of memory! I actually loved programming that thing, mostly writing programs that would generate random D&D characters for the game I was running or star systems for Traveller. Dang, that was fun.
I came late to the intertubes, and I’m pretty sure the first site I visited was a forum for Gary Numan fans. I think to that moment I had never met another one in the flesh, and that was a thrilling moment. For someone as socially inept as I am, the internet has been a godsend. My life has just gotten better since going online.
Jedi titan DAvid Franics White, the Great Grand Master of eternity!!! Join the revolution, Victory will be mine soon!!!!
david francis white!!! I am confused!!!
Radio Shack Color Computer II with cassette tape, no modem, around 1985-86. First internet experience was a couple years earlier with a friend who had Compuserve. The first time I used the internet was in 1995 at college and I found a review site for the Twilight Zone.
I may win the prize for latecomer here. I bought my first computer in 2000 (late 2000), one of those Dell numbers with Windows ME. I didn’t know how to turn it off. I used to pull the plug out of the wall until someone showed me how. I’m not a Luddite but technology kind of freaks me out. I’ve solved the problem of the meaning of life but I have issues operating a toaster.
That said, I’m totally self taught as far as computers go and can now do most things needed. Yay me!
First computer I ever used was in probably first grade. Those new fangled things that no one knew how to use. I taught myself how to use them since my mother volunteered and I got stuck there after school hours for so long. I ended up teaching the teachers how to use them.
First computer ever owned was… I think an old Compaq my parents bought at Sears. One of the first computers they ever had at our local store. We ended up replacing everything on it until it finally died.
First online experience was with Prodigy. Trolls have existed since the beginning of the internet since I got into many fights with them until I got older and wiser. Then we eventually switched to AOL since as mentioned above Prodigy wanted to start charging by the hour.
@bobhoncho – I LOVED Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego! Also You Don’t Know Jack. I remember getting freaked out when I happened to play the game on a holiday and it yelled at me for playing it on the holiday.
My current computer is now 8 years old and is slowly dying. Man I need a new one.
I remember using my dad’s Apple IIe, since I didn’t know where else to play my floppy-disks of Hitchhiker’s Guide. (“You hear a bulldozer approaching.”)
Ah, the days of wandering into a dark place, and possibly being eaten by a Grue.
Oops, wait, the text games were later; back then I wanted to see the little line-by-line illustrations on the Apple IIe Dark Crystal computer game I’d picked up at a Radio Shack clearance. (Which was new back then, to give you some time-frame.)
As for first Internet? AOL. Dial-up. (Even found one of those little fan-made replacement packs that replaced all the program sounds, so that when you logged on, you heard Jeannie saying “You have mail, Master.”)
To this day, I’m not on Facebook. I will never BE on Facebook. I can’t face Facebook. Every time I see a commercial saying “Like us on Facebook”, I go to the page, and all I see is my old AOL days, a nice self-contained net-playpen for a lot of housewives using the Internet for the first time to chat about their cat, college girls to post mugging cellphone photos, and corporations creating advertising pages because they think This Is the Cool Internet.
Usenet, and the late-90′s Algonquin Round Table glory days of rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, came later. On AOL, but got out of there when I found Netscape and could take the training wheels off…A couple years later.
Forgot to mention, anyone remember when MST3k was on Sci-Fi and they had the forum where like every 5 minutes it would show a picture of whatever was on Sci-Fi at that moment (including commercials) and you could type in your own riffs and rate them. Loved that.
When you had a Telstar, I had something called a Heathkit; when you had an Atari, I had something called an Interact (with a keyboard and cassette drive!); when you had an Apple IIe, or IBM PCjr., I had something called a Commodore 64; when you got your first PC, I got something called a Commodore 128 (it was out of date even then!); when you got a PC “clone,” I got something called a Tangerine iMac. But since it was 1999 by then, so did a lot of other people.
My first night online, with a friend’s help, I discovered that Roger Waters was finally touring, seven years after the release of his latest album, Amused to Death. I remember visiting an MST site (an old version of this?) as well as Sci-Fi’s page and schedule a bunch.
GO64
Oh! And I followed Edward the Less!
Mid-80s, I played on my Dad’s loaner Osborne-1 (the first laptop, at only 50 or so pounds), thankfully it worked as a desktop also.
The Tandy-1 “how is this thing even remotely a computer and supposed to be educational when BASIC was already out of date and oh yeah it also plays ‘Marble Madness,’” kiddy PC came next.
First real comp was a Laser 386 with a whopping half meg of RAM, expandable to a whole meg.
First MSTie related stuff I saw online came from school labs. I remember “The Movie’s” banner ad, so about ’96, ’97? Also the show’s site was pretty large and interactive- Caption This! still rocks on, somewhere.
So glad that Al showed us how to use our blinkers as we MERGED onto the Information Superhighway!
The first computer that was actually mine was a Commodore-16 attached to a TV, eventually exchanged for a C-64 and a glorious “green screen” monitor. I’d tediously type in programs out of books and magazines, or try to implement stuff from Scientific American’s “Computer Recreations” column, back when they actually had one. (Christ, SciAm is utter garbage now.) But my first computer experience was with the Apple II-whatevers in elementary school–playing “Oregon Trail” and screwing around with “LOGO” turtle graphics.
Ha, what a fun topic! My first time was when my dad bought an Apple II E (insert obligatory joke about me being old here). We watched him set it up, witnessed his frustration when nothing came up on the screen, I hit a button on it and the monitor turned on, enda story.
Just saw #43, I had that “Hitchhiker’s Guide” game too! It was clever and fun. I can’t remember completing it.
Several people have talked about the first computer they ever USED — somewhat different from the first computer they ever OWNED. When I worked as an editorial assistant at The Inquirer, they had dumb ATEX terminals to a main frame on all the reporters’ desks.
In fact, here’s an amazing factoid– the VERY FIRST EMAIL I ever got, this was fall of ’91, was from Best Brains (they were thanking me for the article I wrote about them) — and I had NO IDEA WHAT IT WAS!! What the IT dept guys did was cut and paste the email into the rudimentary instant message system they had. I was, like: “How did these guys send me an instant message???”
When I moved to my next job, sitting on my desk was an IBM 8088 with 2 5-1/4″ floppy drives and NO hard drive! The one floppy ran the rudimentary word processing program and the other floppy held what you were writing. Green screen IBM monitor.
My Dad bought a Texas Instruments (I can’t remember the number), back in the 80s (like 84). It had NO internet hookup, because there was no internet to hook up to yet. It didn’t do much. It had no operating system. You couldn’t play games on it, talk to anyone or even type a letter. It was basically a glorified calculator. It did have instructions on how to program little things, like a worm that would crawl across your screen, and back again. Pretty boring.
My first work computer was in 1987 and was called a “WANG.” Yeah, it’s a poor choice to call anything. It was a word processor. You could load boilerplate legal forms onto it, and plug in the correct information. It was great for legal firms and that’s where I used it. Made typing up a Will or Bankruptcy a breeze. It, also did not have an internet hook up. Too early.
Sampo you reminded me about something I forgot. This Wang had no hard drive either. I don’t think the Texas Instruments had a hard drive either. It depended on Floppy Drives as well. Man, it’s been so long I forgot all about that. I think that might have been true for all computers and word processors then. They didn’t have hard drives.
Anyone else know if that’s true?
@44
Caption This! Such a great timewaster between classes at University. Some great stuff came out of that.
My history:
Later upped to a A1200, can’t remember the year. That was a great machine there. If Commodore hadn’t blown it we might all be using these.
Otherwise, Amiga was way better than that machine with Windows 3.1 in it. Workbench beat the crap out of it. Definitely a step down. I believe I first subscribed to a dialup service at this point with email. Slow, but I was happy at the time.
1981 or so: VIC-20. Used cartridges like NES, just a bit longer and narrower. fun machine. I sold it to my cousin.
1982 or so: C-64. Outstanding computer. Had a cassette tape drive (later a huge floppy drive, 1541 I believe!, and that just amazing me). Got a subscription to Compute! and Compute! Gazette that year too I believe for my b-day.
1984 or so: C-128. **first internet** Used Quantum Link for many months but dad put a stop to it since it was getting expensive.
1987 or so: Amiga500, which is mentioned on the show at least once. …also, video toaster was an Amiga product. I still have a signed picture of their spokewoman.
1994 got a Packard Bell PC with the flawed Intel chip that made the news. PB was one cheapass company! Cheapest chips you could find were put in those. But still was able to play DOOM and my old Amiga couldn’t.
My current PC with Windows 7 is more amazing that all of that rolled together.
“Caption This!” I was there too! I saved quite a few pages of those. Maybe I’ll post them somewhere sometime. Had a ball with that.
“TRS-80″ My high school had one of those. And they’d keep a similar computer in a closet in the back of the room. It was fun to go back there and mess around with it. But they really needed more. I’d trade C64 programs with a classmate, first foray into piracy. Left me uneasy. If I “try” something these days and like it I buy it.
Anyway, I remember watching Mr. Wizard with his computer, showing the kids how to type in programs.
@Agentmom: seems like your WANG worked pretty good in your younger days. Sorry.
Oh, was just going to mention I had that signed photo of the Video Toaster spokeswoman when I bought the paint program that company, Newtek?, put out. Paint in 4096 colors! Pretty amazing for mid-1980s. It came with the photo and a home made cinnamon candy sucker. Nobody does THAT anymore! lol I really did love Amiga. I have a long history with it. I remember when Amiga was dying and Amiga World magazine did an article about the UK market and I nearly wet my pants. It was like being born again! I miss those times. And having Amiga mentioned on MST3K was just icing on the cake. I truly thank them for giving Amiga some props during the Joel years. Leaves me a warm feeling to think about that.
Does a Magnavox Odyssey 2 count? My dad was too cheap to spring for an Atari, so he went to Sears and found this. My favorite game was a clone of Pac Man called K.C. Munchkin. It was so embarrassing to have my friends come over and play.
@ 44 & 54 – Sci-Fi’s Caption This! I loved it! Get this: After my dad got rid of cable in the later half of summer of ’97, there were times that I was so MST3K-deprived that I got on the Caption This page while MST3K was playing, just to catch a little glimpse of the show I loved & missed so much. This was a sign of either endearing fandom or incredible sadness, I guess.
My first computer of any kind (that my family owned) was a Dell 486/33 back in 1992 right before I started high school. The thought was that my brother and I would be able to do homework on it, but it didn’t take long for me to begin installing games on it. At first it was stuff like SimCity, and later Wolfenstein 3D. Then DOOM came out at the end of ’93, and it was all over. The PC was pretty much just a gaming machine as far as I was concerned. Just after finishing my Junior year, we had a house fire which destroyed that PC. So we bought a Packard Bell (lol). Shortly after that came my first “on-line” experience. We never had AOL or Prodigy, and we didn’t have internet access until sometime later. At that time, it was local BBS’s, particularly ones that I could play Doom and Doom II on. Being able to play 4-player deathmatch without having to be on a LAN was a blast.
My family’s first computer came to us in 1983, and it was a TI-99/4A. By that point, TI was practically giving them away ($100 a pop, I think.) It was an all-in-one unit we hooked up to a TV through an RF modulator–no fancy-pantsy monitor. All software except for the very, um, basic BASIC interpreter was on solid-state cartridges, or if you wanted to run something really crazy, cassette tapes. There was a great game called PARSEC, a side-scrolling space shooter. It did have an add-on speech synthesis module that would make the various games talk in rather creepy voices.
In 1990, by which time the old TI was not doing terribly well, we got a real-deal 386 running DOS 4.0. Mm-hm! A 40 MB hard drive and 4 MB of RAM. That was the computer I really started gaming on. The Star Trek 25th Anniversary adventure game, X-Wing, TIE Fighter… yes, sir. A couple of years after we got it, we got a 2400 bps external modem and a Prodigy subscription. I don’t think I really hung around on the MST3K boards then, since I didn’t really start watching the show until high school, and that was only through borrowing a friend’s tapes–we didn’t have cable. I did play an adventure/dungeon crawl game called MADMAZE. I can still remember how Prodigy would draw the vector images for everything layer by layer.
I dialed up local BBS’s, too. Door games were my jam, as they say. Trade Wars 2002 still brings me fond memories. And ah, taking an hour to download a 1 MB shareware game via XMODEM–those weren’t the days.
Later, we moved to a 14.4 kbps modem and to better and brighter computers. We got up through Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 on that machine. Prodigy actually moved to Windows and started allowing access to the Internet instead of its closed system.
When I finally got to college, the university eventually managed to put broadband access in its dorms and I was off to the races (when it was working.) I don’t lament the loss of dial-up.
Well, first computer experience was when I was about 5 years old and played Follow Me on the Altair 8000 at the high school my dad taught at. That thing was cool – used 8 in floppies and printed to what may have been an army surplus teletype machine. Wasn’t too long after that we had an Apple// e, which I remember fondly for games like Aztec, Lode Runner, and Larry Bird vs Dr. J One on One. Oh, and People Pong, which was wrong on so many levels…
The first computer I bought for myself was a Canon Pentium 90, with a 540 MB hard drive, 14.4 modem, and I forget how much RAM. Played a lot of Arena and Tie Fighter on that guy and still managed to finish college. Still have it actually – boxed up in the garage. I also became a champion web surfer on that box, though not as much as I would’ve liked, since we only wad 1 phone line into the apartment, and we never figured out how to keep the call waiting from knocking the modem off line every time we got an incoming call.
I can’t remember my first internet experience, but I do remember that it was Dial-up. My earliest computer memory was pretty much playing Barbie Detective and Barbie Ocean Explorer.
#60 Definitely not a sign of sadness. That was one of the best ways to connect as MST3K fans back then. I still remember some of the commercials. I have an especially vivid memory of one of those sexy 1-900 ads with a woman relaxing in a candlelit room with a book.
I became aware of the Internet in 1995, via television. In 1996 my mother bought an IBM Aptiva packing, I think, an original Pentium 100 processor and Windows 95. This is the first machine I ever surfed the web on. I really got into web surfing in 2000 when my brother bought a Gateway with Win 98 and a Celeron 566 processor. This is when I really got enthusiastic and I immersed myself for days at a time.
EDIT- I still own my brother’s Gateway and he still owns my mother’s old Aptiva. We never throw away computers around here. These days I use an AMD hex core of course.
Thanks radioman970! I was afraid nobody remembered Q-Link and the great times we had loading the Vic 20 and the Commodore 64! And the dreaded head banging noise from the floppy drive that signaled the need for a reboot…
I played hours of Q-Link trivia which cost a bundle but it made me sharpen my skills so now I earn nice rewards playing competitive live trivia at bars.
…wait, I did what with my life…?
First computer was a Texas Instruments 994a. About all it was good for was playing games, or using BASIC. It did have a speech adapter, so some of the games could talk. No modem, so, we couldnt try anything like in WarGames.
First connection to the ‘Net was on a custom built computer, no brand name. It was dial-up, on a text-based browser, with a one hour time limit. So, no graphics. Eventually, we got AOL, and that really got me hooked on the ‘Net.
And for those of you who remember the glory days of Caption This, there’s a few sites where the spirit of it lives on.
http://glitterscappostparty.yuku.com/ (A wide variety of movies, TV shows, even comic books. And a week of MST3K episodes every November.)
http://lustforlunch.com/is/
http://www.hipsoda.com/caption/ (Doesnt support IE, so use Firefox, Chrome or Safari.)
@ 65 – LOL Oh I know, I was just kinda kidding about my MST3K desperation. My thing was, that was the only way I could actually *see* the show at that time, even if I wasn’t really *watching* it! It wasn’t even so much the participating in the riffing (though I think I did that, too). I remember refreshing the page over and over and grabbing a whole bunch of screen grabs while a rerun of Parts: The Clonus Horror (my favorite episode at the time) played, because that was the only way I knew how to do something like that. I really was MST3K starved. I had a few eps taped, and Rhino had already released the first round of VHS’s (but since I was a kid with severely limited funds, they served more as teasers on Best Buy’s shelf than anything). So, any glimpse of the show, even if I couldn’t hear it and had to constantly refresh the page, was welcomed. Hey, I was like 11/12 years old.
More back on topic, that was the kind of quirky feature that made that relatively early Internet so much fun. Nowadays it’s something that people wouldn’t think twice about, but back then, it was such a cool feature. It was a lot like MST3K: The Home Game, which technically introduced me to the show (although I didn’t “get it” until I saw the real thing).
Another early online experience I recall was my dad and I playing a game called (I’m pretty sure) “WebDings”, in which you drew a picture while people guessed what the subject was. Yeah, it was just online Pictionary, and it was terribly slow-going, but interacting with people in real-time like that blew my young mind.
My first computer experience was in junior high in the mid 80′s. It was all DOS stuff. The first internet experience was when I was stationed in Schweinfurt, Germany from 1994-1997. Since it was new the army wasn’t as strict as they are now on where you surfed. I’m a huge sports fan so that is where I spent most of my time. Incidentally, that’s how I met my ex-wife, through the personal ads on Yahoo. She was from WA which is where my next duty station was. That was a long 7 years
$61 – Never played Doom II online (nowhere near the connection), but used to spend offline hours a session using a fan pack that replaced all the Doom II sounds with MST3K quotes.
Picking up ammo was “Mitchell!”, picking up health was “Hyuck-ewww!”, those pink-bull things pursued you with “Sandstorm…Saaand-stooorm…”, shooting an imp-demon was “Oh, thank you very much. Shot in the face.”, monster growls in the area was the Torgo theme, and successfully completing a level was “He triiied to kill him with a forklift…”
And then the PS2 came along and made PC gaming obsolete.
Still, it’s amazing how many Windows fans still try to needle Mac fans twenty-five years later with “Your computer can’t play GAMES!” (Yeah, and neither can anybody else’s, nowadays.)
@69 I understand completely about desperation when it comes to watching MST3K. Being Canadian, we’ve never had it on any of our networks here. All we got were cheesy half hour clip shows which were nowhere near as funny. The old VHS releases and tape trading was the only place I could get them (I traded vintage DW for MST3K). So the usenet newsgroups (and later Caption This!) were vital to keeping my love of the show going.
First time I actually jumped into the world wide web was 1996 at Humboldt State’s library. I was there for about five hours. Didn’t get my own computer until around 1998.
My first online experience was with a device called Web TV….looking back man did that thing suck.
The year was 1991 (I think) and my husband and I were in college. I spent almost a year saving $2400 to buy a Gateway 2000 (as it was called back then) 486 (66 mhz processor) with 16mb ram, 424 meg hard drive, DOS and Windows 3.1, and a 15″ monitor.
When my husband came home a few hours later, he saw the computer in pieces on the bed. He dang near had a heart attack. “You spent over two grand on that and you take it apart?!”
I gave him an odd look and pointed at the owner’s manual. “It told me to, so I could familiarize myself with the parts.” Back then computer companies expected the user to be able to upgrade the memory, harddrive and the like.
It also came with a 14.4 mb modem. My first experience online with that computer was using Compuserve and the Mosaic browser (which was way ahead of it’s time). That night I went from the White House to some site in Australia. I felt like quite the world-traveller.
Back in 1989, as an accountant for a mid-cap company, I used to send and receive Excel templates to and from various subsidiaries in the compilation of consolidated financial statements. I didn’t quite comprehend the technical details behind this data transfer. All I knew was that the computer squealed terribly and I wanted to put it out of my misery.
@67. lol .. it was a blast. I even uploaded some artwork I made to it. It was great to download little programs and games, not have to type them in from the magazine listings. I still have a few of the monthly guides they sent out to keep you interested. It really was amazing to go other places using a computer. Something so new at the time. …yeah, that was one loud disc drive. I remember replacing it with something newer with my C128. Night and day on that change.
btw, I had a 300 baud modem with my C64/c128. I don’t remember much about it. I may have gotten it as a package with Q-link… or maybe not. can’t remember. With Amiga I had a 14,400. I did very little with it. I would never have dreamed I’d be where I am now. Being able to download anything and everything digital friendly. Really amazing.
Now, another good question is how long did it take everyone to download porn when they got hooked up on the net first? lol Internet porn is pretty sad these days, but when it was new.. hell! Felt like a kid again finding one of dad’s special magazines under their mattress!
I wasn’t going to post, as I was late to the PC game at home, but with nobody appearing old enough to have the same experience as I, I decided to chime in to educate all you young whipper-snappers. During either the 1969-70 or 1970-71 school year, our high school bought two “computers.” They were approximately 6′ x 4′ x 4′ and required you to load programs by paper tape. The math whizzes in our school (me included) got to play around with them. I don’t remember much of the details, senility having set in, but I did know that we could program the “computer” to do some simple tasks. Then in college, at Oregon State, I majored in Computer Science. It was weird, that although I received said degree, I never actually ran a computer, rather programming it through Hollerith cards (as some have noted), submitting them and waiting for the turn-around time to receive the printout. The computer was a CDC 6600, which filled the room. To think that my laptop has more computing power.
But, being in the 70′s, (that’s 1970, Servo) and the economy being bad, I stayed in college an extra year and added accounting to my degree. That is where my career took me. Although wanting a computer at that time, accounting was not lucrative enough to live on, much less to satisfy one’s desires. The first company I worked for had a mainframe (an IBM 386, or something like that, it took up a much smaller room), and, except for reading a few reports and receiving my paycheck, I didn’t have any interaction with it. The next company, after I had been there a couple of years, bought a couple of Apple 2c computers. But, my boss got to use it, not me. I was bummed, thinking I was dissed even though they knew I had a degree. It had two 5.25″ floppy drives, no memory and used a spreadsheet program, called VisiCalc, with 64 rows and 13, maybe columns. Later, the company expanded computer usage to include other accounting types. We received another spreadsheet program, which I can’t recall, and a word processor, and I was asked to do some reports with it. This gave me my first experience with PC macros, which both helped the process and got me into trouble. Ah, the days. My next company was headed by a Luddite, so I did my accounting with ledger books. This was a big step backward from my other companies. Eventually we got Compaq “luggables” with a tiny green screen. I remember buying Dr. J vs. Larry Bird to give my two boys something to play with when I had to work on Saturdays. My wife and I were somewhat purists, so we tried to shield our kids from the evil of video games. It didn’t work. they went to a neighbor’s house who had a Nintendo. Later, when my mother gave them a Super Nintendo for Christmas, we knew we were licked. When my company replaced the luggables with desktops, I asked if I could buy one. The asking price was $1,200, so I said no thanks. Instead I bought a Micron computer (a Pentium 200Mhtz) and that was all she wrote. The upshot is that both of my children are computer geeks, one a programmer and the other a support person, I have a Dell 1720, and am writing this history.
Ah, my first computer. A Radio Shack/Tandy Color Computer 2. Got the 4-slot expansion port into which I plugged an RS-232 cartridge, a speech cartridge, and who-knows-what else. Bought a 300 baud modem (had to dial on a separate phone and throw the connect switch when the server answered and squealed at you) which I used to connect to CompuServe. I still remember my CIS ID and password.
My first MS-DOS computer was a Tandy 1000-A, running MS-DOS 2.22. Eventually bought the Windows program (version 2.03) which was a cute novelty at the time.
Upgraded the 1000 to 640K, added a second 5.25″ floppy drive (eventually adding a 3.5″) as well as a 80286 (it came with an 8088) and a 20 MB hard drive. I was set for life, to hear me talk.
Though I no longer have the CoCo 2, I still have that 1000. It ran the last time I booted it, about 5-6 years ago.
I started at home with the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A with the tape drive, circa 1982. Mostly used it to play games.
I also wrote stupid little programs in Basic to do things like run Monte-Carlo-style analyses of the various dice methods for generating ability scores for D&D characters.
Method III was the best.
Can’t remember what my first online computer was. But I do remember my first two favorite online activities were Caption This and Sci-Fi’s Mindprobe trivia game. I even wound up writing a couple of the themed games. The only bad part was that occasionally my dial-up modem would kick me off in the middle of a game.
My first PC was similar to Crow’s. 75Mhz Pentium, 4x CD-ROM, 14.4kbps modem, 1.2Gb HDD, 16Mb RAM and Windows 3.1, though I upgraded to Windows 95 soon after. Mostly played games on the PC, but was able to use the internet.
My first computer was an Apple ][+. I eventually installed the AppleCat 300 baud modem for dial up to local BBSs (Bulletin Bard Systems, before online communities or the public internet). It was state of the art back in the day, including 2 external 5.25″ floppy drives and that green Monitor III. Even wrote my own BBS code in assembly language at one point (that was fun)!
Though I think I enjoyed Zork I, II & III more than the BBS experience. Those were real games
From there I upgraded too many times to keep track of & joined most online communities (CompuServe, Delphi, et al) that existed in the beginning. Then there was the internet…
First computer, eh? I’m old, so my first computer was a Tandy dual-5.25″ floppy with no hard drive, lovely CGA graphics, lovely internal beeper to simulate sound effects and music (love Greensleaves in KQII!), running DOS (but because no hard drive, you had to have the DOS boot disk in drive bay 1 every time you turned on the computer). Needless to say, this computer was NOT Internet capable. It was to be many years until my family finally had an Internet-ready computer (“Internet” in this case being proxied by Prodigy, through a 2400-baud dial up modem – love that dial-up sound!).
And when I finally did go online, I wasted time chatting about Stephen King books and not MST. Oh well.
I forgot to mention games. First non-computer game was a Pong console a friend had. Thought that was super amazing and all around neato. After playing with our cousins A2600, we got our own eventually… But back on topic, first computer game was an Adventure cartirdge on VIC-20. Not the nifty graphic game from A2600 with the dragons that swallow ya if you don’t find all the keys, but an imaginative text adventure game with no graphics at all. I really got into text/graphic adventures on my C64 because of that. all those Telarium (had to look that name up) games. I sold my dirt bike, bought a stack of those things and became introverted.
On VIC, i also got Lunar Lander cartridge (coincidence, just bought Lunar Flight from steam’s sale yesterday) and some mouse find the cheese maze game that I played the hell out of it. Only remember running the mouse around this maze in search of cheese that would pop up. Much more fun than it sounds.
I listed C128 as my first computer for going online, but I may have done that with a C64. REALLY hard to remember. I do remember that once I got my Amiga and modem I was desperate to find free numbers to link up to just so I could. I think many of us probably had a special place in our hearts for the movie Wargames. I sure did! But I never got linked up anywhere that would make me look cool to a girl like Alley Sheedy, damnit!
I see a lot of Zork mentions – for those feeling nostalgic (like me), Activision has released a bunch of those old Infocom games as an IPad app. A little weird with the touch screen, but still… (Unfortunately, four of the best titles are not included for some reason: Hitchhiker’s Guide, Beaurocracy, Sherlock, and Nord&Bert are all absent).
My family finally got a computer when I was in high school. It was 1996, an Acer (piece of ****) with a Pentium II running Windows 95 with a 28.8K modem using the Microsoft Network internet service. I was able to run a few games on there with some success, like the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and Warcraft II and Starcraft.
Prior to that it was just whatever computer classes I had in elementary school back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It was mostly on the Apple IIe. I had a friend with an older brother who had a computer. I watched him play a game on it, but I was unimpressed as I had a NES on which to play games.
I don’t remember what my first computer was, but we got it sometime in the mid-’90s and I remember my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to use the Internet. So I spent the whole time playing computer games and screwing around in Microsoft Paint. We upgraded to a new machine in 1998, and by then I was 12 years old and my parents said the Internet was okay. I had my first encounter with the world of message boards when I stumbled upon the official Calvin and Hobbes discussion board at uexpress.com – I exhibited all the typical preteen n00b behavior, using my real name as my username, typing my messages all in caps, and spamming every thread on the board with my own self-absorbed nonsense. I like to think I’ve matured since then.
Funny story – this also led to one of my earliest experiences with MST3K. Fanfic MSTing was common on the Calvin and Hobbes boards, and each member was invited to contribute, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. Again, I’ve grown up.
WARNING Long response
First computer was a Commodore 64. Loved that thing, playing CBS Mystery Theater (and always losing), one of those mid 80′s Marvel games where the heroes were fighting an original villain, Shogun, and some dungeon maker game. Tried the modem but my step-sis had to explain you needed to subscribe for it to work.
Four years later my stepfather bought an Acer, which only lasted long enough for me to play & love Descent (especially with it’s goth-metal soundtrack) and get bored with Wheel of Fortune (just due to having a limited number of puzzles). Ironically I forgot the lesson of that brand’s problems and bought an Acer as my first laptop 15 years later, even after a roommate’s messed-up. My current one – a Compaq I found marked WAY down at Wal-Mart – might not be perfect but it hasn’t made me want to smash the screen like I did with the Acer.
Didn’t get on internet till six months after my dad bought a PC (can’t remember model) and I decided to see what this AOL thing was that he spent all his time on. From there I discovered Usenet and RATMM, as well as MiSTings (the less said about my attempts the better). Like @60 the internet in general was a good fix for those MST-less years, though in my case it was the fact I didn’t have a cable provider that carried Sci-Fi till ’99 (too lazy to look at list of past discussions, have we done a “first Sci-Fi channel episode”?)
On the first computer I owned myself – an old Tandy bought from my step-mom – I used Prodigy, and loved the BBS sections too (got two warnings for my part in flamewars on the Howard Stern board). I didn’t know about viruses, though, and it got one that sent it to the stone age. I still held on to it, but could only use DOS
and an e-mail program, but I belonged to a great X-Men list, a decent MiSTing one, and an awful Simpsons list that forever colored my perception of that fandom.
Re “The internet is for”: Without getting explicit my first exposure to that was still on the geeky side, with Star Trek & X-Files erotic fics. Actually, I think those stories were the third thing I ever found on the net after checking out High Times.com (total stoner as a teen) and AOL’s MST & Doctor Who forums.
@14 I think I ran up a thousand bucks with those hourly rates because I spent so much time playing reply-by-post roleplays on the Gargoyles (as Macbeth) and Doctor Who (as a gothic borderline-Mary-Sue Time Lord protege of the Doctor) boards.
@44 Loved Caption This, even if I couldn’t figure out how to submit my own the one time I tried (it was for some weird looking cast shot and my riff was something like “The Prodigy’s new look didn’t go over that well”)
@43 & 50 I curse myself for not buying a copy I saw at a second-store in the early 90′s.
@71 Other than the aforementioned Descent I’m a console gamer – that’s why it took six months for me to try AOL, I was too busy playing Goldeneye & Mario RPG on N64, Doom & Discworld on PS1 (re the former, I declared out loud “SNES version sucks!” when I played their port for the first time), and Chrono Trigger for the millionth time on SNES.
Wow, the responses here. The first computer I USED was an Apple IIe that my Dad would bring home on school breaks (he was a teacher and no, i don’t think was supposed to). I remember playing Ultima III alot!
The first computer I OWNED was a Texas Instruments 99/4A with all the candy: tape drive, sound cartridge, joysticks and a “extra memory” cartridge (32kB extra space!). It had 16kB RAM and it was notable for using cartridges so I could play Hunt the Wumpus and Munch Man and a keyboard for writing code in BASIC and make something of myself. Mostly I wound up playing an early MuD game called Tunnels of Doom. In addition, every once in a while the computer would shout “Zygonauts approaching!” or “Press REDO or BACK!” You could also program it to say stuff like “You are a but head!” I still have it in my garage. I followed that up with an Apple IIGS with a dot matrix printer, which was notable for being the computer Apple basically dumped after 2 years of production for their Macintosh line. I had that until I was done with college.
As for the internet, I used to email my friend at Northwestern on a teletype hooked up to their server. Later I got into something called AOL, which was slow even then (I think my Mom still uses it).
My first computer was actually my family’s first computer, which we got when I was about four or five (around 1984, I think). It was an old Texas Instruments; it had cartridges like an old NES to fit in to play games or run programs, and it hooked up to the TV. Being four, the game part was all I was really in to.
Our next family computer was something called a Kaypro. It was supposed to be portable, in that it folded down to something the size of a large suitcase. It took up a ton of desk space, and had a tiny screen in glowing green.
We eventually got a string of “real” computers. My dad’s never been one for brand names, so he’d get friends to help him build one or buy parts from our local surplus store and try and install them himself. Our machines were a mishmash of brands and parts. ‘Twas on one of these machines he eventually installed Prodigy when I was in about fifth grade, and that was my first foray onto the internet. I seem to recall going on Weekly Reader, Nova, and National Geographic for kids a lot. The graphics were oh-so-dazzling 16 color blocky abominations, and everyone had gray skin on the Nova and Nat Geo site graphics. It was like learning with zombies. Good times.
After we moved and I got into MST3K, I sought out to see if Prodigy had an MST3K section, and lo and behold enter the Prodigy Forums. I started with the immensely creative name “a MSTie”, and later switched to “SOLring” after I discovered Magic: The Gathering. I think I still have some printouts of one or two of the round robin story games somewhere, which were quite hilarious.
My first computer that was mine was bought for college, an IBM Aptiva that had been a demo model at Circuit City. Had a gigantic 2 Gig hard drive! Wow! It got me through the first two years. The best MST3K-related thing that happened to me (until going to Cinematic Titanic last year) was on that computer, when I won the second round of the MST3K Sci-Fi Mindprobe Trivia game; it was a proud nerd and MSTie moment. I still have my lithograph and t-shirt.
I then befriended some computer science majors who were big on fixing computers. My computer became an Aptiva in name only. To this day, between my dad and my friends, I seem to have developed a personal aversion to prepackaged machines.
By the way, my parents never let my sister or I have video games growing up because they wanted us to know how to use a computer instead, though they would buy us games for it. For the record, I just got my electronic health records certification, and my sister has a degree in computer science. I begrudgingly admit they had something going there.
YOU had a 386 ??? !!!!
Wow, weren’t WE POSH and high teck ??!!
My first computer at home was a Tandy 1400 “lap top” (14 pounds) with two 3.5 floppy drives and an 8088 processor with a top speed of 7 megahertz. I later got a math co-processor with helped considerably.
I go it on sale for $1600 with no hard drive as that cost an additional $1600. CGA graphics on a monochrome screen.
I bought a modem, about the size of a packet of cigarettes and an online program (the modem did not come with one) from a Shareware store.
My city had a free weekly computer magazine that listed BBs and I finally signed on to one after three hours of trying to figure the thing out. I believe it was a blazing 12 kbps speed.
Later I got Prodigy and liked it for the online encyclopedia and a few discussion boards, all pre-MST3K nationally.
Believe it or not, with WordStar 5 (and a later 20 Mb hard drive that you patched through your printer port) I made it through college.
DAK and Damark allowed me to get a real keyboard and RGB monitor for color. I had that thing for five years before they stopped making CGA programs.
NERDS haha. besides your first computer experience, was first internet experience? mine waa good ol Webtv. sittin in the recliner with a wireless keyboard chatting at the old sci fi mst3k chat.
popping into that same chat the same night it was “pre empted” by blair witch chat night. o those days
My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 with cassette drive. Just loading the Star Trek text adventure game took over 30 mins. Playing it wasn’t usually worth the wait. I shelved the Vic-20 until I got a Commodore 64 with external floppy drives (yes, TWO!)
My first PC was an old 8088 IBM PC with a 5 mb hard drive that I rehabilitated when my company “upgraded” to the IBM XT.
First online experience? I guess it might have been Apple Talk from an Apple II, but I can’t remember exactly. I was also running an MST3K dial-up BBS for a while.
I remember jumping MST3K groups from Compuserve (expensive), to GEnie (free, but sucked), to Prodigy (free and better), to AOL (but only after they offered live chat). I used to pay my AOL bill by working as one of their tech support people from home – they traded online hours for tech support hours. That was all a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
My first computer and online computer was an Amiga 2000. It had it all…color..stereo sound…great games.
Got online for the first time while living in Germany using the Amiga and an external 1200 modem. Slow, but it worked.
The first computer I ever remember using was an old Mac SE that was given to my grandma when I was two or three. My mom still has a picture somewhere of me, with my arms around the computer, hugging it, because I didn’t want to go home and figured if I held on to it tight enough, it would come with me. My arms didn’t even go around the thing, because I was so small.
My aunt and uncle were early adopters of the Internet, and my cousin used to do voice chat on MSN messenger, probably around 2000 or 2001. She also got me set up with my first email address and blog when I was about 6, much to my parents’ chagrin. I still remember my cousin and her brother screaming at each other and getting into knock-down hair-pulling fights because they had to take turns on the Internet. Those were the days!
We didn’t get our own computer until I was almost 10, and then didn’t get Internet until 2 years later, despite my incessant begging.
All that early exposure to computers must have done something to me, though, because now I’m in college majoring in IT. And still trying to hunt down that old SE.
My first internet experience was actually MST3K related. I attended the University of New Hampshire in Durham during the fall semester of 1995. All students were given usernames and passwords to access the school’s computers, and the fact that the University had internet access was a big deal at the time. Not being very computer-literate, I couldn’t tell you what type or brand of computers the school used – I want to say Mac, but I don’t quite remember. Having recently joined the MST Info Club, I was curious if I could actually contact someone from the show, so I wrote my first-ever e-mail to Julie Walker. If I remember correctly, my e-mail consisted mostly of afew questions about the show, namely its future, since there was growing speculation about its demise at the time. Within 24 hours, I had my first response, from the very lovely Mrs. Walker, answering my questions and assuring me that there would be new episodes – and afew Season 1 eps too! – come Thanksgiving Week. I recall being thrilled that I had received a response at the time….I had my reservations about the internet up to that point. That was the first step to ending that hesitation.
Our family’s first computer was the Apple //gs, which my Dad purchased some time around my 12th birthday. For some reason, Apple decided that although the Macintosh was great (despite its “toaster” appearance back then), people still wanted a souped-up version of the “E” and “C” models of the past. Yep, Hard Disk Drive and Modem both sold-separately and EXTERNAL. Neither hardware nor software was compatible with Macintosh either. Still, in 1993 we managed to get a 2400 bps Modem from Q Computers, an education supply house, and I was able to access Electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBS’s) such as “The WaStEd WaCkEr” and “Moth World” for the first time.
My first Internet experience was sort of roundabout. In 1995, before my community college bought proper computers with actual web browsers, we had the option to use the “LINCC” terminal system, based on the VT-1000, whatever that was. My friend Sean and I pulled up the “gateway” section and I typed in Comedy Central’s address (it being the only one I knew from memory) into a search engine. LINCC had no address bar (or pictures, obviously), so this was the best I could get. The first page we clicked was something called “Spandex and You,” which linked to a database of lightbulb jokes. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Blue.