What got you interested in computers?

[Prometheus]

What inspired you to start using computers?

What about them intrigued you....?

I woke up early when i was 6 a lot and i came in and dinked around on her computers with her. I was fascinated by all the things computers could do...

By age 10 i was instant messaging and playing games over the net making "pokemon" websites on homestead *shudder*

and here i am now 14 ...yup yup....ok not much has changed i still play games and instant msg but no pokemon and im learning to program in a month or 2 :)


what got everyone else interested

NO SHORT ANSWERS LIKE "It was just there"
or stupid answers... This is a computer fourm?

[TheRogue]

back when i was 4 (or earlier) mum used to take me to her school on inset (teacher training) days, and i was dumped in her school library, where they had lots of BBC micros and acorns

this has to be the main influence, also explains my ability in maths, back then (this is 12 years ago now at least), all i played were maths related games (and was pretty good :P)

at my own school, we had some bbcs and acorns, quite a few times the school let me borrow one of theirs for the weekend to play on (this is year 1 in uk.. so i'm 5-6)

i eventually got my own acorn (if you're in the UK it's the most common one you used to see in schools), that lasted a couple of years.. from then i got my first pc.. a comcrap 486.. to an apricot p75... and on and on :)

[TheRogue]

o0o, forgot to add

first went online in 1995, aged 8 (or 9), on good ole msn internet, £5 a month for unlimited access, and something like 3p a minute phone charge, playing yahoo games and god knows, my first alias, pc_nut on yahoo!, back then yahoo was the greatest thing online :)

[Aemon_]

well, from elemetary to middle school, all we had to use was Apple IIE's and IIGS's. in middle school we did use some power macs, but i didnt touch a pc until high school. i took all the keyboarding, business computer apps classes, then i took VB in my senior year - and that started my downfall. i broke my ankle the last few months of my senior year, so i sat on the sofa, learning HTML on my parents WebTV. go to college, had access to real computer labs, then found free parts from a guy who had some junk sitting around and built my first computer. yeah, it was a p60 (in '99, yes, very far behind). now i work as a web developer.

CLIFF'S NOTES: i like teh intraweb!

later

[james]

well, my school had apple IIe's as well, and we had an 8086 at home (no 3.5" floppy even!). That was back when I was real little, in the 80's. I learned to type on that and learned basic wordperfect and lotus (all of it blue screen), i also played a game or two (bricks, pacman, space invaders, etc.). We got a 486 when they came in to 'reasonable' pricerange (the DX2, 66MHz, with the turbo button, you gotta luv the turbo button), and got prodigy internet on a 2400 baud modem. I learned bb's on that, along with a bit of IRC and then just surfing, but it was expensive! I kinda just used computers all of my life, only got real interest in them when I wanted my own but had to build it from 3 computers that wouldn't even turn on or POST. (the only computer i've ever seen held together with duct tape.) I learned a lot figuring that out and now I'm here.

[eviltechie]

my dad and his team back in his 20's made a missile without the invention of microprosessors yet

so he made it with IC and all these old school stuff

so he worked alot with electronics and computers when some of those big ass tape computers came out in the 70's when he worked in Honeywell in US

then when i was 8 years old back in 1992, my uncle had a computer tutoring class with 486 and 586's... i think that was the time... give or take 1 year or 2

later in 1995 i got my own family comp and it was a TwinHead laptop
P1-166 i think...
top of the line back then

even before then i have used my aunt's IBM laptop before running windows 3.1...

when i first used a mac it was later in 1997 in canada on a black&white screen appleII i guess
playing pong...

i really got into comps when i got my P2-300Mhz comp in 1998 or 99

then i started to go deeper into hardwares and stuff

[MIK3]

Started back when my cousin gave me his old computer. It was running Win 95 at the time. The latest and greatest version of windows, at the time. It took me a while to adapt to it. And for a while, I really didn't do much on it other than game. Then we upgraded to a Packard Bell, (curse the day it happened). Heh. That's when I started learning all there was to know about computers. And not till about a year and a half ago did I really start getting into computers, inside and out. I joined this forum, and with the help of vee_ess...I now know what I know today. Then about half a year ago, I got a real computer. Thank god for that day. I started replacing parts and upgrading to what I now have. I must say, I am still learning. But for 16, I can't complain on the knowlege I have. It doesn't compare at all to what the people know, who taught me...but one day I'll be up there with the rest of the people on this forum. Hopefully, I will never stop learning.

[Ryon]

It started with a top of the line computer my parents bought the fam for christman, top of the line at its time, a whopping pentium 100 with 850 meg hard disk. played ultament doom alot...
I come from a small town so we didnt have many computers in the lower levels of school, but when i got to high school i decided to sign up for a computer science class, ya know, computers i liked playing solitare and talking on ,at the time AOL :rofl: ) as it turns out i had a REALLY great teacher teach me C++, i liked it so much i transfed to the AP class and have been learning every sence. I guess its the idea of open ended problems. Most problems aren not what is the answer, its this is the answer, now how do you get there??

[wizbones]

I bought my first computer for typing up training outlines, hated typewriters.

It was commadors first AT Compatible, ran at 7.5 Mhz had to 5 1/4 drives with a whopin 640k of mem.

Basically just typed and printed my training outlines - then a friend talked me into getting Lesiure Suite Larry - Getting that game to run taught me a lot and is basically what hooked me - after that games got more and more comlex and you had to do a lot more configuration to get them working - just kept learning more and getting even more hooked.

That was back in '85 started out with Windowz 3.0 and Good Ol' DOS. I entered the IT industry professionally in '98 as a tech providing support for PC's and Macs for Netscape Browsers starting with version 1.x and lasted through 4.x until moving on to Gateway 2000, TEN, Meril Lynch Online, HP and a few others.

Then was a lead Network Tech for a local ISP - did that for a few years and now run my own PC shop out in the middle of no where - here in the near future am starting my own wireless broadband ISP.

And I owe it all to Lesiure Suit Larry :lol:

[Uranium-235]

welcome back wiz!

[wizbones]

It has been awhile hasn't it? Been really busy, will try to stop by more often :rolleyes:

[MIK3]

Wizbones, what's going on man! It's Soccer_Stud here. Geeze, it's been a while. Glad you're back man.

/ot

[bilo86]

I'd say when I was in 4th grade. I was always on AOL and got into the "progs" scene..heh. Then where it really kicked off was a couple years later my brother bought me HTML 4 Dummies book and I started by making BMX websites and then everything took off from there and I haven't been offline since. :)

[xMerCLorDx]

i used to hang out on BBS's when i was in 5th grade if anyone is old-school enough to know what i'm talking about you're 1337 ;D heheh i hung out on all kinds of local boards.. anyway about a year later messing with that, i became interested in the public libraries' local directory system and through that they gave free internet access...it was limited because when you dialed in you could pretty much only use terminal sessions..and it was all commandline driven.. and so i got crazy with telnet, learned basic commands and whatnot, and then i started messing with basic unix stuff through that. I played a few MUDs but they're pretty boring.. uhm in middle school i got into more of the hardware side of things. i worked in the library fixing the computers and making cables. i gained a very loose comprehension of networking here. since then i went through high school and took cisco classes for 2 years. i have competed in national computer competitions and score reasonably high. i got 16th in the microsoft network administration, and 5th in the network design team nationally. and state wide i got first in computer network technologies, first in network design team, third in information systems, second in cisco network administration, and second in pc servicing and troubleshooting. i'm not really the best at anything..i'm just a farily broad based kinda kid.. i suck ass at math so a lot of you guys have a much better understanding of that. i don't consider myself very intelligent, i just have a reeeeaallly obsessive passion for computers.


for anyone who read through my lifes history, props to you!.. lol

[nickc]

I'm going to show my age now. I got started in about 1982 when the ZX Spectrum was first launched. Games were plentiful and cheap. It came with an excellent manual that taught you programming. The magazine shelves were jammed with magazines offering program listings that you type in and learn from. Ah, the nostalgia...

Nick

[Johnw]

It all started when I got arrested at a young age for something stupid. Bare with me :mercy:, I got sent to bootcamp for about six months. I didn't know what I wanted to do in life, so I just took classes that were offered at camp. There was a computer class that taught A+ cert. and I was not even in it because I thought it was hard and a waste of time. Eventually, I was forced to take that class because it was the only class available at my age level. I attended the class and soon after I was introduced to Cisco. I loved it :love:! I got my A+, CCNA, and half of my CCNP certifications. Now, I am attending college and majoring in computer science. I am also planning to finish CCNP and get my CCIE as well.

[Jason425]

http://brawl-hall.com/gallery/data/media/5/littlestory.jpg
good luck

[gnogtr]

I got into computers in the 8th grade when I hacked the computer lab at my middle school because the teacher was quite dense and I had to teach her how to use the computer when I had no prior experience...

[Travis]

Mine is short and simple.... the madness all started when I was given a Commodore 64 for Christmas when I was 8. No one had computers back then! The madness seemed to compound itself when I picked up a 300bps modem w/450bps turbo mode!

[jojasary]

when my friend showed me what "DOOM" was at his dads office. Of course back then we werent allowed to play so hed exit the game whenever he came in the room. It scared the hell out of me when i was a kid though!

[StinkyMojo]

I've got to say Ski Free on Windows 3.1 ....
ahh the joys I had with that game :D

[Jason425]

that game OWNED..i hate the dog thing that eats you

[StinkyMojo]

the abominable snowman!! lol dog thing, Jason you crack me up :lol:

[gnogtr]

Yeah, I hated him too. 3.1 was soooo easy to hack :D

[Jason425]

back then comps were like gods to me.. those were the days..

[StinkyMojo]

back then comps were like gods to me.. ..

they still are to me :nod:

[Jason425]

pfft.. I am the comp's god now..

[Dragon]

my aunt sent us an old TI comp. yeah like the calulator company.
i was lik 6 orsomething. used to have figure out the command to run "Captain Goddnight" which you had to beat in like 2 hours or somthing or the world exploded. it was all about timing. but i learned how to make that thing do all sorts of stuff (just like i still do on the TI 93s or whatever in algebra >:) ) anyway - my dad bought an old aptiva - which i set out to learn everything i could about - of course as soon as i got to see the inside of one i was hellbent on how does this thing work - still havent figured out one little part - what configuration of electrical charges tells the computer to interpret the other ones as instructions? where the first on come from?

how many licks to the center of a tootsie pop?

the one thing ive figured out in 2.5 years of prgramming: computers are only as smart as you make them.

[StinkyMojo]

the one thing ive figured out in 2.5 years of prgramming: computers are only as smart as you make them.

word to that...