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?
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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:
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. :) 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.
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. :( 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.
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.
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. :)
@Agentmom: seems like your WANG worked pretty good in your younger days. Sorry.
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 :sidefrown:
$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! :D
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. :p 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.