What is your earliest computer related memory?

Every now and then I'll read comments harking back to peoples experiences from the early days of the Internet. Recently there was Argent's tale of the ENIAC bug. Now, I've been a computer geek for... a while, and I got to thinking about what my earliest computer related memory was. Not just something I'd heard of, but something I'd interacted with.

So here's mine, interested to hear yours.

On a school trip I visited the computer center at the Atomic Energy Research Station at Winfrith Newburgh. I remember it being hot and incredibly noisy what with all the punch card stations and other mechanical peripherals. My prized souvenir from the trip was a punch card which read:
'TRUNCAT3 TO INTEGER'

(The 3 replaces an E because that's another one of the 'bad words' for posting here)

Things have come along a bit since then

If you think this whole thread is a waste of time please just ignore it. I won't be offended.

Rime

I remember as a child my father took me to the office where he worked one weekend to show me the Teletype terminal newly and proudly installed in what used to be a broom closet. I liked the paper tape punch, and especially the chads it produced (though I didn't learn that they were called chads until about five years ago).

Am I the youngster here? I took a math elective in 1982 to get out of taking trigonometry in high school. We learned to do simple programs in FORTRAN, COBAL, and BASIC. Our computer was a dial-in access to the school system mainframe using the old phone-and-cradle modems. The lab had two actual computers as well: a Commodore PET and an Altair 8800. The next year I got my first computer, a TI99-4/A.

My earliest memory I was probably using Windows...3.0? Maybe 3.1?

My next door neighbor bought an Apple II about 3 months before the IIe came out and I remember him being ....

custom government stuff. the wonders of breadboard programming and boot decks.

Online shopping

This one doesn't really count as it didn't involve actually using a computer, but it is a very important computer-related memory of mine. There was an extremely good library near my secondary school. On the shelves was a book called, "Programming the IBM 1620: A hands On Approach". It assumed you were sitting at the typewriter of the computer, and was my introduction to programming a computer directly, rather than via a high-level language - albeit, entirely in theory only. Sadly I've never seen a 1620 in real life.

Quite a difference from the usual ALGOL and FORTRAN books.

And in case you're wondering, no, I'm not quite that old. It was just a well stocked library with some, to me, unusual books.

My first actual hands-on experience was the ZX81.

Do consoles count here? Pong is my earliest memory if so.

call -151

Around 1978, some kind of space-battle game with Star Trek ships on an computer at my friend's dad's office. I remember the computers had the big washing-machine style external drives.

The first stuff I remember that I can put specs to was my Sinclair ZX81 with a whole 1KB of RAM, which I used to learn the basics of BASIC.

I think I played an old game of Lode Runner when I was 5? But I remember Sesame Street and that gay couple Bert and Ernie.
And telly tubbies and that gay one with the handbag.

One of these:

http://www.mypilotstore.com/MyPilotStore/sep/522

My dad was a pilot and he had a few laying around the house.......he gave one for my very own.

Then before I got a Spectrum I had this:

http://website.lineone.net/~lineup/st-games/images/grandstand-astrowarsdg.jpg

My sister wrote me a letter on punchcards in about, oh... 1972. I think still have the two-inch thick stack of cards in their envelope.

1st i saw was the zx80, 1st i owned was the zx-spectrum 48k




i still get a bit sentimental when i see it



.

My earliest didn't involve an actual computer, that was an Elliot 803, located about 70 miles away. It was during High School, we'd type out our programming attempts on teletypes, which would output our Algol program on 5 hole paper tape. This tape would be telexed to the computer center fed into the computer and any output, also on 5 hole paper tape would be telexed back.
Of course, if the teletype or telex missed a hole, the program wouldn't compile.
The cool thing was, you could edit your program directly on the 5 hole paper tape using sticky tape and a small hole punch.

The first "mass" storage I bought was a 10mb hard drive for the the first Compaq luggable - cost $2,800 in 1985 dollars, about 56,000 times more expensive than today - give or take...

Playing Nibbles, Tetris, Blockout and Casino on an XT, which we got the famous "un-fillable" 512KB hard drive for.

My mom took me to an electronics store that was also making punch cards, and I went home all abounce with a big bag of tiny, yellow punch card confetti.

Learning the circuitry of a bi-magnetic core computer - used for ecrypted communications. It also used punched cards.

My first computer experience was a Tandy 80 when I was.. 8. We had Invader and some math bingo game for that. The math bingo game was to make Mom happy with it, because it then became "educational." I think when I was 10 we got a Commodore 64. I learned a bit of BASIC in Jr High, because our business class computer lab consisted of nothing but Commodore 64s. This was before computers were actually seen as useful in schools and real funding was allotted to them.

I was a very destructive child. Instead of saving the city in Save New York on the Commodore 64, I'd destroy the city before the monsters could and then I'd destroy the monsters... And if I played against my sister, she went before the buildings. So too did my supply plane.

I was a late bloomer. I got my first computer in 2000, when I was 30.

Setting up accounts for the male programmers on Compuserv when it opened in 1969. I snuck in a account for me also..