My first encounter with a PC was when my folks bought me a Commodore 64 back in the 80's. It was fun but I quickly bored of it and it hit the shelf for 10 odd years before I pawned it off for $50.

I never really got aquainted with 'puters until the much more advanced age of 22. In about 97 I bought a playstation and got hooked on games and of course always looking for the best of the best I upgraded myself to PC's. My first one being a PII333 with a Diamond 3D monster. Now Im a fairly inquisitive fellow when it comes to figuring out how things work, so I managed to trash the thing on many occasions and rebuild it again. So I really gave myself a trial by fire, plus the fact that I refused to pay anyone to fix it for me.

How I got involved in IT is quite a different story though. One of my mates from work dragged me along to a local college for an information session for an IT course. I had every intention of leaving at the end of the session but they started to hand out these aptitude tests for admission into the course. I was about to get up to leave but no-one else did, so I got a little freaked and thought "What the hell I'll just do it." Turns out I did pretty well in it cause some weeks later I recieved conformation that I had been accepted, however the mate that had dragged me along was rejected. I thought "Well if I made it this far I might as well check it out for 6 months and if I dont like it i'll quit"
Anyway everything with computers seemed to make sense to me, so I was pretty quick to adapt to them. After about 6 years of part time study I finally finished my network engineering diploma a couple of months ago and through pure arse find myself working in the Inrastructure Services department of the company where I used to be an office clerk 5 years ago.

My first computer was a bread-and-butter word processor, and it had a 'bootstrap' error every time it started up...
I dont know the exact time my knowledge merged with Binary but it was sometime between when i got the next computer (Pentium 586, still have it) and when it's hard drive exploded.
Ever since then i seem to have had computer knowledge about 3-5 years ahead of people my age.

I've been a comput manic as long as I can rememb.....

Stop complianing and start playing

Edited by - The shroud on 8/22/2004 8:05:16 PM

me since about 4 on Ye Olde Compaq 386 I used to think man this thing is awesome! then the 486 came out and i was like man this thing is awesome!! the pentium came out and im like man this thing is awesome!!! and so on and so forth. only got FL a year a half ago though

I saw and used my first computer at my uncle's. He let me play games like Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad. My uncle convinced my parents to buy a pc: they bought a Pentium1 90 MHz or something.

"older generation"

Humph...... I resemble that!

Ha - back before the days of yonder PC - and i am only 24 dammit! Seems older when everyone is talking about 90mhz +

heck - wayyyyyyyyyyy after the BBC, the Acorn Electron, The Spectrum ZX48k, we got our first PC - a 386sx 25Mhz with 47Meg HDD and 2 meg memory. It cost a flippin fortune as well, and was "state of the art" home computing!


soooooooooooooooooo long ago.

I'm not surprised it cost a fortune!!! 47 MB Hard Drive!!! Holy ****!! It took me almost three years to save up for a 1Mb Hard Drive for my Acorn Archimedes!!

I remember the ZX spectrum, never had one though. My grandad did though. I did however have a BBC, there was a game on it called Key to The Kingdom, probably the hardest puzzle game i ever played. I was only 7 or 8 at the time and the BBC had the biggest floppy disks ever. I also owned an Atari ST, not an Amiga man i have to say. Games like Paperboy, Bubble Bobble and a platformer about a fox made by Psygonsis (think thats what they were called). They also did the most addictive game apart from Tetris, Lemmings. Oh how many an hour was spent playing lemmings

I started with a 286 with two 5.25" flops and 64kb RAM..... All I remember was how good I got at flipping out the flops smoothely and without kinking them.

---

I remember the ZX spectrum, never had one though. My grandad did though.

---

ok now I feel old...that was just uncalled for

@indy - but do you remember the amstrad 3" disks? The first solid floppy disk, they had a slightly larger capacity but were pipped at the post by the IBM 3.5". I think I've still got a few somewhere

I remember working with 286's with my uncle. Ah, back then, the Amiga was an awesome machine.

i started with the zx81 then the bbc amiga(witch i still have and use) to play
Elite i still think one of the best space trader games of all time (up till now)
now moved to a hewlett packard 750uk with XP 3 years old and i still cant use it to its full extent
oh for the good old day's

---

ok now I feel old...that was just uncalled for

---

Sorry Grom

If it makes you feel any better i was about 6 at the time