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[SalmonGod]

Moving this discussion over from Ameripol.  Holy cow we're white and nerdy.

Spoiler: Previous discussion (click to show/hide)

I became a technology worker early. (My childhood job was literally working part time as a bench monkey in a repair shop)

I came to be cynical about technology, before it even went mainstream. LOL.  How's that for hipsterism? LOL

I became a technology worker early. (My childhood job was literally working part time as a bench monkey in a repair shop)

I came to be cynical about technology, before it even went mainstream. LOL.  How's that for hipsterism? LOL

I'm sure I have an account on one of those old BBS systems still, you just need to give it the finger.  Besides, if Kermit doesnt work (Damn substandard terminal clients!) there's always XMODEM instead. Just dont send me any .PICTs-- So damned hard to open on non-mac classics.

I was the first one in my faculty to bring a PC to take notes.

I was the first to bring a laptop (Compaq armada 1530dm-- factory refurb, second hand) to school to take notes in my highschool. Teachers did not like having the tech in the classroom. Oh, how times have changed.  Not like it was really capable of playing games anyway-- thing was a REAL dog. It could BARELY handle MS Office 97.

Like I said, I used to work as a bench monkey part time in my teeny years, so I managed to score one from work after it was traded in by a customer, on the cheap.

AMAZING system specs of my first laptop
Compaq Armada 1530DM
---------------------
Pentium MMX 133MHz
64MB RAM
1MB Cirrus Logic display adapter (I don't think it can even be called a "graphics card")
33.6k modem
1.4GB HDD
3-1/4" Floppy
20x CD-ROM
2 - PCMCIA slots
1 - PS2 port
1 - Serial port
1 - LPT port
1 - IR port
I had a XIRCOM 10/100 card and much later, a very primitive wireless G card I used in it.

It finally died a horrible death as the chipset nuked itself one day.
The LCD could only display 256 colors.

My family had a couple computers before the one they got internet for, and I played around on those, too.  My dad did lots of IT stuff for his work, and brought home various tech.  I was too young to retain gritty details about it all, but he taught himself programming and 3d graphics in the late 80's/early 90's for presentations to the FDA.

I was never as technical as you guys, myself.  But I was playing Nethack on some Mac computer at 8 years old, and stubbornly spent many hours playing Syndicate on that computer as well, even though it would slow to a crawl of 1 frame every couple seconds after I brainwashed too many citizens.  My dad also brought me in to work with him a couple times to play Doom on their local network on holidays when he was required to be there, but the office population was sparse and no-one had intentions of working.

But when we got our first actual home PC that was legitimately ours and not some stuff Eli Lily was intending to throw away, I sort of commandeered it.  I was severely ostracized at school, and meeting people online brought me relief.  All I remember is it had a 100mhz pentium, 100 mb hard drive, and a 28.8 modem.  With that, I expanded my interest in roguelikes, traded mp3s over IRC before Napster, and would sneak on in the middle of the night to talk to people from the other side of the world.  I also settled on the name SalmonGod in that first year.  And played thousands of hours of Quake, and its countless mods, where most of the standards of 3d game design and a majority of the people who worked in game development for the next 15 years have their origins.

I'm not as into the guts of things as weird... but the internet is definitely my cultural roots, and I'm far, far more capable on a computer than the vast majority of people.  Enough to be the person everyone goes to in my workplace for computer questions/issues before calling corporate I.T., and have even showed them up a couple times.

[spoiler=continues derail, spoiler mode engaged]

I was born in 1982. My very very first computer experience was on my dad's very expensive IBM PCjr, which he bought to do his police casework on, as he was working in cooperation with the detectives in his precinct at the time on a number of cases. My siblings and I (all older than me, some significantly so) were very careful not to touch any of his police crap, but the computer DID come prepackaged with a disk for Kings Quest 1, (the PCjr version, with tandy 3-voice audio). Dad needed 2 diskette drives, so he splurged on one of the (apparently rare, I later learned) Racore Drive-II expansions, which contained a realtime chip, additional RAM, and a second floppy diskette drive.  The normal PCjr could only be expanded via the sidecars that would slap onto the side, but the Racore Drive II expansion replaced the top lid of the unit, making it double-height, and worked its magic internally by hijacking the floppy controller card, and tapping into the sidecar bus.

Our system looked exactly like this:



It was NOT a "true" PC compatible though-- it had wonky interrupts, the video hardware was some bastardized version of EGA (before EGA was really a thing), and was sufficiently "strange" that normal PC software would not run on it, or would not run "properly." 

What it DID have, was cartridge BASIC, DOS 2.1, and King's Quest. (in addition to all the police related bullshit dad had for it.)  Dad was SUPER protective of his work equipment and workspace though, so we had to SNEAK time on it, meaning we were limited to periods when he was not home, and we were, and had to be super careful about not disturbing anything in his workspace.

The experiences I had with it, led me to consider computers as "super cool" even then, a sentiment that stuck with me all through the 80s, and into the 90s. I remember constantly pestering my mom to get me a computer of my own relentlessly over that period, and being told bluntly that they were just too expensive. Finally, she broke down and got me an AST Advantadge 486sx with 4mb of RAM, running windows 3.1, sometime around 1994. She was a moron, and bought it from RadioShack so she spent waay too much for it-- But I quickly tore into the thing after FINALLY having something I could play shareware diskettes that the other nerds at school were trading. (rich kids who had access to BBS friendly systems way before my mom decided that maybe these computer things were actually going to stick around) I quickly found that the system mom got was pretty underperforming (weaksauce cirrus logic integrated video, very little cache memory, no sound card, etc.) so my older brother and I (He's about 10 years older than me, and had access to his own money) purchased some upgrades for it.  I had been inside the PCjr several times unbeknownst to my parents OR siblings, and was NOT afraid of the inside of computers (I was 12...) so I just up and installed the upgrades after school before mom came home from work. She caught me finishing up the installation of the soundblaster 16 my brother had picked up, (since I had to fiddle fart wth getting the IRQs and DMAs working without knowing quite as much about what IRQs are used by what system devices as I do now...and not having access to staples like Peter Norton's famous book, seeing as this was before mainstream internet still.) and had to trial and error getting it jumpered right.  She about died of anxiety, but when the system worked just peachy afterwards, she decided that I needed a summer job. 

She found my later employer working a booth at the local flea market (Kansas' largest!), who was equal parts shady and clever, and worked out a deal to have me do odd jobs there.   I think she wanted to put me with the shadiest computer guy imaginable to discourage my fervent tech fixation, but it didnt work. Instead, I got to learn the literal ins and outs of just about every kind of home computing device that had existed in the market place between 1980 and then. I worked there initially completely illegally (being under 16- but the shady guy did not seem to care too much for legal matters, and was a consummate software pirate, and a drug head-- the latter I studiously kept my mom from learning about.) but was sufficiently useful as a bench monkey that I continued working there for another 8 years, working weekends in the school year, and weekdays in the summer.

Shady employer man managed to ride the tech boom well enough that he managed to open an actual brick and mortar location in downtown, after which I only worked the fleamarket stall occasionally as staffing required.  He hired more help, who were likewise extremely gifted with computers, each with their own strongpoints.  I was very good at problem solving and diagnosis, while others, like the japanese american guy he hired later, were wizards at assembly programming, or electronics hardware repair.

Sadly, at the tail end of the 90s/early 2000s, when the dotcom bubble burst, everyone lost their shorts, and my employer was not spared-- staffing had to be cut, and I was one of the people who had to be let go. It was very hard to find employment as a bench monkey (I had never gotten to "spread my wings" so to speak, and technology had avanced pretty steadily up to the early 2000s, and with the financial downturn, NOBODY wanted to train a green newhire-- they wanted people with already marketable skills in specific disciplines, like SAN, or Unix admin-- and wanted more years of experience than I had even been alive.) As such, I went through a rather lengthly unemployment spell after that, but kept my tech skills up to date out of personal hobbyist interest. During that time, I ended up becoming the in-home-care for my grandmother (dad's mom) after she had complications from one of those bladder mesh devices they did the mass-recall for, as it caused her to go into renal failure, and required her to get an ostomy which needed constant, daily care. I was unemployed, and I was cheaper than hiring an actual home-care CNA, so that's how it went down. 4 years later, she passed away after complications from one of her weekly dialysis treatments, and I landed a job doing student assisting for the local college, doing CAD/CAM drafting classes. Another 3 years later, I scored a job doing industrial drafting, and the rest is history after that.

I have since then gained industry experience doing SAN administration, Network installation and administration, Linux administration, and do free benchmonkey work in my local community as a hobby. I enjoy doing strange and unusual things to consumer grade electronics devices to make them live up to their real potential (My latest victim is a WD MyCloud NAS box that is capable of SOOOO much more than the limited firmware inside it is configured for... I am hacking away on it to liberate it from that sad, sad condition)

While my employer in that early, and wonderful period of computing history was shady as hell, I got to work on so many different and wonderful computer architectures that I have difficulty recounting them all.  Basically, if people owned it, and it needed fixing, odds were it would make its way through a shop like ours, so I got to see and work with everything from IBM 5150 XTs, to literal big iron servers (an actual AS400 came in once!).  I can't really think of a better place to have been in that time, and still get a warm glow thinking about working there, despite the grueling hours, and absurd workshifts the shady owner instituted during the summer months.

One summer, the jacknut won a bidded contract to build 200 workstations, and we (5 people) did it in a week, alongside the normal workload doing customer repairs, and doing onsite service calls.

Truth be told, a fairly large part of me longs for those days again.

My earliest memory is the first time I ever played a computer game (born 1983 here, btw).  When my dad was still in college.  It was a lab computer that operated a huge frickin' laser that hung down from the ceiling like something out of Half-Life at University of Wisconsin.  My memory may not be reliable on that point, but it's what I remember.  Would have been in '85.  I remember sitting in his lap playing Frogger on that thing at 2 years old.

My parents were also D&D players since before I was born, so I grew up around that.  My dad went to Gencon back in the late 70's.  He knew Gary Gygax, but they actually had some weird beef with each other that I don't know the full story on.  All I know is one of them threw a tacklebox at the other.  My dad was also a Tolkien fan, which rubbed off on me.  The Hobbit was the first novel I ever read, when I was 6 years old.

Basically I was completely unfit on every possible level to survive in the culture of rural Indiana in the 90's.  Everything about me was strange or devil-worship to them.  The internet saved my life.

Never worked on the inside of a computer until early 2000's, though, when I got my first of my very own, not shared with the family.  Have since built several, but nothing deeper than buying components and putting them together.  A few times doing troubleshooting to figure out what component is having problems and needs to be replaced.

I think my parents still have that old 100mHz pentium (it was an Acer) sitting out upstairs.  I'll be over there tonight, and see if I can get a picture.  My brother still uses the same desk, too, and it's still covered in shareware discs and old PC Gamer magazines and stuff.  Every time I visit his area, it's like looking back 20 years.  The dude never fucking cleans or moves anything, really.  Incidentally, he's also the one who started urging me to try Dwarf Fortress way back in the 40D days, but I don't think he's played in a long time and never ventured into GD.

Spoiler: This looks pretty damn close (click to show/hide)

[Max™]

I remember when "You've got Mail!" was said by a woman (CompuServe yo) and getting wasted in Doom or Doom II
over dango... dongo... something like that when we tried to play at 14.4 kbps.

Getting creeped the fuck out when I discovered what I assumed was a snakeman moving at the edge of my view was actually a goddamn chryssalid WITH FRIENDS was a supernope moment at 3am.

Oh, and playing Spaa-see-woord Ho!

[ChairmanPoo]

The first PC games proper I had were Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes.

At a later stage we got a cd reader for that PC, and got the EA compilation CD, which had several crazy good games, including ultima VII, ultima underworld, popilous II...

I just recalled that Ultima VII was hell to play because it required a memory configuration which went against every other game, so you had to reconfigure everything before and after playing it. It also strained my ram to it's limit.

I think my English fluency is so good (C1, as of my last IELTS test) in part thanks to the games in that CD, which were in English, and induced me to look up stuff, rather than answer randomly.

[TheDarkStar]

I'm relatively young (I was born at the very end end of the 90s) but the first PC games I played were old ones like Master of Orion (still an excellent game) or Duke Nukem (the original platformer one) because my dad thought they would be good ones to start on. IIRC my family's computer ran on windows 95 or 98. My grandpa programmed for his job, though, so there's a long history of being tech savvy in my extended family.

I do remember before smartphones got big, but not a lot. IIRC 2010 was the year when I saw everyone with them, but I wasn't especially old at that time so it could be that they were ubiquitous a few years earlier.

[nenjin]

Started with Castle and Frogger and a lot of text adventure games on an IBM x386 when I was like 6 or 7. That's where computers really started for me. I remember green screens and orange screens and single box units, PCs that folded into a 40 pound plastic briefcase...My dad was a programmer so he always had tons of hardware sitting around the house on loan from his company. Started trying to write BASIC when I was like 10 or so...never got very far, I lack the discipline for coding I think.

[Digital Hellhound]

My earliest PC memories are probably watching my brother play Age of Empires 2 over his shoulder, or watching my sister play the first Sims over her shoulder, or watching my dad play Caesar/Zeus/various citybuilding games over his shoulder. I ended up playing all of these at one point or another, though AoE2 was probably the one that stuck with me the most, due to the sheer potential of creating my own little stories and fights in the editor. You can probably guess from these examples that access to the computer and its games was bitterly contested. My brother would sometimes physically pick me up and carry me away to take it for himself no i'm not bitter or anything

Looking around, all of those examples came out around 2000, giving a nice date for the start of my PC life.

I also have a super-early memory of writing stories in Word, though I'd list this under 'writing memories' rather than 'PC memories'. Still, that's something that I kept up ever since, and I feel frustrated trying to write on paper, where stuff isn't so easily editable. A word processor is, like, a very fundamental thing about a computer for me - probably not what most people would feel to be one of the core things they use their PC for. Or?

I remember the sounds connecting to the internet on dial-up. Or, actually, I can't remember the sounds per se, only that it made such weird sounds... man, I feel kinda sad having forgotten what it sounds like. I'm sure it's on youtube somewhere, but it's not the same if it doesn't involve the bored wait until it gets through.

And yeah, I spent most of my days after getting home from school before that screen. Which is... still true, only that there's no-one to worry over my internet usage anymore. I wonder if that's even really a thing for newer generations? Time limits and such being common?

I vacuumed so much English off games and the internet I baffled family friends with my vocabulary before English classes ever started at school. Which is something I'm immensely grateful for, really. One example I recall is knowing the word 'monk' because of Age of Empires 2, heh. I'm willing to bet I was very obnoxious about it all.

I couldn't say what our early PCs were, though they were never terribly powerful. For some reason I still recall that we upgraded so we could run Call of Duty 2.

Also, I miss Windows XP. Not the least because many of my older games (The Movies, whyyy) refuse to work on Windows 10 due to some stuff it apparently has built in. I could not stop the sneaky updates in time, though I do have a late-2000s computer gathering dust somewhere that's a few versions old (and probably has most of those old games installed, for that matter).

I haven't really thought about this stuff in a long time. This is a nice thread.

[Sergarr]

I don't actually remember which of the PC games I've played first, but the big ones I remember were Age of Empires 2, Vangers, Civilization 3, Heroes 3 (with the first expansion), Might and Magic 6-8 (though I didn't really play them, rather watched someone else playing them and abused the shit out of the high-level savefiles), Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood, Praetorians, Caesar 3/Pharaoh (which I horribly failed at), Warcraft 3, Cossacks: European Wars, and probably many, many others that I've forgot. I used to play them in turns, picking up the next one once the previous one became too boring. There was enough that I didn't really get too bored from the lack of variety.

EDIT: Also, my first computer had 128 Mb of RAM and a huge, tremendous 433 MHz Celeron processor!! Also, 40 Gb of hard-drive space.

[wobbly]

My 1st computer was an XT (a 286? I think). So it was basically text games like the hobbit then rogue-likes, I remember playing nethack to death. The 1st graphical games I played were stuff like the sierra games: SpaceQuest I & KingsQuest 1 etv. All in CGA (4 colour). The jump in the standard of graphics in around 30-ish years is pretty amazing to me.

Edit: Now that I think about it the 1st 286 might of been the AT range, so it was probably not.

[AzyWng]

I remember when I was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, and we had one of those really old PCs that actually resembled the one shown in the OP. We never used it, but I think I distinctly remember that most of the games were in two dimensions back then.

I was born in 1999.

Now even the decidedly not-gaming laptop I own is able to properly render and simulate physics for all three dimensions (provided it's given the right game engine, of course).

Computers. Computers always change.

Still, I'm quite young compared to people like the OP - when it wasn't flash games (which it was most of the time) it was Age of Empires 3.

[itisnotlogical]

I hate to be stereotypical, but I mostly got into computers because 1) I wasn't physically fit/active and 2) I wasn't good at making friends. Also, being a dumb four-year-old, I thought going outside was bullshit when I had perfectly good Contra/Mario/whatever to play. Whatever friends I made in one location were lost pretty quick because we moved every year or two until I turned 14. To be frank, it's hard to get invested in a person after the third time you move away from everything you know, whereas videogames never changed.

I played a lot of freeware games, like Stick Soldiers, Little Fighter, various Newgrounds games, etc. but my early gaming history was really dominated by AdventureQuest and Runescape. I wasted entire years of my life in Runescape, especially in Catholic school when I started to feel really ostracized and different from the people around me, in a more profound way than I'd ever experienced before. I'm not saying Runescape is an acceptable substitute for real-life socialization, but I definitely used it that way for a large portion of my life. At any rate, I actually met people I got along with on RS (and eventually AQ Worlds) and had a few real friendships that meant a lot more to me than any of the dumb playmates I had in meatspace.

I got a lot of my politics from BBSes a lot like this one, where the crazy talk-radio bullshit my mom listened to didn't stand up for a second. I learned very quickly that the world was a lot more complicated than I knew, even if I didn't have all the details yet. I guess in that way the internet was good for me, bringing me into contact with challenging opinions when I didn't have much IRL human contact (there were years that I was just out of the school system entirely).

Eventually I learned quite a bit about computers, just by virtue of using one whenever I had the chance. I repaired our crappy dial-up internet, I told people how to avoid viruses on LimeWire (not that they listened), I fixed virus problems and restored OSes, and eventually learned to program because I wanted to make my own video games. I'm not really interested in making games anymore but I still love programming, so there's something positive.

[NullForceOmega]

First computer I ever touched was an Apple IIe, in grade school, first game was Oregon Trail.  It was extremely green.  MY first computer was a 333mhz Pentium II with a FAT 10GB hard-drive, started with 128 meg RAM, upgraded to 256 later on, purchased it in fall of '99 with my own money from a summer job.  I hate the internet and everything it has done to the world as a whole (not looking for an argument, it's just one person's opinion).

[Bumber]

Got my first computer as a hand-me-down from my aunt. Not sure of the exact specs, but it had an MS-DOS, separate CRT monitor, a chiptune sound card, and a red power switch (like this.) It took two different sizes of floppy disk. One of the first games I played was Indianopolis 500, which I wasn't any good at. Spent most of my time playing Lemmings and School-Mom Plus (sort of like Kid Pix, but with other stuff like math quizzes and a sheet music editor that played the notes in chiptune.)

It might have been an IBM PC AT:


I also played Oregon Trail and Math Blaster a bit at school.

[Biowraith]

I don't think my dad was ever exceptionally geeky but he did used to 'borrow' a ZX81 over the weekends from the school he worked at.  1K RAM, baby!  So that was my introduction to gaming, playing Bomber and Space Invaders (possibly it was called Space Raiders, I forget) in monochrome in front of the family television.  I can still remember the cassette inlay sitting in the cabinet in our dining room. 

A little later on the ZX81 was upgraded to the 16K model of ZX Spectrum - I can remember my family taking it in turns to play "Through the Wall", one of those games where you control a paddle and use it to break bricks by means of a bouncing ball.  Oh and Hungry Horace, which we were all terrible at.  At some point dad bought our own rubber keyed 48k model and stopped borrowing the school's computers.  I also remember getting my first joystick for it (again courtesy of dad), much later on, and playing "Sabre Wulf". 

Around age 11 I saved my pocket money, birthday money, and christmas money for a year in order to buy an Amiga (with parental assistance), after being blown away by the sound of the monks chanting in The Bards Tale when visiting my aunt, whose boyfriend at the time owned one.  I think the first game we got for it was Turrican though (whose speech in the intro also blew my tween mind - bearing in mind the only speech on a computer game I'd experienced prior to that was the cracklefest of Ghostbusters). 

And so on.

I did still play outside with my friends through that time, but yeah, my gaming started pretty early.  Into my teens I added tabletop wargaming and pen and paper RPGs to my nerd/geek repertoire and outside became rarer and rarer :p

[wierd]

Oh, I loved working on the insides of computers, AND BEING PAID FOR IT--- when I was a kid.

Nothing quite like being in the computer lab, and having a deep felt heart-to-heart with the lab admin about how a certain thing with a certain workstation was probably XYZ related.

LOL

I learned how to set up IP based networks, how to cable twisted pair and thinnet ethernet, how to manage collision domains, and all that fun stuff "cowboy and indian" style, as the shady bossman would simply refuse to NOT accept a paying commission, even if NONE of us had ANY experience with that architecture of environment. I got to become very good at gathering, reading, digesting, and applying information from usenet newsgroups (workplace had real internet access and several phonelines that could be used for hopping onto BBS systems), and along with the japanese american guy (great person, wicked sharp.) we could tackle just about anything he threw at us.  I remember telling him about twisted pair ethernet maximum cable length restrictions once, because a client wanted to run an ethernet drop between buildings that was simply just TOO DAMNED FAR for twisted pair, and suggested link aggregated thinnet, even though thinnet was slower-- because thinnet used grounded cables, and could handle 5 times the distance.  I realize this is a very advanced conversation to have been having now that I am older-- but at the time, I was stuck trying to find a solution to the "IT MUST BE SOLVED!" hardassedness of that shady bastard. LOL

LOL-- there was this one time that a metals processing company specializing in steel kept having problems with their computerized workstations, even though these workstations were specially designed to be very hardened against damage.

Turns out, they were sucking in corrosive vapors from the nearby steel pickling tanks, and those vapors were literally rusting the insides out at an absurd rate. It was so bad, that the chasis would literally CRUMBLE at the slightest touch. I went to plug in a serial mouse on the system, and the serial port crunched into the back when I inserted the cable. Just "CRUNCH!" and little bits of rust and dust fell off the back.  Opening it up, the whole inside was heavily oxidized, and just a total horror show.

The most noteworthy repair though, was the one a drunken redneck literally SHOT with a 20 gauge slug. Very interesting, that one.

So many colorful stories-- It was a great time to be a kid.

[SalmonGod]

Y'know, despite playing a whole bunch of video games when I was a kid, there was also a lot of playing outside with my brothers. When we moved to Memphis briefly, I remember following the storm drain for quite a ways, where it actually ended up turning into something like a beach. Was fun, doing that sort of exploration.

For sure, I played outside a ton, too.  Just mostly by myself.  And yes, stuff that you couldn't get away with today, at least not near the city.  I wandered off into the woods by myself as early as 5.  My parents gave me near unlimited freedom, compared to what I feel like I can get away with giving my kids today.

Most of my time before I had much in the way of gaming stuff was spent catching any living thing I could, turning over rocks, jumping off of things, crawling into any interesting space I could find, etc.  Used to pick up bees by their wings, without ever getting stung.  I still did stuff like this all the way up until my early twenties, when responsibility started kicking my ass.