How Long Have You Been Using Computers

[Naam]

since 1984. had of course computers in the company i ran but no bloody idea how to handle one.

[Lopburi99]

Since 1966 at Michigan State University when I started my computer science program, using a Control Data (CDC) 3600 programming in Fortran IV with punched cards and getting one compile/execution every day !! ANd being thrilled if there were keypunch errors !!

[Gary A]

It was in the early 80's. I bought one of the IBM compatibles from Radio Shack. It had a massive 10 megabyte hard drive. I bought Lotus 123 and used the spread sheet to build a business program. It took a while but when finished, it worked great. The US Internal Revenue Service was impressed with my daily records and monthly summaries. I was lucky, I was only audited that one time.

[chiang mai]

1967 operating a Honeywell 1200 the size of my living room spending endless hours watching tape sorts, how daft was that! But I loved punched cards and became expert at correcting errors on them by sticking the chads back into mispunched holes with a wet finger - I still remember the Holerith code! 1969 and a Univac 41 the size of my house with disks (fastrands) the size of small cars and a 100mb capacity. Moving on in time: my boss at the bank dumped IBM's first commercial PC on my desk in 1978 and said, here, decide what use this might be to the bank in the future. As I recall I wrote a very bland report that didn't even come close to setting out the true potential.

[bdenner]

OK, let me expand on this:-

Forgetting the armed services and then the years I spent in seismic oil exploration with GSI, a subsidiary of Texas Instruments where I spent many months studying their sciences in Dallas Tx. during the 1980’s, some 28 years down the line I’m still a two finger typist but by the <deleted>#k I can fix, repair or ‘nigger’ rig them. When your stuck out in a desert with millions of dollars at stake, that’s your bread and butter -- it held me in good stead up to retirement inc. my last few years with Chevron here in the Gulf of Thailand.

And then again, there was a time for 5 years where I was with a company out of Massachusetts called Foxboro, they based their early technology on a DEC PDP 11, now there’s a dinosaur complete with paper tape streamers and a 16mb storage facility that weighs in about 25kgs.

I could go on but my own personal computer was a Commador 64.

BTW I'm Australian just seems that I spent most of my time tied up with US companies.

Edited January 13, 2009 by bdenner

[simonphuket]

Interesting to see the majority here have used computers for more than 20 years. Would be interesting as well to see a simular poll regarding the age of the members on this forum - my guess is most are over 50, maybe even over 60.

And interesting to see that so many with an IT background ended up here...... What's wrong with us IT-nerds?

[G54]

Interesting to see the majority here have used computers for more than 20 years. Would be interesting as well to see a simular poll regarding the age of the members on this forum - my guess is most are over 50, maybe even over 60.

And interesting to see that so many with an IT background ended up here...... What's wrong with us IT-nerds?

Maybe we are twisted?