Yo, what was your first computer? How old were you, where and how did you get it, what did you do with it, etc.
Yo, what was your first computer? How old were you, where and how did you get it, what did you do with it, etc.
TL;DR It was an old Wang system, 286 processor(I think, anyway), with no hard drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, and a lovely green monochrome monitor. I didn't have it long enough to reach the point where I could have identified the actual hardware/specs.
Back in 1993, I was 10, and the internet really wasn't a thing yet(yeah, yeah, I know. But for most of us, the internet didn't exist until the mid-late 90's). You'd probably have difficulty even finding someone in the neighborhood who could tell you what a computer was, nevermind having used one. I was out running around the city, as you used to be able to do at 10 years old, when I passed by some local business/office/who knows I was 10. Big pile of trash out front, waiting to be picked up. When you're a kid, and you're poor, you go picking. Trash picking, I mean. You can get all sorts of cool shit, especially from the wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe it's different nowadays, but back in the day, people would toss out perfectly good toys, bikes, electronics, furniture, and as they became more commom, videogames, computers, etc. A ton of the shit I owned as a kid is stuff I picked straight out of the trash. Even after that, I picked trash for years. Resold a metric FUCKTON of stuff that other(presumably wealthier) people deemed to be garbage.
Back to this business/office/free stuff location, I obviously start eyeing what's in the big pile out front of this place. Among the stuff, I see a big, beige, metal box, a weird looking TV, and something with a big coiled wire hanging off of it. Now, it's not like there weren't computers in movies/TV at that point, and I had just read Jurassic park the same year, so I did recognize, vaguely, what it was. So I start looking at it, poking around, It had a name on it. "Wang". Don't know what that means, but I'm 10; that's hilarious. I decide I'm taking it. Tried to pick it up, and yeah, that shit is heavy. Nevermind the TV thing, and the keyboard. So as you do, I look around for a stary shopping cart, and sure enough, there's never one far away. Grab the cart and start lifting my haul into it, when someone comes out of the business/office/treasure-hoard, and yells "HEY!" Thought I was about to be in trouble, but instead, this guys walks over to me and says "you're gonna need this." Handed me a bundle of wires, and a square envelope, and just went back inside. So I toss that in the cart, and start pushing. And push I did. A shopping cart full of early 90's computer hardware, pushed by a 10 year-old, down the street, on and off of curb, up and down hills, from the other end of the city, is hard work. But eventually, I got home with it. Not to worry though, I only lived on the 3rd floor of a three-story building.
So I get home, and I start unloading my haul, one piece at a time, and start dragging it up the stairs. Thankfully no one was home, so I could bring everything into my room without anyone complaing about what I'm doing. That was also one of the only times I actually had a bedroom, so that worked out. Once I get it in there, I put the big metal box on the floor in the corner of my room, I take my monitor and decide that I'm pretty sure it's supposed to sit on top, so I put that there. The keyboard was next. After I untagled that cursed coiled cable, I obviously checked the back of the monitor, looking for where I need to plug the keyboard in. Figured out that no, it gets plugged into the big metal box. What next? Oh, right, that bundle of wires the guy gave me. It tuned out to be a couple of power cables, and a (what I now would assume) was a VGA cable. So I get to work plugging all of that in, and when it comes to the VGA cable, that's when I realize that oh, everything plugs into the metal box, that seems important. That must be the part that is a "computer." So what the hell is the TV thing? Took a minute, but I eventually remembered my NES, and realized that oh yeah, the box is where everything happens, and the screen is just where you see it. Again, I was 10, and all of this technology was still new to the average person. Give me a break here.
And last up was that square envelope. Would you believe it had a black plastic thing inside? It's really floppy. Weird. What the fuck is this thing? It has a white sticker on it, and some illegible scribbles. Nintendo to the rescue again. This black plastic thing sure does look like it would fit into the slot on the front of the metal box. Oh shit, it did! Now I just have to turn this thing on. How the fuck do you turn this thing on? Spent a while on that one, flipping the obvious big red power switch in the back. Took a while before I figured out there was a second power button on the front. TWO power switches?! What is this nonsense? Whatever. It's on now.
I sat and watched as bright green text started popping up on the screen. Various numbers, and phrases that I'd never heard in my life. Clearly, this stuff could only be understood some secret government agent, or that one kid I read about Jurassic Park, who was obviously like, a genius hacker or something. The slot where I shoved that floppy plastic square sure is noisy. What the hell is it doing, anyway? It loads in just like my Nintendo games, maybe it's a game?! Maybe a game is about to start. It sure was, friends. Maybe the greatest game ever made. We called it... DOS.
Man, did I love that game, DOS. I spent the several hours, typing random shit on the keyboard, as the command prompt did absolutely nothing of interest, since I had no idea what I was doing. But after those couple of hours of typing swears and random nonsense, I finally started to get bored, what with all of the nothing that was happening. And for whatever reason, I thought maybe someone could help me. Or, why not the computer itself? Maybe it will help me. So I typed the work "help", I hit the enter key, and sure enough, something finally happened. Holy shit, it's doing something. It's telling me how to DO stuff.
And so, before this novel goes on even longer, yeah. I found the help menu, and spent many more hours needlessly using very basic commands to create, copy, move, rename, and delete empty files and folders. Truly, I was now an elite haxxor man.
Over the next couple of years, I pulled many systems and parts out of various trash piles, and cobbled together different systems. Many, many different 386 and 486 systems. Until finally, when I was 15, I managed to get my hands on an obscenely slow, but absolute magic at the time, dialup modem, and a pile of "free hours" of AOL.
And they all lived happily ever after... Until social media was invented. The end.
If people like/want to read/discuss such poorly written nonsense, maybe I'll write up some nonsense about other technology-based shenanigans from over the years. And if people would rather make fun of my poor writing skills; fair.