I originally posted this post on my blog.
An owl blinking in a large forest made us all jump in surprise.
It was back in 4th grade. We all were sitting in a large conference room while a guest teacher disassembled a computer. He took every part, showed it to the class, and told us its name.
That year, the school competition was to build a computer out of recycled materials.
I built mine with boxes and Styrofoam. OK, when I say “I built,” I mean my mom or my aunt. I don’t remember exactly who. My display was made with an old X-ray image.
We exhibited our computers on tables in the school hall while a group of teachers walked around taking notes, trying to find the most creative one.
I didn’t win the competition. My X-ray display wasn’t enough to win.
But after the competition, I put my computer on my desk at home. I pretended to work with it. Sometimes I still pretend.
After putting all the parts back in place, the guest teacher turned it on.
We all jumped in surprise. We started pointing at an owl blinking in a large forest. After a few seconds, the forest became an enchanted house with bats flying around. I was frozen sitting next to my friends, staring at that thing. Whatever it was that thing.
It was an animated wallpaper. LOL. It must have been Windows 95 or 98.
I don’t remember what happened to my first computer ever.
But, fast forward a few years, we had our first real computer at home. Or my second one. It was a Windows 98 computer with a 56K internet connection plugged into a wired phone line. Oh! The famous buzz when we picked up the phone while my dad was connected to the internet. The days of Yahoo and Altavista.
Only my dad used the computer because “it wasn’t a toy.”
We had to restart the computer after every minor configuration and every software installation. We used a protection filter on our displays. They were almost radioactive. And after using it, we put pajamas on our computer before going to sleep. Dust was its arch-enemy.
My favorite wallpaper was an astronaut jumping around in outer space. That was Windows 98. And that's how old I am.
Do you remember the first time you saw a computer? Let us all know in the comments.
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Top comments (50)
OK, I feel very old right now.
The first computer I used was an IBM 1130. It was about the size of a refrigerator, had 8k core memory, 16mb disk cartridges, a "high speed" card reader, a selectric-like console, and a 60 line per minute printer (yes math whizzes, that's 1 line per second; you could listen to it setting up each line before the big clunk that printed it).
This computer ran report cards and schedules at my high school. I'm forever grateful for the guy who administered it who decided that high school students could learn about it too. I learned Fortran first, but later assembly language, RPG, and even BASIC using a version from Portugal that had all of the messages in Spanish.
I got into advanced things like loading registers directly using switches on the console; at first to give myself more "lives" in whatever game I was playing, but later to interact with assembly programs. I got good at partitioning programs into chunks that could be dynamically loaded to make stuff fit in that 8k.
I was fascinated with all this and it led me to a career that I love. The technologies keep changing, but a lot of the fundamentals stay the same.
I have a core plane from an 1130 in my office. It's amazing to think of each bit as a small magnetic donut with a couple of wires running through it.
If you've read this far, here's an amusing trick that we used to play on the guy who taught the Fortran and RPG courses. The console had these labeled plastic blocks with lights behind them for indicators. There was a green "running" one, a yellow "out of paper" one, a few others, and one bright red "parity check" one. I don't think we or that teacher knew what parity was, but we all knew it was bad when it happened. So, while his class was in there keypunching and running their programs, we would swap the "out of paper" and "parity" blocks and then punch a small hole in the console paper. When the paper printing out the job control stuff got to that point, everything stopped and the red light came on. The teacher would panic, but one of us wizards said we could fix it (by flipping some switches, looking very smart, and then advancing the paper a bit). That never got old.
Thanks for reading.
John
Have you ever had the chance of letting him know you went into computers because of that?
For me it was more like a happy accident :)
Loved this take.
Hey that sounds like a funny game...or prank :)
Thanks for your comment
Way younger than me, then. My first computer was a Sinclair Spectrum 128k - the Spanish flavor. It came out just in time for christmas of 1985.
Later, I studied computer science. During the first three years Windows 3.11 was all the rage, but we all were mainly using MS-DOS 5.
When I finished college in 1997, Computer graphics (you know, the "real" ones), were a thing of UNIX Workstations, PC's were starting to catch up with CPU's like i386 and i486. Cyrix and AMD were then manufacturing alternatives, though that stopped with Pentiums.
And suddenly the PC was powerful enough, eating the whole market. Windows 95 was the new way to operate computers (though many of us were still rebels behind the MS-DOS prompt).
In the end, all of us jumped into Windows. Windows 98 SE was a thing for me, and also Windows XP, but then I changed to Linux and have never looked back.
I jumped into the computing wagon with Win95-98. Anything before that is prehistory for me :P
We had to solder the chips on the board for my first computer. And then had to flip switches on the front panel to load the binary to program it.
Got fancy after that and had a TTY33 and only had to use the panel to load the load program, then read the program off the paper tape.
Also did some programming on a Tektronix 4051. They had a feature where you could make a program 'encrypted' on the DC300 tape drive. Turns out that the encryption was an exclusive OR operation and if you loaded the tape with the program as a data tape, you could read the header. I wrote a program that used an ASCII representation of bytes and decoded the program. For some reason they declined to use it as a submission for their user group.
I worked at AT&T when Bjorn stopped by to give a talk on 'C with classes'.
Once, another gentleman of similar age and I were talking about times like these and one of the younger folks spoke up saying "I learned about that in my computer history class." sigh
I once used a FORTRAN where you could pass in the address of a constant and change it's value. 1 + 1 could equal 4.
And next month I turn 70 and will finally retire, the vast majority of my life as a programmer (aside from a miserable couple of years as a Product Owner.)
I used a couple of Tektronix "graphics" terminals (4010 and 4030, IIRC) at my first job. they were glorified Etch-A-Sketches. You had to erase the whole screen to draw something new.
Yeah, FORTRAN call by value was just the same as call by name, so if you assigned a value to a constant argument in a subroutine, that memory location got altered and 1 could equal anything you wanted it to. LOL That was challenging to debug.
The 4051 was, I believe, either a 4010 or 4030 with a DC300 tape drive and BASIC built in to it.
OMG! Such a privilege.
Me too :P
Always feeling old reading such articles :-)
So, my first computer I saw and learned to code on it was a Sinclair ZX 81 (1 KB RAM), from my uncle. My first own computer was a ZX Spectrum, then a short period with a Commodore C64, then Atari ST, TT, and after that had to switch to x86.
Pretty similar for me, though I went zx81 -> TRS80 coco -> Spectrum +2 -> Amstrad PC512 -> self-cobbled-together cyrix 6x86, which took me into the i386 era.
I tried using a Trash 80 a few times. Trying to save programs onto a cassette deck was brutal.
:O Still impressed me how things run with such resources...or our current software is too bloated.
There was no Wallpaper to hold in memory :-)
OMG! 😱
I'm thinking our second family computer was around the 95-98 version. Before that, it was whatever was on special at the local radio shack. I was too young then to really be allowed to touch it without supervision and I know it was a Tandy with a dot printer that sounded like it was preparing for takeoff any time you tried to use it (and spent the next 20 min meticulously tearing the edges in perfect lines).
The internet came several years after the cow boxes, if I remember right. The excitement from just hearing the dial up for the first time is forever ingrained, but unless you got to experience that for yourself it's hard to explain. Kinda like the excitement of Y2K, when you either hoarded supplies like a doomsday prepper or threw a party to honor the end of computers (cause the lifespan of every computer worldwide was only guaranteed until midnight).
Nostalgia for sure! Thanks!
My sister and I liked to pick up the phone while my dad was connecting to the internet just to hear the buzz :D
I first saw a computer at my father's workplace. He worked in a communist lab trying to reverse-engineer PL/1 and port it to a huge Soviet machine. It was about 1985. A few years later, he changed job and worked in an acoustics lab. They had a French Intertechnique computer with a screen and an oscilloscope. The machine featured a simple Basic dialect that my father showed me and let me play with. And a year or two later, he bought me a Commodore 116/16, the first computer we had at home.
hey it sounds like your father had a lot of interesting jobs.
That dial-up screech and having to restart every time really takes me back. My first computer had that flying Windows 98 logo as a screensaver, and I remember feeling like it was magic. Which old wallpaper always stuck with you?
For me it's the green windows xp wallpaper, that's the first one that came to mind :)
The astronaut flying in outer space. OMG! I just waited for the computer to show it.
Hmmm ... 🤔🙄🤔
hey such an interesting journey...Assembler?!! I only found it once while in college...
Yes, but not really productive, more as a hobby and of pure interest how these machines were working.
End of this yourney was, when Micfrosoft choose the intel cpus for the PCs - not the in my opinion more logical 68000 with his linear memory.
The "secrets" of intel with their not so logical paging then stopped my assembler-jouney. 🤔
First time i saw a computer close up it was a windows 98, that was my first year of uni. In my 3rd year of uni i had to do workplace attachment and there I worked in an Iron & Steel factory; There they had a variety of computers from mainframes running COBOL, Informix and Progress 4GL based systems to windows 95 desktops for secretaries and managers. I once ahd an ecounter with a windows 3.1 computer that provided the interface to manage some equipment used in the factories there, such fun!
Same around here. The wallpaper with the astronaut was my favorite
this hit home so hard, the dial-up buzz and those dusty screens took me right back to my own first setup
makes me wonder, how much do those early little tech moments end up shaping how we see computers now
I guess most of us ended up choosing programming because the mystery/magic of seeing computers for the first time. These days, they're so omnipresent that we just don't care anymore.