@Dan: So if I copy that floppy my computer will badly rap at me? :P

Also, classic LOL.

I honestly had computers around me as a baby. My father was in the industry so I was lucky. I remember monochrome systems and the evolution to CGA EGA and then VGA and XVGA.

Now, about copying that floppy. I need you to see this below before you consider that …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4

First computer I touched was a BBC Micro which my school had bought in 1982 – there were about 6 of them and we were taught to program in Logo. A couple of years later we had a few Apple IIe machines and those we were supposed to work on, but we spent ages playing Taipan and Swashbuckler.

My first personal machine was a ZX Spectrum 48k (it seemed you were either a C64 or a ZX Spectrum owner back then). Of course the only thing I ever did with it was play games. And the tape alignment thing was always frustrating. 5 minutes to load 48k – the kids these days they’d never believe you :)

Bizzarely, I was reminising about first computers just an hour ago.

My first computer was an Archemides A3000 (http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=697). The games I remember on it are SWIV, Chuck Rock and Mad Professor Moriati, oh and Lemmings of course. It didnt have a hard drive and everything ran on floppies. I do remember managing to get a ram disk working on it (not that this was much use).

You used to have to manually reassign ram by the k if you’d used the computer for more than a couple of hours. It had an absolutely beautiful GUI, and a BBC Micro esque (for obv reasons) CLI that would roll up from the bottom of the screen.

It was bought from a lovely little store called Beebug in Hemel Hempstead which only sold Acrorn kit. It was a wonderful shop staffed by people who actually knew computers. I’ve just searched and they still have a website. http://www.beebugnetworking.co.uk. Although it doesnt seem to have been updated since 2006.

I may have to dig out some of the old games now, they had better be on the interwebs somewhere. There was also a demo of a platform game that onvolved squashing hamsters with a large hammer, that was excellent, but I never saw it released is a full game.

@Nick: You are correct sir! I fixed the dates in the post. Sigh, when I moved to US I totally forgot how to read what the yanks call “military time” and the rest of the world calls 24 hour format.

@BobCFC: Doesn’t ring a bell. It probably should but I can’t recall the floating eye. Screenshot?

I spent the occasion on ##1234567890 having fun spamming :D

Windows 3.1 was the last great Windows :PI really enjoyed the marvels of Empipe and Asteroids, but it was a second hand PC and it died in less than a year :(

Haha X-copy brings back a few memories *wink*

Funny, I just saw an article the other day about Deluxe Paint… remember that weired floating eye logo they always used to show off 4096 colours in AGA mode?

Actually Luke, I think it’s 6:31:30 pm EST.

pillin@turd ~ $ php -r 'echo date("c", 1234567890), "\n";'
2009-02-13T18:31:30-05:00

We were always far behind on our neighbours with the computers.

When they had an old DOS box, we had nothing.
When they had some WIndows 3.1 machine, we finally, after a lot of nagging, had an old DOS box :) aah the games i played on it. It had a 60Mb harddisk, 2Mb of RAM, and the processor, I belief it was an 8086…
The Blues Brother, Dangerous Dave, …

Then came the Windows 3.1. I remember that I clicked through every window, every option, every folder and file, to find out how it worked.
I even once renamed every executable in the Windows folder to its Dutch alternative, because I liked it better that way :P
My uncle had a few fun hours repairing it :D

Later came the Windows 98 box (233Mhz, 64Mb RAM (whoa!) and a friggin 12Gb HD), then the internets (back in 1999 with a 56K modem, teh bomb!). I also clicked through every menu option, setting, file and folder, thereby breaking it multiple times, harder than the 3.1 and customized it to hell. Literally.

Then came the Pentium3, 800Mhz. I’ve upgraded the RAM to about 384Mb or so…
For college, I buyed a AMD XP2400, which now serves as a Home Theater PC. It was replaced for a laptop (Acer 8200), on which I’m typing this wall of text right now.

The first computer I tinkered with was a DEC VAX, and I cut my teeth on programming, coding in FORTRAN and Pascal. Later, COBOL, C and Lisp were added to my language repertoire.

My first “professional” position entailed writing and maintaining steel mill scheduling and production tracking programs. My first boss did not know how to use a text editor but could compute randomizing algorithm in his head. I worked on IBM mainframes there, but the first system I worked with was an old Burroughs system that had no text editor, but I could port source code and binaries from another machine to it. And there was a utility that “simulated” a punch card interface and you could “patch” a program by changing a number of lines in the source code. Yes, it was the age of computing dinosaurs.

Did not own my first PC until 1990, as there without a decent modem, there really was no reason to plunge for an expensive toy. With it, I could connect to Prodigy and GEnie. Early gaming attractions were SimCity and MS Flight Simulator. But used to play a Star Trek game on the old DEC computers in the Steel Mill. And we all wrote various games on the work mainframes to amuse ourselves while waiting for code to compile and batch jobs to execute.