My mom and dad bought a computer when I was around six or seven years old. It was a Packard Bell running Windows 95 and it came with a Canon BubbleJet Printer. Mainly we used it just for fun and playing games but as my sister and I got older, we used it for typing reports etc. My dad liked tinkering around with it and figuring out the DOS commands....one night, they forgot the DOS command to get back into the computer! They spent hours trying to figure it out and finally at about one or two o'clock in the morning, they got back in....much to their relief :)

I don't know how much influence our first computer had on my learning to code, but I do remember that even at that young age, I wasn't afraid to try anything on the computer. I just loved it.

Today, my mom, dad, sister and I all are learning/have learned to code. And my dad builds computers as a hobby. It's quite a family affair! Lots of fun for us when we get to talking programming....we all can put in our two cents on how to fix something :)

my first computer was a sinclair zx81. It made you a true programmer to see what you could get out of 1k of memory. Later I moved onto the Sinclair spectrum 48k. Wow you should have seen what I could do with a whole 48k of memory and a little z80 machine code.----------Later I got an Amiga 500, then an Amiga 1200. Then I stripped down the Amiga and put it in a tower case with a graphics card. Later I had to succumb to the pc craze even though at the time the Amiga was better. A whole OS in 2mb of ram.

The first time I saw PC computer is in my age 7, year 1999, at the first pc bar in my hometown, I played like Star Craft, Counter Strike, Big Richman(an old famous Chinese video game at year 1998). at that time, many other people play a famous chinese network game called Legend.

This is my first view of windows. It was to amazing for the little kid.

The first time learn program is at my age 9, school's extra computer class, the teacher teach us a programming language called Logo, although I was to young to know English words, but with a lot of great experience with this little turtle.

Our school received donations from Taiwan in about 2000 and I was only 10 that year. One day our teacher took us to the room with several dozens(?) of computers installed with Windows XP. My teacher showed us the Painter program, and it's very interesting. But it didn't surprise me, I was a child and it was something as normal as my classes. About 7 yrs later when I found myself so limited in thinking and suddenly I realized that computer are so powerful. Then it changed a lot.

My first PC has Windows XP operating system. The first software, you know, PINBALL, really interesting to play hahaha.

Hmm. Well, first computer in the house was an XT running DOS. The first computer that was mine was an Amiga 600 (my friends all had 500s). These two were mostly used to play games and do homework (essays).

At some point in high school Commodore had imploded and the A600 was replaced with a 486DX2/66 running DOS/4DOS and Windows 3.11; and I saved up enough to buy a modem and get into BBSes and the demoscene. That's what really made me change how I saw computers - they were creative tools and connections to the world. A computer suddenly had very little use if it couldn't connect to another one somehow; and they were devices to make art, music and code.

IBM PCjr

Packard Bell MMX 166MHz running Windows 95, 16MB of RAM - this was early high-school 1997/98. Overclocked it to 200MHz, upgraded RAM to 64MB, upped the memory on the graphics card to 2MB and used it for many years (Delphi literally took close to an hour to compile the project i was working on)

Years later (around 2004) when everyone was already getting close to the 2GHz mark, somebody gave me their old 800MHz PC in exchange for doing work for them (for more work later, I got an old 17" CRT monitor, my 14" CRT monitor at this point was so fuzzy that I eventually drilled a hole in the back so that I could tune the resistors in the back on a daily basis to get the picture somewhat clearer, I was also the only one able to read anything on the screen, I had to de-focus my eyes in order to read anything on the screen). I used this gift-PC to generate income with which i bought textbooks, funded my first internet and in second year varsity i could finally afford my first PC (2005) - built a monster PC with the highest spec components money could buy at the time. This was the first time i could actually run things everyone else was using, pretty soon switched to Linux and dumped windowsXP (this monster PC is now our media PC, the Stacker Case is so big that people comment that it looks like a piece of furniture itself)

After that i bought a Macbook pro - my first laptop (2011). So in my lifetime so far, I've had four computers, i bought two of them myself. Three of the four I still have and are still running fine, the 800MHz one I gave to somebody who needed a PC, I believe it's still running.

Programming came naturally for me, it was not a hard choice to make after finishing varsity. I was fairly good at it compared to other areas i could have chosen and it paid well.

3rd or 4th grade (mid 80s) Apple II - can't remember if it was an original or one of the later models - the school had an entire room of them (was a private school)

Dad bought a RadioShack / Tandy TRS-80 shortly around that time - actually did some programming on it, but had no idea that's what I was doing, haha. Programs had to be saved to a casette drive by pressing record on it and running a command on the TRS.

Used mostly Macs in 7th / 8th grade - when asked what to get, teacher recommended a PC, so we did.

Our first real PC was a custom built 486dx33 / 4mb ram / 250mb hard drive / cdrom / 2400 baud modem in '92. Came with DOS 5.2? Think I road that out until Windows 95, upgrading it a few times. Shortly after, got my first job, bought my first PC - Gateway Pentium I think.

Wasn't until an iPod 3rd gen caught my eye did I really look at Apple. Started taking programming seriously with an iBook G4 (might still have it somewhere) > PPC dual 1.6ghz G5 > Intel Mac Core 2 Duo > Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo > multiple Macbook Pro i5's

Had various 386s and 286s come and go from people looking for a buck or 2 for them. I've built them from bare chassis to now just taking a new one from the store and getting back to work.

While I dabbled with VB4 / VC++ on Windows 95 / 98, I don't think I ever took programming seriously until I got my first office job. It was in technical support; I had played with Microsoft Access and building reports; 1 thing led to another and I spent time doing what I was doing in Access as a real program in VB.Net. One thing led to another and I was looking for programming jobs instead of customer support jobs.

I remember not knowing what a config.sys file was or autoexec.bat and bugging the neighbor who was in IT about it for days, haha. Dad brought home a (I think) Pascal book one day and I ran to my brother (we were kids) saying "this is everything I need to make that football game you want" haha. Sure! It's easy to write a video game - just read this book!

My own experience was with a TI-99/4A. I had run across computers at school, but this one was the first one of my own. I remember painstakingly typing in BASIC programs and hoping they would compile. And I even bought the tape recorder to read and write games and software to the computer. It was very ghetto but I loved it!

What's a PC? My first computer was an IBM 1130.

an old sinclair watchin my father write space invaders in assembler ;D and later using powerbasic for calculating physics and chemical reactions ... after that amiga 500, atari ST, intel pentium 60, intel pentium 90, intel pentium 200MX, AMD k6 400, PIII 600 and so on it was fun :D ...

If you read my story, you will know that I had my first very own, self-assambled PC at the age of 4. But my father was an IT guy and my mother built a web presence for our county even before that, so I essentially had access to computers since I was born. I drew with MS Paint, I wrote gibberish with MS Wordpad and I had a whole lot of fun. Then I got my own computer. My father bought the parts and he assembled it together with me and installed Windows95 on it. My parents bought me learning-games (matching forms, simple maths, point-and-click adventures, etc.) and I was able to install and use that stuff even before I could read! From then on, I always had a cool computer. I installed Win98, WinXP, Win Vista, Win 7, 8.0, 8.1 and 10 in the year they were released. I always had a good computer, so I could play around with it lots. I might be one of the first generations who really grew up with a computer like that (from birth)!

Windows 95 - MSDOS, when I was very young. lol. I didn't actually become a (real) programmer until after uni. And becoming a programmer meant I could start my own business (for the opportunity at the time). I say real because in uni I worked a lot with Matlab.