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Charlie Stross

@stux Feeling old now because I lived through that era as a (young) computer user ...

9 comments
Veronica Olsen πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆπŸ‡³πŸ‡΄πŸŒ»

@cstross @stux I was about 5 at the time of this clip. My first real encounter with a computer, I think, wasn't until helping out adding books into the database at my school library when I was around 10 or 11.

Charlie Stross

@veronica @stux My school got its first computer labβ€”with three Apple II’s between more than a thousand kidsβ€”too late for me to take a CS 'O' level much less aim to study CS at university.

Klaudia (aka jinxx)

@cstross @veronica @stux Oh wow. I still had those floppy disks in the late 1980s and early 90s. Our math teacher had written a learning program for us that he handed out on 5.25" floppies. :) And I was lucky enough to write my first articles for the students' newspaper back at school using some text program running on DOS. :)

sbi

@veronica @cstross @stux Being born east of the Iron Curtain, my first encounter wasn't until I was way past school. And it was machines like this.

An A 5120.16 computer from the 80s of East Germany.
An MC80 computer from the 80s of East Germany.
Dani (:cxx: modules addict)

@sbi @veronica @cstross @stux My very first computer was the Elektor SC/MP kit that I had to buy piecewise and solder myself.

elektormagazine.com/magazine/e

My verst first *working* computer 😜 was the successor of the famous PET2001.

Hugo Mills

@cstross @stux I remember taking my Spectrum to my Dad's work to demo what you could do with a microcomputer. (I'd written a simple slideshow/demo in BASIC.)

One of the people there said "You used to need a machine the size of a house to do that sort of thing."

BoneHouseWasps πŸ”Ά

@cstross @stux if I close my eyes I can still feel those keys under my fingers. 😁

JimmyChezPants

@cstross @stux

My grandma was doing her MA in my earliest memories, and she used to grab boxes of used punch cards for scrap paper; the world was littered with them. I didn't know what they were till much later, but in case anyone's ever wondered where all those punched cards ended up, they were notes and crafts and bad paper planes, and every one was loved and cherished.

I was the nerd on the school computers every lunch and recess till they got me a C64.

AlisonW β™ΏπŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ

@jpaskaruk @cstross @stux
Punchcards make perfect paper planes (which curve upwards vertically and stick into ceilings) if launched via elastic bands. 🀣

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