Newly Digital: What was your first computing experience?

Just came across this experiment on the Kalsey Consulting site Adam Kalsey has asked 11 people to write about their early computing experiences and we can add trackbacks to the post to make this a collective anthology. Here is my story (by the way, this story is set in a far different India than what you might be aware of):

First experience with computers India was pretty late to wake up to the personal computing revolution, in any case when it happened I was quite young and not really clued into high technology as did not have anybody to tell me what was going on in the valley in 1984. By the mid 80s we had head about the PCs but never laid eyes on one. Then one day I walked into a computer store. It was called Computer Point guess they are still around, and that's when I saw my first computer in 1987. I could not afford the PCs but there was one model that could; it was called a DB Spectrum+, reckon you know it better as the ZX Spectrum. Guess it was about 5 years after its launch in the west that we were able to buy it in India. It was a dream machine. I regularly wrote games in BASIC and stored them on cassette tapes using an old Phillips Mono player. I loved that computer...

First PC
The first real PC I used was in my Engineering Class, it was a 386 running DOS and had BASIC,PASCAL and ForTran. Cool, now I had more languages to work with...

But after that I did not touch computers for three years (I was doing Mechanical Engineering) until my final year when I wrote a program that did Structural Analysis using the Finite Element Method- I concentrated mainly on the graphic display aspect of things...

First brush with the Internet
Again were quite behind on this, In 1994 I got myself an account that provided a shell based access to the internet. I could check email using PINE, and use TELNET and 'browse' using LYNX. Cool, eh? Moved on to TCP/IP and Mosaic about a year or so later...

First brush with Flash
I downloaded a trial version of Flash 1 in 1996. Been addicted ever since...

So what is your story?

Posted by Navneet at June 2, 2003 12:36 AM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam