connected to a DEC server. Plus a Compaq ‘portable’ computer roughly the size, shape & weight of a sewing machine. It had an Intel 286 processor.

We wrote our Basic program, then used a punch card machine to generate the code for the computer to read, then fed those punch cards to compile the program. One little mistype was enough to throw the whole thing out. I guess it was fun and frustrating.

It was big & clunky with an even clunkier monitor with orange text. Yuck. At the same time I purchased Lotus 1-2-3 & Word Perfect & big instruction books on them & DOS. Ha ha. For awhile, it was my DOS skills that impressed coworkers the most. Simply moving, copying, deleting files mystified people but when I could find a file they were looking for, well that was magic! 🪄

but real first computer was IBM 360/40 in 1971.



but my real real first computer ( that I got to actually "own" ) was a Cray 1 ( always important to say "serial number 7" ) in 1980.

Not many technical people can say they owned an 8 million dollar computer.

Peace from an old techy

so they gave it to the "new guy" right out of college to use.

I wanted mirrors... but the ones we got were like in the computer history museum ( pictured )

It was a fist gen Mac. black and white screen. If you didn't "save" throughout your writing, the "bomb" would go off and crash and you'd lose it ALLLL... it sucked! Bt the Graphics dept loved Apple, supposedly better for graphics programs etc... THEY had the Color ones with fancy big screens, lol...

https://images.app.goo.gl/83SdDe2g4xiaAM7WA

Had better graphic capabilities.
Almost all graphics for weather broadcasts of the time were done with the LightWave 3D software on amigas. As was Max Headroom, and the first season of the TV series Babylon 5. The Amiga 3000 was a true 32 bit computer. Wish I still had mine

Late 80s, our AF Medical Logistics flight was transitioning from keypunch card and centralized base processing to an in-house standalone computer system allowing us to directly input data and get real time information.

Also, at the same time, we received IBM "clone" computers which were used mainly for word processing. The computers weren't connected to the internet until the mid-90s.

The sponsor, our physics teacher, had the only computer I knew of anyone owning at the time (I think this was '82). We'd spend every second Tuesday in his den playing what was to me the most incredible, amazing war simulation ever imagined (though it was a text-only game with the weird green dos type on a fuzzy black screen).

Digital has coopted the world like nothing I can think of since Gutenburg.

We had a dumb terminal and a 600 baud phone connection to a mainframe at a local university. I basically just learned Basic & Fortran on it, but I don't recall doing anything technical or useful on it.
I had a Commodore 64, but that was mostly a game machine.
The first programming I did was on a CP/M based computer. I don't remember what brand. I wrote some programs that could partial out a chemical formula to estimate heat capacity & thermal conductivity from the Hsu method.
Then in '84, we switched to Mac in our department & I became just a user.