How did it all start for you?

How did it all start for you?

When I was diagnosed with autism

Apple //c. Fuck I'm old.

My father had a friend that used to fix our computers. I would always hang around whenever he came over. Guess it started there.

Dad always had computers

AOL disk

I was the youngest in my grade, so I was typically the small kid not picked for sports, so I wasn't interested in sports out of spite. I also have a dad who was a programmer, and a few order cousins who were geeks that tought me a bunch. Built my first hand-me-down / frankenstein computer at 10 with some help.

My grandfather used to play heroes of might and magic and it was all downhill from there.

Commodore Amiga in 1993. I was 9.

I fucked up the OS and I learned how to reinstall it from scratch from like 30 floppies Workbench came with. Then I learned 3d on it, and first PC was Win3.1, then wingay 95...and have been on Macs since 1999.

cheap late 80's/early 90's dos machines from garage sales in the late 90's

Mid 90's Poor as fuck family living literally in the slums, my father spends his savings of some years pension and buy for me and my brothers a brand new pentium 1 pc, he said computers are the future, learn that and maybe you will do yourself a good living my sons. He passed away some years after that.
inb4 pajeet
I am from south america.
Now I am in a dead end job as a php developer, thanks dad, at least I did a lil better than you.

didn't expect those feels

started out playing Age of Empires as a wee lad

next thing you know I'm here on Sup Forums

Damn, that's pretty sad and bittersweet.

That's your fault for being such a dumb Mexican, learn something else if PHP isn't paying you well.

Got a degree in audio engineering, was getting paid shit and saw salaries for real technology jobs. That was pretty motivating

>inb4 pajeet
>I am from south america

Is this supposed to be better, you PHPhucking beaner?

> (OP)
>Apple //c. Fuck I'm old.
Clams op

>> 60749170
PHP is a dying language in the US, so I bet it's useful in south america

Yeah this.

Old ass laptop before color laptops were really a thing. Used to go into the Colonization files and change settings and shit.

Tandy 1000hx

pos dos box at home and apple IIs at friends, and later machintosh ii and eventually win 95, which is around the time I really got into computers.

My uncle used linux and installed it on one of our computers in 98 or so. I still have a red hat 6.0 2 cd set.

Immigrated from a former commie block country. Dad met a guy who acquired cheap 286/386s and the rest is history.

2002, I was 12. Parent's bought me my first computer. Pentium 4 processors just came out. Dell had a deal going which for a tower with a pentium 4 and an igp, crt monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse, it was $1200. It came with windows XP home that wasn't an OEM disc if I recall, probably why the price was so high (compared to today). My parents were also tired of dial up, so we got a cable internet connection with a standalone modem.

I spent the first few months just hanging out in MSN Messenger, AOL, and ICQ chatrooms. I would spend my days on "funny" content aggregates like ebaums world, somethingawful, amd fark. Newgrounds and candystand for flash games. My friends eventually got me to play diablo 2 and medal of honor allied assault with them. In MOHAA I became interested in "hackers" but really they were juzt cheaters but I wanted to know how they were able to do the things they did which got me into programming and actually had me start paying attention to my math classes.

Around 2004 I started coming to Sup Forums. Was scared off a few times by some of the shit I saw on Sup Forums, but I think we've all been there one time or another. I've never left for more than a few weeks at a time though, but even then I would bounce between here, an MMO, g4, somethingawful, etc.2002.

There were couples near my apartment that owned PC.

They didn't have children and I was playing with their win95 PC, everyday after school.
One day they decided to move out elsewhere and after few years they got a child.

Best friend's dad did a ton of shit with Red Hat Linux, and was always building him awesome PCs to play games on. One day I asked his dad how it all worked, and now I'm a fat autist shitposting on a mongolian tech support forum.

I was a grade-school kid who played Simcity 2000 on some shitty Dell in the mid-90s. My dad went and got this newfangled "internet service" thing. I was bad at Simcity 2000 and used this interbutts thing to search for cheat codes, and found one page that told you how to use a hex editor to change things in save files.

When I was 8, my uncle showed my how to chip an Xbox original. Since he was the only non tech literate in my family he teached me about computers

I've always kinda been like this, it started with me always looking for ways to glitch the fuck out of all my video games (and exploiting all the useful ones)

when my parents got dialup in 2004

My dad was building his win98 machine and asked for my help and teached me some stuff about eletronics. We had older machines but that's when I recall actually getting interested in computers.
He's a civil engineer though.

Very similiar story to mine.

Uncle owned pic related, let me play around on it whenever my senpai came to visit, made me aware from an early age that Win9x was dogshit and any nostalgia for it is utterly undeserved

Asian kid showed me how to pirate doom doing a backup in DOS with 8 floppy disks.

I remember when Gopher came out in the late 80s, which made the Web much easier to use. Since then it's been a slippery slope.
Fellow Gen-Xer here. Don't feel too bad mate.

When I first started coming to Sup Forums around 9 years ago.

Grandpa worked on mainframes for the military. grew up around computers.

my father dicked my mom and i was born 9 months later

They wipe with tp, although they throw it in the garbage, so yes thats a step up

My brother got an HP with a celeron running Win 98 sometime in 1998.. Eventually got dial up internets with aol.

Pentium 4 at 3 GHz with ATI Radeon 7000 and 512MB of RAM, finally died somewhere around 2012, I still remember how laggy Warcraft 3 ran on that lovable POS, the only thing I have left (and needs fixing because the image on the screen kinda flickers or disappears for less than a second, it's hard to explain) is the CRT it used.

It unironically looks way better than my laptop's screen, kek

>ATI Radeon 7000
I remember I had to get one of those with the meager savings my broke teenage ass had on hand after I killed my GF4 Ti trying to bolt a bigger heatsink to it. GTA3 on a Radeon 7000 wasn't exactly optimal.

Dad worked for a company called MDS Mohawk Data Sciences.. built desk size computers for businesses. One day early 80s I'm early teens walk into Radio Shack have Tandy Home Computers, Sales rep talks about this thing called modem, cool. Goto library pull business index look for ones with modem numbers.. go back to Radio Shack hand shake some numbers, 3 days later.. no shit.. fbi shows up.. apparently I connected to a gov military contractor. The dropped all charges when they found out I was 12. Modems removed from display comps at Radio Shack, lol. Sounds gay but was big deal cutting crap then. Mom ended up getting me a Tandy from that.. never went anywhere though gay ass small town no body to teach me.

megaman battle network

>GTA3
Now imagine 10 year old myself trying to play San Andreas, couldn't even fathom to play online until I got the old 2011 laptop where I'm writing this

>Playing AoE
>Computer dies and we never replace it (parents had a PC but only let us use that one for school stuff)
>Years later want to play AoE again
>Don't have a personal PC
>Ask parents to get me one
>They say if I get straight A's through the rest of the year they would pay for half
>Do it
>Get a shitty Dell
>Who cares, it plays empires so I'm cool with it
>Eventually stumble upon some programming guides when looking for cheats for other games
>Learn C
>Found Sup Forums and Sup Forums eventually
>Stuck ever since

I was depressed so I decided rather than simply kill my self I would attempt to exhaust my self until I simply waste away.

I was severely bullied(like taken out of classes by the administration bullied. Took two years of class in the guidance office. I was a little socially retarded and grew up in a town with less than a thousand people, but still don't understand the extent of why it was that bad. I never did shit to anyone.) in school growing up and grew up hating everyone. My Dad got in on the early ground floor of the IT industry, so there was always shit around the house(sometimes pretty cool shit, even). I ended up growing up on shitty internet forums and Sup Forums, so it was a pretty natural progression.

Dad used to fly planes so he was into flight simulator. Needed a decent PC to use it. Had a nice Joystick to play Harry Potter and Lego Chess all day.

Harry Potter games

My NES broke, the only source of entertainment I had was an old Pentium 1 (which actually was a pretty decent PC back then) and a few books on Pascal, visual basic and c++.
Long summer, no friends and a healthy dose of good old autism set me up for good.

We were pretty poor, first I lived in a 1 room apartment sharing an air mattress with my mom and sister, then lived in a house with my entire extended family, then moved into the basement of my Aunts house. I was always fascinated with computers but I rarely got to use one. At school I remember using them whenever I could, I got in trouble because the class went to an assembly but I hid and stayed in the classroom on the computer instead. My mom was a teacher and would often work until 7-8pm. After school ended at 2-3, all the other kids would go home together and play sports and stuff, I would go to my moms classroom and immediately on the computer, only stopping to go to the bathroom or to help her out. I remember when the school moved to a new building, they left a bunch of computers behind so we finally had one at home. I kind of regret it, to be honest, but I'm sure we all do.

nine years old, lurking from an emachines "Never Obsolete!" cumputer around 2003~2006 ish

>be me
>Play tons of warcraft 1 and 2, doom, and civ2 when i was very young
>eventually got into other cool games my dad had.
>Learned how to use dos.
>Learned more about basic pc use through my early teens.
>Play mostly console games until first pc at 16.
>have massive hardon for diablo 2 and sc1 through console years tho.
>teach myself everything i know about computers by trial and error, and exploring every tool that came with my xp install.
>In highschool make a friend who was into pc gaming
>hung out all the time.
>jews me into cs 1.6.
>Next thing i know im a late teen from a somewhat middleclass family who wants something better than a toaster with a pci slot.
>No pcie
>not even agp.
>Fast forward to now, have decent pc that can play most things, get into python.
>Recently install my first linux distro on my second hdd.
>autism setting in

>also ranked gold in leeg of retards

Watching another kid play Runescape in the public library.

This. I have been depressed so I said, well I better kill myself by working hard instead.

>Dad bought me one right before dsl died out.
>Learned about porn
>Huh, I wonder what else I can do with it.

And now I'm here, arguing about brown cpu fans and C.

>Born into a lower class black family in West Philly
>Grew up with barely any technology so I would just spend most of my time at the playground
>Did nothing for most of my youth, just chilled and relaxed all cool
>Took up an interest in basketball (or 'B-ball' as we called it) and usually played after school
>One day some guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my neighbourhood
>I got it one little fight and my mom got scared and said "you're moving in with your auntie and uncle in Bel air"

Brother used computers when I was a kid, fascinated me so I would use it whenever I could. I remember playing quake on it...
Good times

>
>They wipe with tp
Not in Venezuela

We don't have tp shortages anymore, but you can't actually shit if you don't eat.

56k modem

>be 5
>dad bought IBM machine with a Pentium II in 1997
>found games like Half-Life, Doom and Heroes of Might and Magic
>PC stopped working once
>opened the fucker and was in awe over how this shit even worked
>decided to learn what everything did

One thing lead to another and here I am, shitposting on an imageboard.

i dont see how fighting got you into computers user?

downloading files to play SNES roms, on this shitty 56k connection to zophars? Wow. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

there was a rollercoaster tycoon cdrom that came with a cheerios box.

>zophars domain is still up
>and being updated
neat

i like how the theme of the site has stayed intact as well

Dad's company upgraded to 286s when I was 6, so he brought some of the old XT 8088s home and gave me one together with a thicc BASIC handbook.

>Zophar's Domain

Holy shit blast from the past

my mom bought a pc to write her thesis degree
I got hooked, even managed to delete a few system folder, and bricking it, on my own

Doom
Duke Nukem

Shitty compaq computer on a 56k modem and bangbros 12 year old me thought that was real. I wish everyday I could get as excited about tits as 12 year old me did.

My uncle gave me a 13Mhz Windows 3.1 machine when I was 6yo.

grandad brought home a DOS / Win 3.1 machine from work (was used for controlling a wood drying chamber at his job). his workmate gave him floppies full of games like the original 2D sidescrolling Duke Nukems, Commander Keen, Another World etc. The Windows portion of the system already had stuff like AvP, Fifth Element, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom etc. Good fucking times.

Street Rod on a 486.

I was in a car crash, and my right leg below the knee was mostly shattered. I was hospitalized for about 3-4 months before they let me out.
In those 3-4 months, I started tinkering with my phone, and then my brother brough me his old Toshiba laptop for movies and stuff. It stopped working one day, so I tinkered with it a bit, and it was mostly working again (mostly = speakers didn't work, but had headphones so it was fine)
From there, I started messing with hardware further, and eventually got into hobby software development.

Had I kept going at that red light, the dude behind me wouldn't have slammed into me, pushing me further into traffic. So I guess I appreciate it, as weird as it seems.

I played magic pockets on some old piece of shit

I remember pressing the turbo button because I thought it would make the game go faster

My first computer experience was at my first elementary school in 1996. Then encountered a computer at my Grandma's, an old, yet preserved IBM with only yellow amber glowing pixilation. Then introduced in 1997 to more computers through my second elementary school. I remember mostly being impressed with the computer mouse. The first search engine I discovered was dogpile.com. Then Grandma got a computer, Hewlett Packard desktop, in 1999 from Sam's Club with Windows ME installed. I used it sporadically: chatted elementary school friends with Yahoo! Messenger on occasion, played chess using instantchess.com (still around), purchased the early Roller Coaster Tycoon from my library's book fair, viewed explicit content related to nudity, etc. I then stopped most computer use for a while.

my uncle game a 10Mhz dos machine when i was similar age
>tfw you press TURBO and it switches to 16Mhz

ME didn't come out until 2000

Thanks for the clarification. It was 2000 as you have said.

there seems to be a bunch of confusion around 2000/ME and their release dates
i've seen people who thought 2000 came out in 2000
and people who thought 2000/ME came out at the same time
and people who thought 2000 and ME were literally the same OS

I wanted to write mods

I wish my laptop would go from 3,8GHz to 6GHz with a press of a button

I think what confused me was the copyright date, which listed 1999 for a particular license. For some reason I associated this with manufacturing/general release. If I recall correctly it was named for the Y2K millennium. I should've looked further into it before posting. Thanks again for the correct information.

yea, both 2000 and ME were named after the new millenium, as was basically everything else that was made in 1999/2000

There wasn't that much of a difference, for me at least, Red Baron played fractionally more smoothly. I suppose uncle's programs got more of a boost. I remember hearing that intels 'math processor' slashed computing times from hours to tens of minutes at the place he worked at.

>I remember hearing that intels 'math processor'

Wolololo

yeah, the one with the floating point stuff... though since we were (and are) in a 3rd world country, i suppose only the basic model ever reached us

Judging by the state of this board, nothing did start for the most people here.

...

When I was 12, I wrote my first ANSI C compiler

My first memory with a PC was playing Mario and DEV on my uncle's pc. Few days later, I bought aladin too. Fast forward a few years, my uncle bought me captain claw and after completing that, I didn't use the PC for a while. Fast forward a few years, my grandpa gifted me and my brother a new PC(Pentium 4). My brother didn't let me do shit with it, because he thought I'd break it. Eventually I got access to it and played GTA vice city and project IGI on it. Around that time, I also heard about hackers and the very notion that they could play God in other people's life fascinated me....but I still couldn't learn anymore about them, because of limited internet access. A few years later, learned about various programming languages and how they can solve life's problems and combined with my childish notion of hacking I began looking for information more and more.... Since then, my exposure to PCs have not been frequent, due to the burden of performing good in school. After completing school I got myself an rpi2 to tinker with and one thing led to another and now I'm on an image board with obnoxious but like minded people.

Ebin racism to look cool my senpaitachi

does someone here cut onions?

OwO

>from like 30 floppies Workbench came with.
Workbench 3.1 was on 6 floppies.

Wait a second... you refer to it as just Commodore Amiga? So the Amiga 1000? It didn't even have a hard drive, it ran from floppies,

What the fuck are you smoking? Oh right, you're just pretending to know shit to feel like a oldfag.

>made me aware from an early age that Win9x was dogshit and any nostalgia for it is utterly undeserved
you must be young as fuck