Why did you get into computer?

FuturDreamz · 12 Apr 2010

I was visiting one of my mom's friend, which had a shiny white iBook and the old saucer Airport. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and then I began to wonder what other possibilities were there.

WindowsStar · 12 Apr 2010

Valor D said:

My family saw an ad in the paper for a free Apple //c computer for anyone who placed $10,000.00 into a bank account, and left it there for 10 years. :)

Intrigued and confused, so how does it work? You leave a 10,000 in an account and 10 years later after they verify the money is there you get a 10 year old computer? Do they lock the money into some account that you cannot access it for 10 years, so you can have the computer right away? Did you get the computer? That seems like a lot of money to come up with, why not just buy a computer wouldn’t have been much cheaper?

loaba · 12 Apr 2010

I was given to understand that the computer was an incentive to deposit the 10k and leave it there. I'm sure there must have been a heavy penalty for early withdrawal.

PS - how much was the retail on that particular Mac in 1986?

WindowsStar · 13 Apr 2010

According to Wiki: The original retail price of the computer was US$1298

Apple II series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

loaba · 13 Apr 2010

So the deal was that you had to lock in 10k for 10 years, but you got a $1298.00 computer for your trouble and some interest in the end? I'm not the quickest of cats, at the best of times, but it sounds like a good thing to me.

jcgriff2 · 13 Apr 2010

I didn't get into computers, computers go to me first - only since late 2007, when I saw my very first BSOD, took the system in for repair, go it back and it BSOD'd itself to death more frequently than before. I dove into Vista head first and solved the BSOD. Started posting in Jan 2008... the rest is history.

jcgriff2

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Jonathan_King · 13 Apr 2010

Wow, John. I never would have guessed.

I started out a few years ago, writing programs for my TI-84 calculator (see this site), and gradually got bored with it and moved on to computers instead.

My first computer was one I built last year, when Vista was out and Windows 7 in beta.

When I installed the RC, I joined SF, and that's where I have learned just about everything I know.

G4b1t · 13 Apr 2010

My first contact with a personal computer was in trash in 1998.
I didn't even know that a home computer free for personal use ever existed. I always saw that great technology used by computers was always used for science and stuff. Until one day right in front of my house in my own pavement i saw a big box with some weird plastic looking green boards on top of it. Looks like somebody was in no use of it anymore and just trash it away. It was my 1st PC @ 226Mhz ( 400 in turbo mode i thin) with a 20G Kaliviar hdd.
Books and lots of bugging to teachers made my way to follow Computer Science.
Be ware it's a virus spreading by air. or maybe sight xD

derekimo · 13 Apr 2010

About two years ago when my brother gave me his old windows 98 emachines computer, that got me started with some basics then I got a HP with 2000 on it from a friend who couldn't remember the password so I played with that for a few months, and then I bought a emachines with vista home basic and started adding ram, video card and upgrading to home premium.
Then I got this computer almost a year ago, a couple months later I found out I could download and try windows 7, then I found this great forum where I have learned so much and continue to learn.

Thorsen · 13 Apr 2010

I started with computers when my parents got a Commodor 64 in the late 80's. I was about 7 or 8 when I found a program in a computer magazine and wrote in the instructions to get it to run on the machine it was about 5 pages long. It amazed me that you could write code to tell a computer what to do and have been fascinated since.

In middle school I was told that I couldn't take a computer course and Band at the same time, so I made my choice and took the computer class. It was mainly navigation and word processing on a Mac. In high school I took every class I could for computers and was designing images in PS in the 10th grade. And writing programs in Visual Basic in the 12th grade. Then college was all Computer Science. I learned over 10 programming languages and many system designs.

All through this time, I fixed computers for friends and relatives, replaced hardware and cleaned computers free of their infections.

My career now is deeply set in computers going from Admin to XML