I was 61 years old and I did not even know how to hook the PC it was a Dell PC I paid 16 or 1800 bucks I don't remember the exact amount. to me it was the best investment I made I love them now my mia noi

Ron, I'm worried about you... I think you'd better take up golf.

Oh God, your making me feel 'B" ancient. My first encounter with a computer as such was at Oxford in 1953. We had possibly the first working computer of all the unis. It was housed in a sterile room about
10x 6 mtrs. Enclosed in glass cabinets were the fore runners of the memory or hard drives.They were each about the size of a movie projection film reel. To enter the room we were obliged to don a white gown and face mask. A bit like a surgeon performing an operation.Of course there was no such thing as the internet. It was basically a mathmatical probality computer. You entered your question and about 2-3 hours later you got a print out with the answer. The sort of thing a desk top calculator would do in seconds today.But like all good things it had to start somewhere.Now look at what we can achieve in the small desk or laptop computer of today.

I had never touched a mouse or keyboard until 95,I was 56!Still don't know much about them!

I was about 9 and a friend had a Genie. Then we used BBC Micros at school and I had a Sinclair ZX81 (which was blistering with its 1k of RAM).

yes, unplug man, go out side, breathe some fresh air, ok, maybe not in udon. stay out of angel's, get some sun. oh, hold on, you'll be doing that a lot soon, out in rice paddy land, lucky b*****d. of course i say this as i sit plugged in myself...........

on topic, i was 30 ish, so 1985 ish, bought one from radio shack, forget the name brand, but one of the first and biggies back then. something outrageous, like 1800 dollars. couldn't really get into it, and the internet really sucked back then, way to slow, i didn't have the patience for it. returned under deadline for full refund, and bought a word processor, which is basically all i needed anyway, which again was a waste, never really utilise that, should of just bought a typewriter. then in 1996, i think, 42 ish, bought 1st real computer, been hooked ever since. which was a blessing, as that's when i taught myself how to trade stocks, somehow actually learned, though cost as much as doctorate degree at any standard university, on profits lost. damn trial and error, and 2 major market adjustments.

but definitely a piece of technology that change my life, or helped my direction.

In 1983, I was 39 when I bought my first Commadore 64 with 5.25" floppy drive. (Back in those days, we MEN didn't tell anyone we had a floppy drive.) A close friend was a Team Leader of the local AA group and we sat down together for several weeks converting the Twelve Step Manual into Tagalog so the locals, this was in the Philippines, could get a better understanding of what AA was all about. I forget how many floppies it took, something in excess of 50, but we finally completed it and after printing out the initial volume my friend went to Manila and was successful in getting Imelda Marcos to 'sign-off' on it. It was then made available to the entire country.

The following year, 1985, the contractor I worked for brought in several Macintosh computers to run the various offices with and I was given one to use for the Quality Control Office records with it's 9" display. I was so impressed with this introduction of using screen icons, a mouse and windows that I went out and bought one for my home use and have been a Mac fanatic ever since.

In 1982 I bought a Dragon 32 and tinkered with BASIC.
The reason I bought it was that I hated the "Dead Flesh" keyboard on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
You had to load programs with a casette recorder, which was a bitch if you did not get the sound level right, you would have to start all over again. There were a few overpriced games available you loaded via a ROM you pluged into the side of the computer. The design was based on the Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80.

Then I had a Commadore Amiga, a mega expensive IBM 286 that had a Micro Channel Motherboard, and ran on MS-DOS. Various desktop computers I put together myself until the price dropped for laptops and I currently still use my upgraded Gateway laptop which serves me well.

1943 When my Grandad brought me a machine called The Colossus...worked a dream until one of the thermionic valves that did all the calculations suffered a blockage...still, was covered under the 5 year extended warranty he took out at time of purchase so took it back to 'Colossus world' for repair.

What's really amazing is, the machine that I'm using to type this, has more than twice the computing capacity of the computers that they used to send Neil Armstrong to the Moon in 1969. Don't you just love this newer technology?

If Neil only knew, I wonder if he would have gone??

Fortran on IBM System 360 in about 1970. Punched cards and print-outs only. Not a good combination for a person who makes a lot of typos.