Same journey but mine started with a Commodore Vic 20.
Gen X, the meh generation
A community for Gen X, those born between 1965 and 1980. Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z are welcome as long as the topic is Gen X or related. Abusive, racist or anti-LGBTQIA+ commentary/users will be removed.
It was an Atari 400 for me which my single mom stretched to buy me for Christmas when I was 4 thinking it would help me “learn computers”. I never coded a single line of code on it; only ever got game cartridges.
My uncle had a TI-99/4A though, which lived at my grandmothers house. We would write code on it and save the games we wrote (from a manual) to audio cassettes.
I did end up with a career in IT so I like to give my mom credit for that even if it’s a tenuous connection ☺️
For me, it was a Commodore PET. Eventually got an Amiga 500 and then an Amiga 1200. Happy days hacking around with cool tech...
Yeah I cut my teeth on a TI-99/4a
I even managed to hook it up to my portable 4.5" black and white TV in my bedroom. Such resolution!
I'm a little bit too much on the cuff of Gen-x to have had a 300 baud, so I cut my teeth on a 1200.
I remember when we finally got our hands on some token ring cards and hooked them up during our LAN parties. Oh the warez that could be shared at those speeds...
I'm a millennial and I also remember a time before the internet, kinda sorta. I mean, the internet existed before I was born in 1985. But the World Wide Web began in 1993, which is also the first time I went online. But it still wasn't like it was today. Didn't have a web browser; we used CompuServ. Which was basically the same kind of thing as AOL. It had its own interface and access to chat rooms, forums, "web pages," and other kind of infotainment things. But it had to be on their network. You couldn't just, like, randomly look for websites. This was well before web crawlers and search engines.
And even for years after being online, most other people I kmew IRL didn't even have a computer. The reason I wanted to try the internet so bad was because the encyclopedia and The Cable Guy both mentioned being able to play games through it, and I wanted to play the PC games I had with other people. I didn't have that experience until Quake came out in 1996.
BBC Micro Computer in the house as a kid, mine were Atari 2600 (best console ever!), Spectrum ZX, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200. Good Times!
Still have a couple of them knocking about!