28, toward the end of my masters program in biology. All my research and course work were done, so it allowed me to wrap things up on campus and move out of town to write my thesis.
It was an NCR PC clone, and even though it was low end, I think a 186, it cost a ton back then like $2000, and $500 for a dot matrix printer. I had to run DOS and any programs (Word Perfect) using a dual floppy system. A DOS disk to boot it up, and then what ever program to run with the data disc in the other slot. Monochromatic screen and obviously no internet. email didn't become much of a thing for another 5 years and then it was just email and IM. www took over society about another 5 years later, been downhill since!
First personal computer I worked on was an Osborne in the summer of 1982 when I was 24. First one I owned was an IBM compatible 80386 with a 32-bit processor some guy built for me in 1988 when I was 30. I took out a $5,000 GSL to pay for it so I could work on my dissertation. It had a dial-up modem I used to connect to the university mainframe system.
We used the original Apple computers in high school in like '78 or '79. I wrote a gambling game where I could cheat by pressing an "m" instead of "n" and my opponent wouldn't catch on. About that time my little brother got some computer with a voice generator and the highlight was making it say "oops I farted".
I was in and out of engineering school and grad school after that and was in the computer lab all the time but actually don't remember when I first had a computer at home. My wife had one of those early cube Macs in the mid-80s that she did her Master's thesis on in hypercard.
My elementary school had a loaner program where families could take home a Commodore PET when I was in third grade. This was probably around 1982. We got a Vic 20 soon after and then a C64. That Commodore 64 became mine and I got a modem, around when that movie Wargames came out. There was no internet but people would host BBS's on their home phone lines, some of them part-time. I hosted one for a while myself. I had users from all over town. Only one person could be on at a time but that's how they worked. Other than that it was not a whole lot different from message boards like Letsrun.
When I was in 9th or 10th grade, I won some sort of competition in electronics class and the teacher gave me a "computer" which was just a simple keyboard that needed to be plugged into a TV. I wish I remember what model it was; nothing I see in google images quite matches my memory.
I was 18 and had been working at the local university’s computer center. They let me buy one of the Dell machines that otherwise would have been scrapped for $50 which I took with me to college along with an old monitor and keyboard/mouse. I stuck a couple extra memory sticks in there to get it up to 4 GB of RAM. I’m only in my 30s but this makes me feel old.
You should have connected the VIC 20 to a cassette recorder and recorded your programs onto cassette tapes. Looking back on it, it seems crazy that ordinary audio cassette used to be used with the VIC 20 like floppy disks were used with most other computers.
What year did you win that simple keyboard computer?
79 or 80, not 100% sure
The Commodore VIC 20 was a simple keyboard computer that hooked up to a TV. It came out in 1980. It was very cheap and pretty popular. Maybe that was it?