I had a Mac named Snowball
It died! It died!
The Genius said he'd fix it
He lied! He lied!
Oh why oh why is my Mac dead
Couldn't that lightning bolt have hit me instead?
I was about 8 when my best friend and I would take crap apart to see how it worked. That was about 1970. Then found his dads liquor cabinet and mixed stuff together to see how it would taste. That and the gadgets Bond would get from Q.Reply
My dad worked for Polaroid in the 80's as an engineer. He use to bring home all the prototypes for testing. Then we got an Amiga and I was hooked for good. Intelivision, NES, Gateway2000 (the old name of the company) with Win95, and Sega. I wouldn't change a thing either.Reply
Does anyone else remember the Olivetti Programma 101? It stored programs on magnetic cards and was absolutely gorgeous, great Italian design from the 60s. How about the Monroe-bot? I think we used this to win WWII. We set one up to multiply two twelve digit numbers and it deafened all the Nazis. Oh yeah, and the IBM 1130. // XEQReply
Wow you can really gauge people's ages based on their responses.
For me it started at a very young age, playing with pocket calculators and turning them upside down to spell letters, recording my voice on a cassette tape recorder and playing it back, and playing with my friends' Speak & Spell and Atari 2600 (now you can guess my age).
I eventually got a TI99/4A on which I learned BASIC and even programmed a few of my own rudimentary games. I typed my school reports on an Osborne "portable". Down the road I upgraded to an Atari ST. My tech interests pretty much snowballed from there.Reply
Though the seeds leading up to my love for technology were planted at a much younger age, my realization that I might be falling in love with it came when I was about 9 years old playing with Paint back in Windows 3.1. I played with it for hours every time I went to my mom's work (a computer parts exporting company).
Then at around 12 years old I began learning Pagemaker from the guy that did the layouts for my uncle's small newspaper. (This led to Photoshop, which led to Illustrator, which led to me majoring in Advertising and a Master's in Mass Comm).
Then at 13, I began building my own computers. Though today my work doesn't really involve almost any of this knowledge (copywriter), my love of technology has only grown.Reply
the Apple IIgs and original macintosh, along with LOGO and storybook weaver. They both were similar to the toys I first had as a toddler (lite brite and Legos), but they somehow managed to captivate me since we first met, and I've been hooked on computers, design, and art ever since.Reply
I dont know if this was it, but its the first 'geeky' thing i can remember being totally psyched about.
Family holiday to Orlando when I was ten, one of the malls in or near Kissimmee, I think, I don't know if there is a mall there! anyway, A cheap Casio Databank knockoff watch, wasn't a databank but was a calculator watch. I begged my grandparents to buy it for me. They did! And I loved it. Started my love affair with all things high tech.
And it wasn't even all that high tech :-)
Edit: Thinking about it, I did have Spectrum +2 before that, and a VIC 20, but my mum used those as well, for me, that watch stands out.Reply
Honest to God.
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