I was in a car wreck that caused me to spend 4 months in a hospital. After release I was bedridden and watching TV commercials advertising Computers. I have always been too busy to even think about a computer while running my company. Watching the commercials made me think about computers so I ordered one and haven't slowed down since.
I worked for IBM when they introduced their PC. They put one on every desk in the tech support dept of their internal computing center, where I worked (we kept the mainframes chuggin). There was a note on each one: 'self learn, it is in your interest to do so'. It was indeed!
At first it was boredom. As a kid I was always unmounting and mounting toy cars etc. Installing and uninstalling drivers to OS was kind of similar. Then as a kid I was curious how it works so I bought some monthly magazine about computers. It was challenging to write a computer program and I liked it. I liked that the result is objective and not based on emotions, sympathies etc I also learned that programmers earned more that average salary which also caught my attention.
After leaving the military in the early '80s I got hired by a tech company without having any experience in the industry. The VP of operations was a retired rear admiral. The admiral looked over my military record and hired me on the spot. He then asked if I had the aptitude to learn computer technology. I'd never seen a computer at that point. The IBM Selectric II and a word processor was as close as I came to State of the Art then. Once I got introduced to office computing I was hooked. Home computing logically followed in short order.
My trusty Sharp typewriter died, and I couldn't find a replacement I liked. BestBuy was selling their house-brand computers with all the gizmos and a mile-high stack of software for a (after rebates) reasonable price. Despite my tendency to be a bit of a Luddite, I gave it a try and fell in love with it. Why? Because the machine had problems, and I had to learn how to fix it myself because I couldn't afford to be paying others to do it for me. FUN! (Looking back, it might actually have been more user error than computer problem...but I'll deny it to the end!)
So 25 years ago or so I said there's no way I'll ever buy or need a computer. A couple years later I needed to start using a computer at work but said I'll never buy a computer for home. A year later my brother gave me his old computer, I guess from there I was hooked. (My dates may be off a year or two.)
An uncle passed away and left £200 to each of his nieces and nephews. That allowed me to get my first desktop. I think it was a Medion.
Never wanted anything to do with computers... well, I liked PlayStation and a couple of games, but they weren't online. A mate showed me some YouTube videos and I watched him bid on eBay (still not really in to that). When I gave up smoking in July, 2010, I figured I could use the $'s saved elsewhere. Here I am.
I think it was curiosity. Those were the days of the Commodore 64 and before the Vic20. I had written a program in Basic to calculate time dilation as the speed of light approached. And also a program for calculating large prime numbers. Both of these programs suffered from a major flaw,slow processing. After months of study I solved the problem by exploiting the logarithmic scales of the slide rule. So an old method,the one that enabled mankind to conquer the moon,came to the aid of the new calculation methods. Fascinating. I voted other.
I grew up wanting and my parents buying me a Spectrum 48k then an Amiga 500, which I'll be honest here. I wanted both purely because the sheer amount of kids at school swapping games (nicknamed as "playground piracy" here in England) was rampant and blank cassettes / disks was really cheap, so having access to games for free and a school full of game swappers was a massive incentive to owning both (the same with my sister and her Commodore 64), so my parents really saved a lot of money when you look at it from that perspective. Sure when you look back it was wrong but that is why many people got into computers (especially the Amiga 500) but will many admit it? I doubt it.
Back then I did not even know, what PC means. My first PC was Intel 300 MHz with 8MB GPU and 32MB RAM. I just enjoyed Die Hard 1 game. Eventually I realized, I have to tweak Windows to get PC working better or working at all.
I like to write, to work and as a hobby, so in 1999 I bought my first pc, basically to use writing programs. Then I had Internet and I found a world where find informations, news, images, help for the work......
I enrolled in a machine tool technology program and learned how to program and operate CNC machining centers and lathes. I soon found employment with aircraft component subcontractors, and an interest in personal computing evolved from there.
In the 1980s, I bought a "Sharp PC 1000" pocket computer because I wanted to calculate indicators for stock market analysis. For this purpose, I taught myself to write a corresponding program in BASIC. I was so fascinated by this task that I would get up in the middle of the night if I had a new idea about how to solve a problem in my software.
In 1985 I was working in a machine shop and they acquired a new machine with Comodore 64. This was my first contact with computer. Then in 1993 my daughter enter University and I bought one for home with Windows 3.1. From then my interest in computing evolved no stop.
I was a latecomer to computing. In 2001 a friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen for a long time told me that he was looking for an email address among other friends to contact me for something fairly important. I suddenly realized that I had to buy a computer as I felt embarassed about the situation. With my first computer I felt thrilled about the fact one could have access to just about any source of information without going to a library, including reading newspapers (at the time none of them had a paywall).
I voted Gaming and Internet. When was a small kid (8 to 10 years old) videogames on the PC were kind of fun, think of Pac-Man and Paperboy. Of course advanced video game consoles like the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis made PC gaming less interesting in the early 90's. After that, I became interested in the Internet as a teenager, I couldn't believe all of the info that you could access for free (newspapers, magazines and Wikipedia). And stock trading (Wall Street) caught my interest, fascinating that you could make money (and lose money) via the web.
It was an elective class in high school, where I learned all the basics a year or two before Windows was launched.
'Other' vote A girlfriend of mine in about 1985 was doing a Master of Arts Degree and had an Amstrad word processor (maybe Alan Sugar) which she allowed me to use to write various things. Locoscript as I remember. No internet at that time. This was the the first time I had typed something electronically and used a monitor Later, (about 1995) a friend was starting at university to do a Bachelor of Arts degree. I had heard of the internet but had never used it. The students at the University were given access to computer labs but my friend said that she preferred not to use it and gave me her access account for three years. I used to go into the lab in the evening when most students had finished for the day and stay most of the night. Most of the students used floppy disks to save their computer work and these failed regularly or the new students that were unfamiliar with operating a PC made catastrophic mistakes losing all their work and there were many pale faces, breakdowns and tears. The Computer labs had helpers at a desk which weren't exactly sysops but tried to solve problems when they could. At that time although the university had Internet access it was very primitive. They had a Unix system and I think Windows 3.0. The first image I ever looked at using Windows www was from Nasa. The page took an age to load...you only got a few k download rate (if that) so loading an image was like painting a wall at home and almost took as long At that time there were little repositories that you could log into that weren't www as such and were just self contained. I forget what they were called. I also dabbled a bit on the Unix system and had email etc in Unix. I also had Elm and Pine email systems. One was slightly more user friendly than the other. Both were very usable and straightforward. I miss that sort of computing in some way. I learned a lot in three years mostly by trial and error. I didn't have a home PC and when I bought one second hand with Windows 3.0 it was quite expensive but useless for the Internet. Dial Up connections were dreadful and my first ISP sometimes could connect for weeks. Dial-up was not good. Hard drives were very small in those days. Manually setting up windows was awkward. There was no 32 bit operating system. Operating systems came on a series of floppy disks. You always prayed that one wouldn't be damaged. I remember later, when struggling, using FDISK /MBR quite a lot. I used to run a program called PowWow, an absolutely fantastic program for the time, at the University from a floppy disk. It was too large for a floppy but a friend helped me make it fit on the disk by editing it down to size I talked with people all over the world. Powwow was eventually bought out and destroyed. A fantastic thriving community at the time. This was a real kick in the teeth. I also used Internet Relay Chat at times and news groups. Later ran my own websites, various Forums, ran DNS server FTP server, Mailserver etc. Not with a great deal of expertise, mostly 'On a wing and a prayer' and hopeful intuition. That's basically how my PC internet life started.
