Goddammit, Microsoft.

[Jarhyn]

My first computer ran on MS DOS 3.3.

3.1 here.

The first one I banged on was in 6th grade. An Amiga, maybe?

The first one that was "mine", however, was MS DOS 3.1 with a graphical user frontend that, eventually, allowed mouse input.

My first IBM PC ran PC-DOS 1.0. When PC-DOS 1.1 came out, I ran IBM's disassembler on both OS'es to see what the differences were.

But I'd been programming for almost two decades before PC-DOS 1.0. My first machine was an IBM 1620 — my high school math teacher was a grad student at the State College and gave us his "password" — and I once programmed a sort on it in absolute machine code. (By "absolute" I mean I sat at the keypunch and prepared an object deck using the Multiple-Punch key. Still need proof I'm autistic? )

Right around my Commador64 days I was building pixel based lookup tables by hand for typography graphics. I was a strange 12 year old.

I remember being so frustrated and angry that I couldn't open up the source code for the games on it to learn how they were made.

Are you my strange kin, then?

 

[Swammerdami]

Are you my strange kin, then?

I am strange. As for kin: . . . What's your Y-haplogroup?

 

[Jarhyn]

Are you my strange kin, then?

I am strange. As for kin: . . . What's your Y-haplogroup?

What makes things like us "kin" I imagine is more "memetic" than "genetic".

In some ways I see the neurodivergent to be a kind of family hidden within the family as it were.

For whatever reason, while I love everyone, those who embody the strange chaos of the bizarre and even broken mind bring me special and wonderful joy, in all their splendor and squalor as the case may be.

I would let this special love drive me to consider such as "family".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

My first computer ran on MS DOS 3.3.

3.1 here.

Sinclair BASIC here.

Color Computer 2 (Radio Shack... kind of like the Commodore 64). DOS would be on the third computer we'd have in the family... a computer with something called a "hard" drive. 20 MB.

 

[steve_bank]

The Radio Shack lap top was popular for a while.

There was the Pet Computer. My first was the C64.

A 20MB hard drive circa 1980 took two people to lift. A fixed lower disk for the OS and a removable upper disk.


The first 5MB HD was a very big deal. Seagate figured out how to mass produce with quality.

 

[ZiprHead]

I don't remember the fist HDD I had, probably in an 8088.