You won’t believe my first computer! What was yours?

I’m sitting here writing on my new MacBook Pro.  Having a new computer has brought a flood of memories about how far computing has come in my life.

The first computer I used was a mainframe in Abilene, Texas.  It was owned by a local bank, and used to reconcile their financial information.  As college students, we got some time on it to run our programs written in Fortran IV.  The programs were input using punch cards, and the output was on striped green paper.  The computer only had 8K octal memory, so you were quite limited in what could be done.  Graphs were printed in X’s and O’s.  Along with it’s card readers and tape drives and printers, it took up a sizable room, which had to have special air conditioning.

So, I’m just wondering how many others of you can remember when:

• Input to a computer had to be from a deck of cards or paper tape.
• Printouts came in one flavor:  capital letters on green and white striped paper.
• Graphics were printed in X’s and O’s.
• Mainframes had 8K octal memories — and that was what a bank would use to reconcile accounts.
• A CDC 6600 was a super computer.  There was one in Texas, and you could send jobs to it from a teletype terminal using paper tape.
• The green screen IBM terminal use was “personal computing.”
• The TI four function calculator was Science Magazine’s product of the year (1976).
• PC’s, Apple II’s, Commodore 64′s and the TI 9400 computer were the latest things, but couldn’t talk to other computers.
• Dot matrix printers were the new revolution.
• DOS was how things worked.
• Social networking was done on a mainframe using NOTES.
• Networks would allow computers to talk to each other, but only if they were physically linked.
• WWW wasn’t graphical.
• Different email programs couldn’t talk to each other.
• Portable computers weighed 20 pounds (I had one made by Compaq).

The first five of these were true 40 years ago when I was in graduate school.  The last five are from about 20 years ago.

So, when was the first time you used a computer?  What kind was it, and what did you use it for?