I don’t even know which way the split would go. Many people i know studying computer science first year have a macbook, in what seems disproportionate. Maybe just general university student bias? also apple walled garden* lol *on the iPhone
First home family computer was a Packard Bell, windows 3.1…was forbidden from taking it apart or messing with the settings.
First computer that I was allowed to mess with was a thrift store Commodor 64…
I used an Apple IIe in 1st grade. With the big 5.25in floppys. Learned logo and figured out how to make spirograms using recursive patterns.
Much later we got a Dell P90 and win 95 before going through the rest of windows releases up through win 7. I figured out Linux in high school at some point, but that’s more of a hobby from time to time.
But also used os/7/8/9 at school and later switched to Mac in general.
This schism exists in my household. Mrs. Warp Core had access to a Mac and went on to do non-computer things. I had a PC and went full-ASD/ADHD HAM on (what feels like) every iteration of commercial computer tech ever since.
As an Old, I started with an Apple ][ and learned BASIC. We did get the classic B&W Macintosh computers when I was 12-13.
Yep, this study would have to divide things up by age. As a fellow member of the Oregon Trail generation, all my early computers were also Apple ][ and b&w macs. But then eventually by young adulthood it all turned into PCs.
I enjoyed a stint with Solaris in college (that’s SUN Solaris thankyouverymuch) which I consider my true intro to Linux/posix/whatever-ix.
I started on a Pr1me 550 type II learning BASIC myself. Apple ][s came out about 4 years later. Then I used them. Windows SA now.
I’m should bring that Ubuntu CD I had shipped to me as a kid to a therapist.
I had one i lost it. i also had a CD of solaris before oracle bought them out a long time ago.
Literally the first definition says it’s an out of use synonym for exclusion
That it is, my bad.
Thank for noting.
Although I some how think she wasn’t exactly using it in the archaic sense on purpose, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
The weird thing is that the UNIX core of MacOS would lend itself really well to tinkering. It’s a shame that Apple lobotomizes all the hardware they sell with locked down firmware…
It’s why I much prefer MacOS over Windows. The command line makes sense. The file and folder structure makes sense. The defaults can be a little bit weird but a little configuration can help me feel right at home.
Ironically, I found macOS to be a lot more technical than Windows. It’s how I got my start with Linux. At least changing the default browser changes the default browser. I’ll be using macOS and Linux side by side.
My elementary school had those chunky, colorful iMac G3s that I played hella coolmathgames on. At home we had an old Compaq desktop with Windows 2000 (later XP).
I never learned anything useful except general computer literacy but I sure do miss those days.
Hey! 🙋 I’m an autistic person (diagnosed at age 3). I grew up using Mac computers mostly, because my father preferred them for his work. Although I would encounter Windows a lot when I was at school as well. However, I didn’t really know how to use Windows until I started seeing videos on YouTube about it (such as this one). This was when I was around 10. So I started experimenting with different editions of it (Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows XP, etc.) via a pirated copy of Parallels Desktop. I also found out about Linux, and toyed with Ubuntu with a bit via Parallels. I found it fun, and thus considered the idea of installing Linux properly onto my Macbook. Unfortunately, the trackpad support wasn’t there. So for my 11th birthday, I asked for a “Windows laptop”, and immediately after getting it, I set up some dual-boot with Windows 10 and some fork of Ubuntu called “Pinguy OS”. (I spent way too much time looking at DistroWatch.) Then, I distro-hopped for a bit until I finally settled on Void Linux when I was 13. I’m now 18 and am running Void full-time on my current laptop, it doesn’t even have a Windows partition. :)
I’ve learned C++ when I was 10. Should I have myself checked?
it’s not going to cause any additional harm:)))
according to the US gov, C and C++ pose a threat to national security because they are a “memory unsafe” language. I hope you can recover from all the pain and memory leaks you had to endure by transitioning to Rust. /s
No point, c++ already contaminated you. Better than getting java in you early, but both have their own expression of mental illness. I think both are better than C, which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn’t exist.
which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn’t exist.
That’s assembley
i only knew HTML and CGI scripts :(
Nah, you already know the problem, you just need to self medicate.
Only if you have trouble functioning. The only reason for diagnosis is access to care.
But, yeah, prior odds are significant ;)
When I was 12 I installed Linux… and now I have autism. And I’m gay!
We get it, you use Arch.
That’s like half the fediverse here
Gaytism
Weird flex, but ogay.
I’m autistic and gay but I also have a secret third thing that stopped me from figuring out linux. The “AD” in ADHD (there needs to be a better way to distinguish between having attention deficit, hyperactivity, or hybrid). I have tried like four times now to figure out linux and my brain just doesn’t get the dopamine it needs from that activity and I just can’t focus 🫠
There is a shoet way to say it: Inattentive type (type I), Hyperactive type (type H), and Combination type (type C)
I routinely describe myself as ADHD type C
C
There is a way to distinguish them ! There is Innatentive type, Hyperactive-impulsive type and Combined type
It looks like Linux got much friendlier as of lately, and requires much less figuring out, but ymmv and you can of course run into issues, unfortunately.
Nowadays we usually have the benefit of being connected to the internet from something other than the computer we’re fiddling with, it was quite hard to troubleshoot modem issues when you need that modem to work for the internet connection.
There’s truly not individual unique experiences.
Well there’s a simple explanation right? When you’re growing up grappling with issues like homosexuality, disability or just feeling like an outsider - spending more time at a computer provided an escape from a judgemental and unwelcoming world. This is the same reason so many of us are night owls well into adulthood, cause we grew up feeling safer when the adults were asleep and we could maintain our personal boundaries.
My first memory with a computer was playing (more like trying to play) Microsoft flight simulator 1.0 on a Macintosh when I was around 8-9. The thing that looks like that:
I only started using Linux when installed dual boot Ubuntu on the family computer around 14-15.
Wow that is awesome! I have big nostalgia for the early B&W Macs as well, having played on a Mac Classic my uncle had when I was a kid. He actually gave me that computer years ago and it’s still in my basement collecting dust. I powered it up a few years ago and it still worked but then promptly powered it down and put it away. I need to go through it and recap it. Hopefully there aren’t any disastrous leaks.
Those beautiful graphics. That dithering though!
My dad had this flight sim on his old PC! That internal speaker and the BW graphics… another one of those games was the keyboard destroyer decathlon.
My first MS flight simulator was 4, the graphics were similar, but in VGA
My first game was probably 1944 or moon buggy
Where’re all the DOS kids at?! 5 hours and 66 comments, but not a single mention yet.
Never mind solving problems with Windows; shit gets real when the thing boots to a
C:\>prompt and you need to know things like the difference between CGA/EGA/VGA/Hercules graphics modes and WTF an IRQ is just to install your games in the first place.I absolutely still remember my grandfather having a dual 5.25” IBM and teaching my 6-7 yo self how to use the cli. I still remember that MSDOS 2.0 box he had up on his shelf, and how he taught me to keep a simple text file of the prices of my baseball cards, according to the legendary Beckett price guide.
I then later vaguely messing around with 3.11 followed by 95+, but the basis of my mediocre understanding of the cli was due to my grandfather teaching me on DOS 2.0.
in a care home presumably
Listen here you little shit.
spoiler
(Seriously though, DOS kids are like ~40 years old. We’re xennials, not boomers.)
If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive
“What is that high memory area stuff they added in DOS4?”
gets swallowed by rabbit hole for days
“Oh, that!”
I had 3.1, 95, 98se, XP(teenager).
I got in at I’d say the best time. XP for the Internet as a teenager was absolutely the best time to be a teenager with computers.
Kids these days don’t know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.
or defragging a disk.
I was talking to a friend just the other day about that. I remember some application we used to reconfigure autoexec.bat to optimize it for one type of memory or the other, but I can’t remember the name of the application (I think it came with the OS), and I can’t remember what the different memory types were called either.
IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.
I figured it out - it was memmaker. It automatically edited autoexec.bat (and possibly also config.sys, I’m not sure).
You ran emm386.com as a TSR (terminate, stay present) to set up extended memory according to my very stretched memory
That might have been one way of doing it, but I seem to remember a more mnemonic name - something like “memmaker,” perhaps?
Edit: Yep, it was memmaker.
DOS was a step backwards for me from Atari TOS.
Alright, I’ll admit it: my first computer ran Tandy Deskmate, not just plain DOS.
Still, I did have to exit to a command line to run certain games, I think.
What were the Atari terms of service?
/sEasy mistake to make, but terms of service are abbreviated as ToS, not TOS ;-)
Ah, so you mean this:
Now I’m glad I was at the tail end of DOS. My dad showed me how to interrupt the windows boot to get into DOS for Lemmings and Doom, but for everything else like Anno 1602, Need for Speed 2 and Age of Empires 1, I used Windows 95.
When windows was at version 3, I mostly had the computer booting to command prompt, type win to start windows
Though at some point I made a boot menu in autoexec.bat to let you choose windows, command prompt, or any of the games installed
DOS5 here, installed from 5.25" floppies on a tiny HDD and looking at one of those awful shades-of-yellow monitors.
That’s if you don’t count the computer that didn’t have a hard drive and ONLY booted from 3.5" floppy (which was just enough to get a bootable DOS disk and Prince of Persia).
IRQ’s were great for choice. You got to your modem, video card, and soundcard and then picked which two would actually work when they all wanted IRQ5 or 7
I remember when discs got big enough that we could have windows 3.1 installed as well as a current tech game
I will not miss setting up interrupts for cards, I will not miss setting up extended memory
Though all that would have been easier were I older. I was in my 20s when Linux became available and the early experience with DOS had me happy to dive right into that
Does anyone still know the
C>prompt?
Personally, I guess that you learn more the more issues you have. MacOS is a more closed down ecosystem compared to Windows, malware is less popular and as hardware comes usually bundled with the OS, you shouldn’t encounter as many driver or hardware issues in general.
As a kid I had so much trouble with incompatible software, viruses, adware, drivers, broken hardware etc. And as I had noone to ask, it tought me a lot about the fundamentals of IT and how to research such issues myself.
Counterpoint, I grew up at a time when Mac’s still couldn’t do much outside of what apple specifically developed for them, so I learned a ton about emulation and virtual machines and such to play games or use Photoshop. I guess that supports your hypothesis, I can rock Unix command line stuff and containers like a pro, but hate figuring out drivers
And then there’s 90s Linux because your parents got a used computer with a friend that came with only that and they didn’t want to spend money buying windows 😢 it’s like learning to swim by being yeeted into the ocean, with a couple sharks hanging around.
At least 80s kids got assembly.
Linux had always been good - put together a new computer, move the OS from the old one, put Linux on the old one…
Find Linux is so much fun, dual boot the new machine on Linux, only keep windows for games
My audio collection from then is all .ogg files
Debian didn’t have a stable release until 1996… Even Slackware didn’t shape up nicely until around 98 from what I remember. SLS gave it a GUI but wasn’t well maintained. Linux wasn’t really “good” until early 2000s at the very least.
I just wanted to play Space Cadet Pinball or Commander Keen as a kid, not compile my programs.
You’re clearly talking about modern Linux.
I don’t think I had budget to buy my own computers until '99, and that’s when I first played with Linux
Yes, I completely see that. This is not a black or white question. You can use Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS… and learn close to nothing or you can geek around hour after hour to expand the boundaries of your device.
I would just assume, that you learn less if everything you want to do, works out of the box. And ‘working out of the box’ a typical selling point of the Apple ecosystem. Which of course doesn’t mean that you can’t have a steep learning curve. Your use cases obviously weren’t delivered out of the box, so you had to get creative as well.
I had a jailbroken iPod Touch with a shell on it and spend hours and days overcoming system boundaries just out of spite. I also remember vividly trying to bring mobile games to a Symbian phone, tweaking around with a HP iPAQ on Windows Mobile, manually typing Midi ringtones with a text editor on a Nokia. :D
