My First PC

When I was a kid - maybe 7, so 1975 - I had an analog computer. A friend of the family gave it to me; it was gathering dust in his garage. It was a plastic shell that had I think 10 lightbulbs across the top, and rows and rows of holes. You would connect sets of holes with wires, and there were plastic sliders that would activate or de-activate parts of the circuit that you had built. It came with pre-designed "games" and "utilities" that you could (after sweating and swearing with wires for 4 hours) plug in to the board and play. You could also write your own programs for it, if you were some kind of frickin' genius (or so it seemed to me at the time).

Thanks to helpful old alumni friends, I found it here. Lots of other cool computers at that site.

Also, as a boy, I wrote a program designed to be entered on punch cards. (It was a lunar lander simulator.) The cards were not actually physically punched - the campus mainframe where I was taking the computer class had just been outfitted with a state-of-the-art teletype terminal, where you could actually type in code without having to punch the cards. But they still taught us how to do the cards, because it was "a valuable job skill".

Yes, I am old. I am punchcard old, and my temples are white.

When did this happen?