Ask HN: What’s some favorite recollections of your earliest days of computing?

I don't remember how I got into this situation, but the neighborhood kids and I were sitting around my computer when I was about 7 or so. We were on some AOL-like chat program -- compuserve, maybe?

TJ typed something, and someone asked him to take off the caps. He looked confused for a moment and then took off his hat. I shrugged, having no idea what it meant either.

Another one: There was an incredible video associated with http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Tatarchuk-I... that inspired some of my graphics programming career. Unfortunately it seems lost with time.

One day in Spring of 1983, I was a junior in high school, and the whole school was supposed to be gathered in the gym for some sort of pep rally or something. I and a fellow computer geek had absolutely no interest in this, so we spent the time walking around the empty halls talking about the programs we were working on (in 6502 machine language on the school's Apple ][+ machines). We ran into a teacher, who asked us why we weren't at the rally. We waved our diskette boxes (the badge of a computer geek at the time) at him and mumbled something to the effect of, "Oh, we're doing computer stuff", and he let us continue on our way rather than dragging us to the gym.

When the Commodore 64 came out, I ask myself what in the world would anyone do with all of that ram.

* Playing a handheld golf game at my godfather's house

* Then he got a C64! Playing the Hobbit!

* Playing Elite on a friend's BBC

* Typing in 10 PRINT... in Dixons or Boots

* Getting a Vic 20 and writing some simple graphics and sound programs

* Granny's garden on the BBC at school although I can't believe they are still trying to sell it!

* Amiga! F18 Interceptor, Deluxe/Photon Paint, Sountracker, Amos! Yes!

* Seeing the Internet and Sun Workstations at uni in 1994, Doom, MUDs, Gopher...

typing BASIC code from Byte magazine into a Vic20 all Sunday, then debug into the evening. then joy! a game to play! No storage, keep it in ram until I get back from school.

Going through homebrew Apple 2 software in unlabeled floppies. The parents bought a few used Apple computers and each time they came with huge boxes full of these disks, much of them unmarked. Sometimes the disk would load a complex program that seemed very useful. Sometimes it would load an animation, and sometimes that animation could be controlled by (guessing) keys. Sometimes it was a game. Most did something!

3.5" disks. They were so rugged compared to 5.25". Installing OS/2 with 11 or 12 of them. A few years later using the internet for the first time (university green/black unix terminal running netscape), loading something I'd heard of called Amazon using my first credit card. Getting a CD delivered two weeks later from the US. The world instantly got a lot smaller.

Learning Fortran II programming in 1965 on a super-computer at a local university. It had almost a megabyte of memory!

Actually, it was a CDC 6600, which had 131,072 words of 60 bits each, which is kinda the same as nearly a megabyte. I was so impressed that the number 131,072 is still etched in my brain.

In college I was able to use my Tandy Color Computer BASIC for Numerical Analysis instead of fighting for a terminal and using Fortran. It was great time saver, plus it had games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0 (The Sound of dial-up)

Not mine, but the story of Forth is amazing: https://colorforth.github.io/HOPL.html

My first adult .gif downloading all the way at 300 baud!