What is your Computer History? When did you get the first one, what kind was it, was it yours or did you get it at work or school? What education did you have, self taught, computer science, adult ed., etc.?
As I am one of the older players here, I will go first. My first encounter with a computer (not counting calculators of several kinds) was in college. I majored in Sociology with a concentration in Anthropology. One of my senior courses in (ahem) 1980 was Statistics for the Social Scientist. This included SPSS, Statistical Package for the Social Scientist. The prof. teaching the class had a specialty in Criminal Justice. He was also a strong believer in "Publish or Perish" so He gave us an assignment to do a CJ survey and use the data to run a program on the college computer. That computer was one of those old monsters that took up a small room. We used keypuch to enter data on cards and run SPSS to get a printout of data which would be used in one of the prof's articles for a publication. The first person to get the program to run would get credit in the article. I can't say any of us were over enthusiastic but we all went out to collect data. Our department was allowed access to the computer from 11PM to about 2AM so after a long day of data collections at various locations, we had to go to the computer lab, pinch our cards and turn them in to be run. The next day we retrieved the data. it really was interesting though I doubted the results. Most of us cheated as we had only a couple days to get the data, not enough time. Also, men were very uncooperative in answering questions. Most of us had to cheat to get male info. I, myself lacked about 15 male questionaires so I randomly selected among those I had and created enough to get the required amount. Everyone else did pretty much the same. Most of us also had to run the cards at least twice. This experience certainly did not excite me about computers.
I graduated early, in Dec. 1980, but I started working as an archaeologist before then. At this job I learned to really enjoy computers. My Boss had a couple of CPM word processors which also ran DBase 2. He purchased a portable CPM unit to use in the field. I taught myself Dbase and Wordstar and wrote a UI for the computer which made it easy to enter GPS coordinates and other data. I had a great time in the field in 1981! Later that year my Boss purchased his first PC and I learned how to use that. I was hooked! That year my dad purchased a Commodore 128 for himself and I helped him learn how to use it. Everything was downhill from there. I got my own PC a year or two later and never looked back. I am self taught. If I had it to do over, I would have taken courses in Computer Science. I loved learning the things I taught myself and would have enjoyed doing something with computers as an occupation. In my next life I will work for Tiny Speck! Lol!