No, the other Scott Adams...the programmer/game designer. Famous among the right circles in the 80's (and still is today in the Interactive Fiction groups).

http://www.msadams.com/

The first computer was a System 3 mainframe when I was a part time programmer and night operator. My first PC was a Commodor 64. I didn't run into Windows until some years later. when I reluctantly gave up my C64. I too typed in a lot of BASIC programs from Compute and some of my own, I had the 5.25 floppy disk for storage, and it's where i learned aboiut checksum. I find it comforting that some Linux programs also use checksum to ensure accuracy.

fun times

my first i ever used was a apple ][ at school, the oldest were a pair of superbrain 64's i found in the basement of another school, and the hardest/wierdest was a unysis 2200 mainframe used in the USAF running exec-8 (very unix like) it still had 6250 tape drives (in 1994!) and a hamps (think router) that had dual 7in floppy drives to load its software

my Atari 400 computer in 1983. However we had Commodore Pet computers in High School.

Commodore vic 20 with some kind of basic on it. I remember typing in echo "test" run and it would scroll test up and down the screen. I had a cassette tape drive and some really cheesy games.

There is a very similar thread already covering this topic

The first real computer that I ever used was PLATO -- now known as Novanet. We had 4 or 5 terminals in the back of the classroom that we used for educational "games." A few years later whilest in boy scouts I got programming access to PLATO and that's how I got infected with this disease.

For those of you unfamiliar with PLATO, it was really quite revolutionary. This would have been back in 1976 when I used it, but at that time it had already been around for many years. The terminals we used had graphical touchscreens and the system was a worldwide network, complete with capabilities we would now associate with instant messaging, email, networked games including MMORPGs, newgroups, and so on.

After that I used TRS-80s, Apple's, Commodore 64, Unix, Amiga, MS_DOS and even Linux before I ever used windows... like a previous poster already mentioned, it seemed really odd not to have a programming language or even basic scripting capability. I still think it's one of the most glaring weaknesses of the "modern" OS.

Oh man! I had one of these! Oh...the memories...heheh.

I was just looking through that site...if you haven't been there before, the old ads are great.

Really? Before posting this thread, I looked to see if this had already been discussed before. either way, I'm still interested to see what everyone says, and I hope this continues to be a good thread.

On the '64 at school, we had the luxury of a tape recorder. That allowed us to compile from hex, a word processor and 50,000 word dictionary in about 50k. We thought the proggy was huge!

Before that, though, my first exposure to computers were thw Commodore PETs and the one CBM machine in th room. I remember what the big deal was when our math teacher (the computer guy) got permission to buy a printer/drive router. RS232 wsa being thought of at that time. Shortly after that, he got the first modem we ever heard of, a Hayes 300 baud jobbie. It was expensive, but you could connect to bulitin boards and get free software for the first time. We all wanted to get access after that...

Ah, a Tandy 1000... 256K of RAM... built in BASIC... the OPTION of adding a floppy drive or two.

Edit, 128K of RAM before we upgraded it. Sorry... forgot about that fact.

I cut my teeth on that machine and it led to the great love of computing I have today. I literally loved that thing to death**. I programmed in basic till that poor computer wanted to die... then I learned to use debug, create programs in machine code (well assembly but barely), load those into high memory, and call them from basic programs to perform FUNCTIONS. Ah, life was good.

I had very little access to software written by other people so most of what I did was just make my own stuff. Whatever came to mind and I could hack together. It was my dad's computer but we timeshared it... aka he used it when I was at school and I used it when he was at work (he worked nights).

I seriously would not be where I am today if it wasn't for that computer... darn, come to think of it I might have had a social life and gotten some by now if it wasn't for that computer. I guess it isn't all good.

**Note, not really to death as those machines would not die. You could beat on them for days and weeks on end and they wouldn't blink. In fact, that machine was taken out of storage two months ago and when the cobwebs were removed (and the dust blown out) it fired right up and ran like it was the 80s all over again. It sits on the floor in my dad's office today begging for some sweet lovin'.

i used a 386 i think first, wit ha turbo button. in terms of OS's ive used in this order

dos, w in 3.1, win 95, win98, win ME, mandrake 9.2(install failed though so i never actually "used" it.)windows xp, longhorn 4053, longhorn 3718, longhorn 4074 (all the stuff after xp only happened in the last month) mandrake 10, fedoracore 1, MEPIS, SuSe. whew. im going back to mepis again now, forever.

Edit: not even torvalds used linux before windows.

Actually, he probably did. The Linux kernel was developed in 1991. During that time, MS-DOS was the prevelant OS for i386 machines...Windows 1.0-2.0 was really only used in business environments.

My first was a PC, Samsung laptop with 286 processor, some version of MS-DOS and some early Windows (before version 3).

When I was young I played on my sister's C64 then got onto my fathers Amiga and a few years after that I got a kickass 386SX, wow, Dos5 and even Win311 were installed. I got used to click and move more and didn't use command line very often .. such a bad development, than after many years I switched over to my Celeron 400 (what a big jump, isn't it?) which still stands next to me. There I began using Linux, Mandrake, FreeBSD and finally I used Slackware which I use now ...

For those who missed the old times, get your emulator out and start playing, I'm still busy playing Bubble Bobble all day long .. ^^