Your age rounded to the nearest decade

[TheRedChamber]

Your Spectrums and Commodores and Ataris were toys compared to the real stuff - DEC computers and VT terminals - the ones used to invent UNIX and C.

They literally were toys - I was seven.

Playing games like this only sets someone up to try to trump everyone by describing the day they dropped the stack of punched cards.

"Punch-cards? Luxury. I remember when it were just me and me pal Alan against t'greatest minds in Nazi cryptography. You're not a real programmer unless you've had to blow the glass for your own transistors..."

 

[ericalauren]

I’m 35! I don’t like this game. My eye doctor told me she thought I was 20, at least.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I was so excited when I snaffled an IBM XT computer with a 10Mb hard drive from work's training centre. Yes, that's correct. Megabyte. It also used 5 1/4" floppies.

Oh, and slightly up to 60.

 

[WyreBendr0417]

Rounded down, 60.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Rounded up - 80

 

[Candy_Kane54]

70 in nine months

 

[lc69hunter]

70. Did Fortran 4 on punch cards fed into an IBM 360-50.. Went to sea several years later and they gave us some sort of Univac POS. We bought TRS-80's from Radio Shack, and when they stopped working, we threw them overboard.

 

[Zootonius]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ETF6cI_X0AEw2yC.jpg

 

[Zootonius]

I'm old enough that the first computer program I wrote was in BASIC using a teletype terminal connected to a university's Univac mainframe. I used punch cards to write FORTRAN and COBOL class assignments to run on that same mainframe, but never used punch cards in any professional capacity. But my first 'real' programming job involved a computer that was so old you used toggle switches to key in the boot sequence.

But I was young enough to fall into the gap which meant I never had to register for the draft. This despite following my WWII veteran father's advice when I was in high school, "learn to type, the army always needs clerks."

If you haven't worked it out and since we're rounding, 60.

I suspect my father survived WWII because he could type. He became a clerk on the eighth infantry.

 

[Lifestyle66]

I'll raise your Linux on floppy disks to doing Autocad on a Compaq "Portable" that weighed 28 pounds and had two floppy drives, one for the program and one for saving data.

I'll even raise that!

In high school, we had ONE programable calculator the size of a typewriter, and it was only there on loan from a local factory. I had a slide rule in school!

 

[Lifestyle66]

Considering where some of the stories are going, I am soon expecting a statement like this:

"I remember when my good friend Jehovah decided to create Earth. I told him:
-Jehovah, my friend! I might be a little old, but heed my advice! Don't make the hills too steep nor the queues too long!"

I guess the big guy didn't really listen to that last advice...

LOL.

"When I joined the army, the only formation we had was 'circle the wagons'.

 

[TxRad]

75.... so round that sid3wqways. Stupid old fingers. Sideways.

In avionics school we were shown a 12 pin IC chip and told we would never see another. I'm glad that instructor was in the Coast Guard.

 

[XerXesXu]

Rounded down - 70.

My earliest memories - looking out my Gran's bedroom window and watching the milkman doing his deliveries using a horse and cart, and the lamplighter with his pole going from street gaslight to gaslight switching them off/on.

 

[ronde]

I'll even raise that!

In high school, we had ONE programable calculator the size of a typewriter, and it was only there on loan from a local factory. I had a slide rule in school!

I still have my old Post Versalog.

 

[Comshaw]

rounded down 14 lustrums


Comshaw

 

[Duleigh]

My first computer was a VIC 20, I purchased that after my first long tour overseas.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I'll raise your Linux on floppy disks to doing Autocad on a Compaq "Portable" that weighed 28 pounds and had two floppy drives, one for the program and one for saving data.

Oh, please. You haven't lived until you've generated stacks of Hollerith cards from a keypunch roughly the size of a VW Beetle, and then waited in line with your stacks for an Enlightened One (a grad student) to take them, and feed them into the Univac 1108. Next: Somebody on here will recall a conversation with Charles Babbage.

But I'm burying the lede. Emily, don't you already feel crowded by creepy geezers? Why would you want data to that effect? As for my completed decades, the anecdote above should provide an approximation.

 

[AlinaX]

Me and Ada Lovelace got pretty steamy...

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

40 but only just.

same.

Spice Girls, Gushers, Lisa Frank, the Macarena, AIM, Talespin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Fresh Prince, Pokemon, Dunkaroos, and Avril Lavigne. My childhood was a tempest.

 

[jaykaythree]

Rounding up here ... but 50.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Round 50 here.
Grew up with a BBC Micro and even though we only had a black and white telly for it, I was really cool age 6 because my parents had got a disk drive! (5.25" floppies) Instant gaming satisfaction! Though most games still needed uploading from cassette, so you'd set it going and go have tea for 40 minutes.

For my MSc we'd take photos of biological stuff and then trot across the road to Snappy Snaps with the film, with notes like 'please try to make the blue smudges in bottom left contrast with pink background'. The photo shop folks learned a lot about anatomy. Photos were still glued into a thesis and labelled with Letraset (transfers, like temporary tattoos!)

For my PhD there was an in-house photography unit, and then microscopes started getting digital cameras on top and you could - sometimes - export images direct to your computer and annotate them in this new software called PhotoShop.

My thesis took up 35 floppy disks (3.5" ones) - one for the text, one for the references, then one for each image... And your set of slides for doing a presentation anywhere was a prize possession, even once they were designed with PowerPoint.

20 years later my kid goes to school for yet another dress-up day as "Mummy when she was a scientist" - jeans, boots, lab coat (even though we never wore them), clip-on ID badge, and a pocket full of slides. Which turned into a hot swapping property in the playground!

 

[onehitwanda]

same.

Spice Girls, Gushers, Lisa Frank, the Macarena, AIM, Talespin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Fresh Prince, Pokemon, Dunkaroos, and Avril Lavigne. My childhood was a tempest.

Simon & Garfunkel, ABBA, Metallica, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, MacGyver, the A-Team, Robotech, Talespin, Gummi Bears, IRC and Jewel. Same same but different.

 

[NorthernCardinal]

40

 

[RachelWalsh]

50!!!! Damn I am old. But it felt a little sexy to say 50

 

[EmilyMiller]

Update:

20:
30:
40:
50:
60:
70:
80:
90:

Em