I got into IT via Forestry. Seriously. In order to get my Masters in Forestry, I had to take a course in FORTRAN. And that was the beginning.

This was in 1982.

Not the technology end, but I was an early user. I got to be a student "guinea pig" for the experimental PLATO learning system (terminals attached to the university mainframe) in 1971. They paid us to come into the computer lab to take multiple choice tests - and the reward was a very, very slow orange-on-black screen game of Pong.

Mostly I get respect for being oldest, but sometimes I have had to work to be quicker and smarter to compensate.

My first programming was wiring together circuits. Then it was FORTRAN 77 on punch cards. Then C and C++ and Java, with Lisp and a dozen other languages in there. Also half a dozen markup languages.

Not bad for an English major who backed into programming through Linguistics (I took all the Linguistics course the U offered).

Old? Well, we had the first color TV in the neighborhood - it was an engineering prototype with all the nasty high voltage stuff on the outside. The whole neighborhood would come over to watch the one color show on the tube "Our Mr. Sun" (link below)

As for computers - My first were an IBM 7094 and an IBM 360/91 at UCLA circa 1968. My first program was in PL/1 and it took me forever to get it to work on the 360/91. But I had hands on access to the 7094 and got to play and play and play. (In both cases the programs were on punch cards - 026 for the 7094 and 029 for the 360.)

I can use a Curta. (You don't know what a Curta is?!!? Google it to see one of the worlds most wondrous little machines.)

youtube.com/watch?v=ucQNFBNAdn…

I was used to being the youngest

Now I realize why I was having trouble answering this question. I, too, end up at the other end of the scale. I was 6 years younger than my closest sibling, skipped a grade in school so I was perpetually the youngest in my class, married an older man, etc. Hence my comment on a recent checkin that I'm not allowed to be old.

@Tom Grzybow

FORTRAN IV on cards!

Well, duh!

My brother had a Trash80

The family computer was this:

I did a thing! Mr. Stranger's bathroom door is MCM-small and he's constantly bashing into it trying to get in and out. It was crying for offset hinges.

Did Ace have them?
nope
Orange big box? nope
Blue big box? nope

Ended up ordering them from MallWart (!) for $13 a damn piece WTF. They are at least nice heavy solid brass. They showed up a couple of days ago, but I had to wait for both of us to be up in bright daylight to get the swap done. Pins wouldn't come out of either set, so I had to wing it a bit. And if I ever find our chisels, they need a bit of remedial wood removal. But they're on and he now has about 2" more clearance in the bathroom 💪

Now I'm debating whether to grab a nap or find something else to do to keep myself awake til close of business (when they call and tell me what time to show up tomorrow morning to blast my after-cataracts).

I didn't know I knew so many people who started out with Fortran. I started with Fortran on an IBM 3033 mainframe when I was 9 and I didn't really "get" exactly what I was doing. Mainly I was just plotting stuff to create pictures, using commands designed for graphing scientific plots and such. I'd plan out what I wanted to plot on graph paper, and then write out a program with the commands necessary to generate the plot. This was all on a time sharing batch system with multiple CRT terminals (text only, but you could preview plots rendered in asterisks).

At the time, I had no exposure to home computers.

I didn't use punch cards, but I did see punch card machines.

In high school I was in a youth group that had a massive national convention each year. One region would be named Region Of The Year at a banquet on the last night.

The 1973 New England region was expecting this honor. They had brought a lot of confetti to celebrate when it was announced. Oh wait, did I say "confetti"? Sorry, I meant the output of IBM 029 card punch machines' chad boxes. They had filled up three paper grocery bags with punch card chad. You know how sticky and get-in-everything ordinary confetti is? Punch card chad is much, much worse.

This was June of my junior year. I was still finding that sh** in some of my clothes and luggage in my sophomore year of college.

OBTW, the organization was invited never to return to that hotel for its convention.

Holy buckets. What isn't an "I'm old" moment? Whether it's the body changes, the ever increasing aches and pains, blood in the toilet, asking younger people to repeat themselves and explain what the heck they're talking about, people with sub 10k word vocabularies asking me to repeat myself and explain what the heck I'm talking about, etc. etc.

Get off my landlord's lawn!