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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I'm typing on the highest end MBPr you can buy, but my first computer was a 286 with DOS and a handful of programs - this was just after Windows 95 came out, so it was quite shitty for the day. However, no computer has been quite as magical as that one. While I get paid good money to produce code every day, and I think it's damn good code, I don't feel nearly as productive as I did when I was learning to write QBasic and batch scripts for the first time.

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My first computer (I didn't own it, but I got to use it often when I was about 4-6) was a Sun SPARCstation pizza box. Fond memories, I think most of my later interest in computers came from playing around on that thing when I was hardly older than a toddler.

Likewise, typing on 2014 Mac Air currently, but my family's first computer was a Commodore VIC20 (I learned BASIC on that) and some years later my dad got me my own computer, an XT (8086) with a 20MB HD (how will I use all that space?!).

I loved both of those computers more than any I've had since.

Now I have a daughter. She won't be getting a Mac. She'll be getting an old box with some flavor of Linux installed and she's going to learn how to really use a computer (only if she's willing and interested, of course). The apps and windows will be there, but I am primarily going to focus teaching her command line and code. Otherwise it's just a gadget and a lot harder to love.

My first computer was a Casio calculator (so, basically not a computer) with monochrome screen. It was programmable in BASIC and it came with a 500 pages manual. I loved that thing. I spent months playing with it!

I should also point out that I came from a dirt-poor family, and this was when I was 17, making it the more significant to me.

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