If we’re talking intro to computer science, for me that was in 2nd grade writing in LOGO then BASIC on Apple][+’s at school. We actually learned by crayon and paper first. I remember it well. TO SQUARE…
To put everything in perspective, I recently made a short programming stint in a company, and discovered that someone there was writing Cobol to read XML files. Add a jar of Prozac to the array of programming tools…
I must add that, thanks to my interest in Linux, I slowly adopted it at work since around 2010. At first it was as dual boot along Windows. But now, since 3 years ago, I made Linux my main OS at work. I had to wait this long because 90% of my co-workers work on Windows, 8% on Mac, and the rest on Linux. As a researcher, I have to work on shared documents, in general from Word, Excel or PowerPoint, now I can do it more easily since LibreOffice made great progress with regards to MS Office compatibility.
The one in my engineering school (late 70’s) covered a whole wall. The professor that taught us how to use it was convinced that the future would be hybrid analog/digital computers.
I heard that in the 60s, somewhere at Aerospatiale, there was a big building housing such a computer that was a simulator of the structure of Concorde.
You see way back in my day, we made all our beats on a Buchla system 100 in one of the university laboratories. It’s sequencer was formerly installed in Ken Kesey’s van.
Never to be outdone… My first computer, a sixties-era Ordinatron600 I got for XMas, with its classy wooden box. I still have it… one of these days I’ll fire it up…
Oh, first computers… Mine was a plywood box. In it, one would find a S-100 card cage populated with a Z-80 CPU board, 64MKb memory board, disk controller, and a 256k RAM drive (blazing fast!!). Alongside the card cage were two 8" floppy disk drives and a 30-pound power supply.
This, a Wyse terminal, and a 300baud modem got me through my masters degree. I finally got rid of it last year, reclaiming basement space. Sorry, no pictures, didn’t have photography back then…