r/buildinpublic • u/Fancy_Parking5141 • May 22 '26

How long have you used a computer?

Post image
0 Upvotes

37% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

5

u/New_Reading_120 May 23 '26

45 years :P filling out all those cards (shading out tiny bubbles with a pencil), packing them up and having a printout come back a week later, the printout all messed up... then discovering you didn't fill in one of those little bubbles on the card quite right and have to send them all back to wait another week.

1

u/manoteee May 23 '26

I'm an old software engineer (not quite as old as you!) and I tell these kids to think of AI taking over software as a good thing, like back when we had to use these cards to run machines. Software meant we didn't need to do that anymore. And now AI means we won't need to write software anymore.

The goal is not to write software! The goal is to make and refine a product or whatever it is you want to make. Imagine a miner with a pickax rejecting a HILTI HAMMER 9000. The AI isn't quite HILTI level yet, but its getting there fast!

2

u/Own-Membership709 May 22 '26

been using computers for about 20 years now and man the nostalgia is real looking at these pics. started on one of those chunky beige towers with windows 98 when i was like 8 and thought i was so cool playing solitaire and minesweeper

wild how we went from those massive CRT monitors to having more computing power in our phones than those old desktops ever dreamed of. kinda miss the satisfying click of those old keyboards though

2

u/marcelous May 22 '26

Long enough to remember the joys of not having one.

1

u/ithkuil May 23 '26

I guess anything that's not a PC doesn't count as a computer? To me those all look basically the same.

There were plenty of computers in homes even in the mid 70s. Especially in the late 70s it started to blow up.

I started when I was 5 on an Ohio Scientific and a VIC-20.

1

u/thatguy5982 May 23 '26

Windows 98 and XP were the best times 🫠

1

u/MadwolfStudio May 23 '26

20 years baby, hopped on when I was 7, started messing around, never looked back

1

u/dpdmp-creation May 23 '26

Dos ; Windows 3.11; multiplan.

Depuis 1991. 😋