My computer big bang occurred in 1982 with a used ZX81 (1KB RAM… programs were saved on a regular cassette tape recorder).
Two years later I spent countless hours copying hex code at night from a magazine into my VIC-20 to e.g. get TurboTape for faster program saving to work.
Somewhat later I also had a Sony HitBit (MSX) and a Philips NMS 8220 (MSX 2) – MSX was supposed to introduce a standardization of home computers, but that effort faded away eventually. Some users are still around though..!
In 1985 wrote a paid sequential database program in MBASIC on a Kaypro II running on CP/M – and broke every high score at Ladder 🙂
My first network experiences started with a modem in 1993 with a whopping 28.8 Kbit speed connected to BTX/Datex-J in Germany, while AppleTalk dongles allowed my first Mac (a super cool used SE) to have a LAN with the capability to exchange files with my dad’s MS-DOS/Windows PC – without using floppy disks!
Despite the SE’s tiny 9″ monochrome display I managed to accomplish my first desktop publishing job using QuarkXPress, Photoshop and FreeHand: a color brochure for a bank in Bonn, Germany.
The LC III I bought to replace the SE made the processing of subsequent job orders substantially easier.
In 1994 I wrote my first e-mail and also created my first <HTML>
page to run in the first popular web page browser program named Netscape, the most popular browser access to the still widely unknown internet at the time:
The same year I bought both a fascinating (but totally useless) Apple Newton and a horrible VGA Apple QuickTake 100 digital camera, and placed my first internet order on a popular electronic book store named „Amazon“ – which is now the warehouse of the world.
A year later I purchased my first laptop (a Siemens Nixdorf Scenic with the new Pentium CPU that replaced that 486, and the brand new Windows 95 that replaced 3.11), and also replaced my LC III with the substantially faster Power Mac 6100 with the new RISC CPU (which I could upgrade yet again by adding a MAXpowr card to it.)
The rest since then is 30+ more years of history… with way too many more computers, devices and programs to list them here 🤪