Dear lord… At my age, 2008 was like a few weeks ago, I’m sure of it 
Anyway, VIC-20 at the age of 13/14 something or other. It was brand new at the time… Ahem… Fun times with peeks, pokes and the occasional soldering iron.
I was 6, it was a 286 with a single 5.25" disk drive. I still remember the sound of that disk drive. You sometimes knew by the sounds of the drive whether your disk had issues, like it would fail scanning the FAT and just bail out sometimes 
The only games we had were digger, an impossible to play robotron clone and space invaders… along with whatever we could make in basic from those terrible books full of code.
I remember later on playing a lot of the early AD&D Goldbox Games (Bard’s Tale, Pools of Radiance), Hillsfar, Space Quest, King’s Quest, some crazy Ninja game whose executable was called ninjer.exe, and a game called Empire.
My grandfather gave me his smoker stained UK Commodore 64 when i was 7. Thing was so amazing. I learned how to program by a book with a boy and robot on it ‘programming BASIC computer games’ or something like that. So many hours of fun.
Same here! I think I was 7 when my grandparents bought it for us. I remember the tower was absolutely huge on that thing and weighed as much as I did.
The first time I started it up and it stopped loading leaving me at the command prompt, I remember being upset and thought something was wrong as I had inserted the disk to play a game but nothing happened. After much frustration I learned how to switch to the A:\ drive and find/enter the filename needed to launch the game, from on I was hooked.
I remember when we upgraded to DOS 5.1 (or was it 6? can’t remember that far back) and I discovered the dosshell (dos-hell) command to see your files visually thinking this was the future!
I saw this a few years later and my mind was blown 
v=5VPFKnBYOSI
Just realized that was 20 years ago :eek: ugh where has time gone…
Is this the first year I got MY computer or the first year my family got a computer? Because those are two very different dates
RIP Tandy!
I got my first electronic console gaming machine in 1983, the Vectrex.
Switched over to Atari 2600 the Commodore 16 followed by C-20 and 1991 my first Amiga 500 
I remember putting our huge CRT on top of the equally big “desktop” case… I also remember dosshell and memmaker and some cool utility called pctools.
I also remember worrying about not having enough conventional memory to load my cdrom driver when I played wing commander 
Loving this thread Cool stuff, cool people.
I have used a computer since I was around 4 or 5…but I got my very own laptop with a whole 100 GB (I think) hard drive. I remember it being quite expensive and I remember my parents saying “he is never going to need any more space on that laptop”…somehting like that. I just remember it being the newest and hottest and probably the most expensive present I ever got. 
Otherwise I used my dad’s stationary computer.
My first computer was a nice Amiga 3000, I had the pleasure to use the 25 Mhz version it was just pure magic for an 5 year old boy I actually started programming years later on an Amiga 4000 that my uncle bought me to freak out my mom.
I don’t actually remember, but I got my hands on my dad’s desktop pc when I was 4 on which I still remember those damned Windows 98 where every day I was praying to the PC god to let me play a game and fix the pc which always had problem with the cursor lagging, pc not working, etc
I got mine when I was 12. The machine was needed for school stuff. Everything was sluggish back . Surprisingly, some things are still sluggish today.
~Dennise
I think I was 4 when I got sega genesis but if you are talking about pc I was about 11 or 12 and with win 95 and ever since I have a love for 3d modeling but did not know where or how to get in to it lol
I was 40 when I got my first computer it was called an Altair and I had to put it together myself.
I believe it cost me 1200 (about two months wages).
However from that day forth I lost interest in everything else and soon opened a private unlicensed school with 24 zx81, 24 lloyds tape recorders, 24 black and white 12" TVs, 24 metal chairs (my wife made cushions for them all) 6 long folded leg tables. I taught during the day and the evenings how to program in BASIC. I opened a Saturday Club for kids and had students from 6 to 14, learning programming Saturday morning and freeplay games Saturday afternoons.
It got so the kids never wanted to leave so my wife would make lunch and snacks for them and many would be there from 9am till 6pm.
During the early eighties kids were sucking up computer knowledge so fast that suddenly - overnight almost, and for the first time in the history of mankind, parents were finding their very young children doing very complicated things with a technology the parents just couldn’t understand. It was an equalizer - now kids really did know more than their elders.
Within a couple of months I had at least 3 of every computer that came out from RadioShack, Commodore, Apple, Sinclair/Timex , Atari and many more. By 1983 I bragged that I could teach BASIC on every computer that could use it.
However the first long game I ever played (aside from Pong and Space Invaders on my ColecoVision) was called Midas and the Minotaur - a text adventure game on a radio shack computer. The first in color adventure game I played was on a Commodore 64 called (I think) Fairy Tale.
At 16.
That first Pc taught me english (kinda not great english proficiency, but still…) and later, programming.
I think I got proper access to a computer at around '93 or '94, when I was about 3 or 4 years old. I remember playing the shareware version of Doom and Supaplex mostly.
First game making stuff I ever did was probably maps in the Worldcraft tool that came with my copy of the original half-life. Of course I made maps of my home and nearby areas and got told off for putting zombies in there to shoot. The first ever programming I did was with a DarkBASIC program in 2001-2002 that I got on a demo CD with a magazine. I say “programming” very loosely, because I had no tutorials, no books and no knowledge about programming whatsoever, but I had some sample games and all of the code for them. So I tried just manually rewriting all of it, trying to logically figure out what each part did and maybe tweak some of the values to make the game do something different. Didn’t get very far with that though, instead of being encouraged, I had to stop wasting time on the computer and go outside and do sports or something.
The first family computer was the Tandy TRS-80. I was probably 2 or 3 years old. I loved that machine.
I think first was Vic20… early teens perhaps, or just before high school. Had a job and saved up and bought my first IBM XT clone with a turbo button that made it go up to 8mhz… eventually added a 20meg hard drive, think that thing was over 400 bucks (the HD)… windows? HAHAHAHA! not invented yet. I even remember buying a USR Courier 2400 in cash when they were brand spanking new… couldn’t find another 2400 BBS in the state.
The good old days when you had to write all your own programs.
Other than the usual collection of various iterations of Windows machines over the years. My first computer was an old BBC Micro that we had at home,
I loved that thing, couldn’t do much with it but play games, was too young back than to fully understand much, but I knew back I wanted to make my own games.
I want to say the cpu was the 286 and was 21 doom came out and wolfintein. Wizarddry was wire frame. Bards tail story.
ive always had computers in my house so basically ive always had a computer