What was the excitement of your first PC?

I know this is different for everyone, but when you got your first PC, what motivated you to learn how to use it? And was it autodidactic, or were you already trained in information technology?

For me, it was the future - the only part of the future I could touch and be involved with. I could learn something they didn't teach at school, and that this was a future I wanted to be a part of.

Of course, like many kids, my first choice was to be a fighter pilot, though recent experience with drones tells me I'm more of a bomber pilot, and there's no work for them outside of wartime even if I did get good enough grades to have followed that career choice...

But falling into an IT career on the back of a self taught ability? It honestly felt like the excitement didn't stop... And has maintained from 1982 to the present day.

What's your ab-initio story?

My first computer was a Commodore 64. A class mate had started a company to assemble PCs (and it still exists) and I was his first worker. I got my own XT-clone with a whopping 640 KB of memory for loan. So much memory for those days, that I used a part of it as RAM disk: I was able to work much faster, saving and loading data was much much faster. Of course there was a risk: forgetting to save the result to a floppy again.
One of the first private projects I had was creating an assembler, written in Turbo Pascal, to enable me to write ML programs for the C64.

My first computer was a second hand Motorola 6800 D2 single board computer.

I then migrated to a Nascom 1 Z80 kit (home built) and started to expand this as time (and money) permitted.

Changing from a 6800 to a Z80 processor was a step change in knowledge, but I mastered it (eventually).

Both of these computers started me off in a career that I am still working in (perhaps for not much longer though)...

Dave

I showed up late, with a weirdly overengineered 386SX clone that was obsolete the day it left the factory. The parents likely decided it would be educational. I got into programming probably in significant part because it was like 1994, so without a modem or much of a local community, you were limited to the $9.99 shelf at Babbage's which was pretty reliably a string of disappointment.

I don't think any of the options in the poll really apply to me. When I was given my first computer (an AST Bravo LC 4/66d) the excitement came from having a computer that I had domain over. I didn't have to share my dad's computer, since he was using it for work. Sure, I didn't have a printer for atleast a year or two, but I didn't care. I had a digital playground to explore, even if it was mostly just using MS Paint at first, and seeing how many programs I could open at once. Eventually I got games for it, but that wasn't an immediate thing (beyond the 4 standard Windows 95 titles). I didn't see it as a gaming box, I saw it as a mystery and a thing that I didn't have to share.

Somewhat similar here (no option really fits). I already had programming experience on an PDP-8/L (assembly, FOCAL). I built myself a Z80 S100 machine as a basis for learning/practicing Pascal, doing word processing (Wordstar!), and preparing for the Computer Science GRE, as well as pursuing a personal interest in digital electronics subsequent to various 8/L repairs and extensions. Had an Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer and H19 terminal. Never got into gaming, then, since, or now.

Pure curiosity. In 1982 I had been in the electronics service business for about 5 years and the buzz was about personal computers. I couldn't afford an IBM PC but a coworker recommended
checking out a company called Apple Computer. I had not heard of them but the price was better. I bought an Apple II+ with no clue what a computer could do. The question of the day was
"was do you do with it ?" I didn't even know what to say so I made up something. My career was still electronics for another decade or more. Computers became a tool in the service business
to try and help diagnose what I was trying to repair. It never was about games, ever.

Larry G

I think for me it was that there were lots of cool-looking things to play/experiment with and figure out. Our family got a second-hand XT clone in the late '80s when I wasn't quite a teenager yet, and between my parents' work and a few kids at school who also had PCs, I had access to all sorts of software and games. I didn't have the patience for most games - especially if they required reading the manual - so also played around with software like PC-Tools, Lotus 1-2-3, etc.. The Lotus WYSIWYG add-on used high-res graphics which looked pretty cool because it was doing something more with the PC than it normally did! I also played around in AutoSketch and learned the hows and whys of different snapping modes. Between my dad knowing batch files and a little bit of BASIC, reading PC Magazine, and DOS and BASIC manuals, I taught myself how to do those things - quite slowly - and ended up programming for a career (and still for fun).

I actually had trouble remembering the initial excitement of the PC. What I remember most is the excitement of upgrades - getting a mouse and then playing with Dr Halo and figuring out how to use mouse interrupts from GW-BASIC, then later how amazing it was to upgrade to VGA, how great Windows was (emphasis on "was" ), being fortunate enough to be able to borrow a modem and get access to BBSes, being amazed by how the shareware versions of Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM looked, etc.

I think then the short answer is "it was able to hold my attention despite my short attention span"!

I majored in Computer Science in college, so I needed a PC for my classes. I was pretty broke at the time (summer of 1991) so I bought a 286/12mhz bare bones mini-tower with 5.25 high density floppy drive, Oak OTI-028 256k video with both digital and analog outputs (handy because I only had a CGA monitor for the first few months), 1 meg of RAM. It was from Computer Direct (Protecto) and cost $299, keyboard included.
About a month into my freshman year I bought a 40 meg Seagate ST-157A hard drive for $160, it was great to not have to swap floppies, and a 3.5" floppy drive as well. Picked up a Laser 640x480 VGA 14 inch monitor to go with it as my folks wanted the CGA monitor back at home for the Laser 128 (80 columns on a TV with RF modulator was painful).
Ended up selling it to a buddy of mine the next year and bought a Premio 386/40 mini tower with 4 meg of RAM, HD 5.25 and 3.5 floppies, Oak 1 meg video card and a 345 Meg Maxtor 7345AT. The drive was one dollar per megabyte, a bargain! Whole system with a CTX (Chuntex) 14" SVGA 800x600 monitor cost me just under $1000. It was my first Linux system...