What Computer Had the Biggest Impact on You? Your First Computer

April 21, 2022

This gallery highlights some of your responses about your first computer.

This gallery is part of the What Computer Had the Biggest Impact on You? series. Also, read more articles in the 70th Anniversary issue.

I received lots of feedback about the first computer you used, the one that had the most influence on your professional development and what computer you found most interesting. I’ve condensed and collected them into three galleries, starting with this one that addresses your first computer.

This collection starts with the small personal computers like the Altair 8800 and Apple IIe, and progresses to mainframes including the IBM 360. Many of the comments mentioned programming in assembler and FORTRAN. Punch paper tape, mag tape, and punch cards also were in the mix. Sorry if I didn’t include your offering. I made sure anything with two or more entries showed up.

You can check out the initial article and leave additional feedback, or you can add comments to any of these articles for others to respond.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.