What is the newest computer today?

What was your first computer, and how did it influence computing in your life today?

• I don't mean the first one you owned, though that is a fine survey answer.  I do mean the first computer you really identified with that potentially started you down a computing related career, or that had influence on your life today. The first one I owned was an Atari 400.  I still have one, sitting alongside a few others: Apple, Tandy CoCo 3, TRS-80 Model 100 Portable. My first computer was the Apple ][.  The High School had them --actually had a lot of them!  Used to carry a few floppy disks in my Pee Chee folder, containing games, my projects and some pictures and other data. Apple ][ computers are very accessible, and well equipped ones are actually great 8 bit workstations.  I still use mine, an Apple //e Platinum, for writing and programming / interfacing tasks. There are many things that influenced me, but I'll only touch on a couple: --The simple nature of the machine, discrete logic and well documented ROM code and routines included.  An Apple just screams, "Program me, hack me, build stuff with me!" and that is why I continue to own and use one regularly.  As a kid, being able to read the ROM listings, write BASIC programs, enter the system monitor, and use the mini assembler to author 6502 programs directly was huge!  All the elements needed to actually make the computer do things --and do them in a potent way were there, exposed and useful for only the time investment required to understand the machine. -- Modest graphics and sound. Really, other machines of the era were much more capable, but the Apple had just enough capability to render near anything possible.  Where it really shined was having 80 column text through a basic add-on card, and 6 colors in the high resolution graphics screen. Those two are enough to present information to people and allow robust interactions. Sound was lacking, but again, enough to allow robust interactions. The product of that was a focus on getting stuff done more than the quality of any one particular element and this is and continues to be an important lesson.  Something being pretty isn't the same thing as something being useful. --Language support. One can program an Apple in LOGO, PASCAL, BASIC, C, Assembly, etc... Today, I am often stunned at the scale of data and connectivity we experience and take for granted more than not.  A small USB flash device can hold the whole Apple ][ era on it with room to spare. I often look for simple, robust, open software / hardware solutions and value utility over higher end features.  If you can't open it and really make use of it, frankly it is not yours.  So much hardware gets tossed in wasteful ways because we can't re-purpose it very easily for a lot of reasons, some sane, many just greed. Accessibility.  Can I just write a program for it?  Can I connect it to this other thing I have and make the two do stuff?

• Answer:

  I had a Tandy Color Computer II.  It was the mid-80's, computers were going to rule the world, and if you wanted your kid to have a bright future, you bought him a computer.  The problem for me was that my mother, with only a high school degree, and me, at the most 10 years old, had no understanding that we needed to either program the damn thing (it used the BASIC language) or buy software to make it do neat stuff.  Our only comparison was the Atari 2600! I strayed away from computers for a while and became a biology teacher.  But somehow, I ended up getting a doctorate in sociology, and then finally doing research on social computing and the Internet.  I guess that Tandy had a real impact on my life, even though all I could ever program it to was was change the color or basic math, and we were too poor to buy software at the time.