Eh, I grew up with Macs, but I couldn’t afford a Mac for my first computer, or even a windows license. I got a computer from a family friend that was broken which I fixed up and installed Linux on.

I don’t know. I think Mac gets a lot of hate simply because it’s a Unix that was sold to the devil and comes with a satanic concierge service.

Like, I’m not saying that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if I had to pick a handful of people that on the whole I would say probably did I would pick Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon musk, Jeffrey bezos, Larry Page, Vladimir Putin, and probably every Hollywood social elite and musician that sells a platinum record, every Republican senator, congress person, and every president after Jimmy Carter, and every CEO whose company is worth more than 10 million dollars who didn’t inherit the company from their parents.

growing up my family had a mac desktop that i had access to while really young. eventually realized mac is a little terrible, so i tried bootcamp to get some proper use out of the computer. i successfully installed windows, but somehow fucked up and formatted the mac partition. all for windows to also suck

Switching from apple is like breaking out of prison.

This isn’t right at all… Mac’s are awful if you want to do things like play most video games. Linux is much the same.

That’s right. I said it. Come downvote me, fanboys, I don’t mind. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.

I feel that is the difference we’re seeing though. Younger kids who generally live on smart devices have lower tech literacy.

Yep, this study would have to divide things up by age. As a fellow member of the Oregon Trail generation, all my early computers were also Apple ][ and b&w macs. But then eventually by young adulthood it all turned into PCs.

I enjoyed a stint with Solaris in college (that’s SUN Solaris thankyouverymuch) which I consider my true intro to Linux/posix/whatever-ix.

My youth was at least partly misspent hacking z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC664. Not as many regrets as one might assume. I miss when (8-bit) assembler was simple enough to hand-code without playing “surf the reference manual”.

I learned basic on an old trash 80 from radio shack in the late 70’s. I really miss mucking around with it.

Edit: Now I use Linux.

I started on a Pr1me 550 type II learning BASIC myself. Apple ][s came out about 4 years later. Then I used them. Windows SA now.

Yes, where we were READY to solve problems like “is that game ported to my system” and “is it any good?”

FWIW, we were also dropped immediately into a BASIC interpreter, day one. PC’s may have been priming IT professionals, but were C64 users primed to be programmers?

Keep in mind that autism is a spectrum

No point, c++ already contaminated you. Better than getting java in you early, but both have their own expression of mental illness. I think both are better than C, which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn’t exist.

according to the US gov, C and C++ pose a threat to national security because they are a “memory unsafe” language. I hope you can recover from all the pain and memory leaks you had to endure by transitioning to Rust. /s

Only if you have trouble functioning. The only reason for diagnosis is access to care.

But, yeah, prior odds are significant ;)

Nah, you already know the problem, you just need to self medicate.

it’s not going to cause any additional harm:)))

i only knew HTML and CGI scripts :(

could’ve been before elongated muskrat bought it

**As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands… I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It’s fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered “needed.”. Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and “evacuate” only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months… But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)

Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018

…you dad did very well; give him a hug this december…

Yooo, another autistic geek 2006er!

I was diagnosed at age 4 and i started with Flash games on a Windows 7 family desktop. The first PC i could keep in my bedroom was an old netbook with XP and Lubuntu gifted to me by my mom(i only used the linux part tho). Then, later, another XP-era laptop with Linux Mint, before the current win10 laptop i have today(used it with Windows so far cuz i’m lazy and i used to need windows software but i plan to Linuxize this as soon as win10 is discontinued)

When i take the jump i’m prolly gonna settle for KDE Neon or any other Debian-based that can run KDE and then try to theme it to get something as close to Frutiger Aero as possible.

Awesome! What made you pick void?

Indeed. It can hint towards more required research.

It does imply casualson though

I had one i lost it. i also had a CD of solaris before oracle bought them out a long time ago.

Kids these days don’t know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.

in a care home presumably

I absolutely still remember my grandfather having a dual 5.25” IBM and teaching my 6-7 yo self how to use the cli. I still remember that MSDOS 2.0 box he had up on his shelf, and how he taught me to keep a simple text file of the prices of my baseball cards, according to the legendary Beckett price guide.

I then later vaguely messing around with 3.11 followed by 95+, but the basis of my mediocre understanding of the cli was due to my grandfather teaching me on DOS 2.0.

If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive

DOS was a step backwards for me from Atari TOS.

I had 3.1, 95, 98se, XP(teenager).

I got in at I’d say the best time. XP for the Internet as a teenager was absolutely the best time to be a teenager with computers.

Now I’m glad I was at the tail end of DOS. My dad showed me how to interrupt the windows boot to get into DOS for Lemmings and Doom, but for everything else like Anno 1602, Need for Speed 2 and Age of Empires 1, I used Windows 95.

The only thing I remember from that era is inserting floppy dics to play games

“What is that high memory area stuff they added in DOS4?”

gets swallowed by rabbit hole for days

“Oh, that!”

Does anyone still know the C> prompt?

DOS5 here, installed from 5.25" floppies on a tiny HDD and looking at one of those awful shades-of-yellow monitors.

That’s if you don’t count the computer that didn’t have a hard drive and ONLY booted from 3.5" floppy (which was just enough to get a bootable DOS disk and Prince of Persia).

IRQ’s were great for choice. You got to your modem, video card, and soundcard and then picked which two would actually work when they all wanted IRQ5 or 7