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Well, my very first computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX80.  It was the best computer ever (at the time) because it was the first computer that I ever owned.  At the time, programming for me involved typing in the program listings from Timex Sinclair magazine.  I don't think I got anything but the most basic of programs to actually work, but it was amazing to me nonetheless.  I have since bought a Timex Sinclair and the first 6 issues of Sinclair magazine on Ebay and they are in my office.

My first actual programming job was as a COBOL programmer.  At the time everybody was bashing COBOL because it required so much typing.  I just wrote their complaints off to "not liking to type".  Of course, after I started to program in other languages, I realized that they were right.  Still, I loved it while I was doing it.  I moved on to  HP Basic for a few years and did my best to push it to it's limits.  At the time, if you could display records and let people page through them, that was considered cutting edge in the HP Basic world.  I then moved on to Clipper, then VB, then ASP, then ASP.NET and I have been pretty much in the .NET world ever since. 

I have programmed in a few different languages, including VB 1.0, and it always amazes me at how the technology that you are working in seems to be the bleeding edge, but once the next version of the development tool comes out, it goes from cutting edge  to antiquated almost overnight. 

I had not heard of the OQO until you posted it and assume that I am not alone.  I am including some details on it for everybody to see.

You can also read about it at Engadget

YOU? You didn't hear about the ultimate IT geek UMPC?
David! :)

Well it's a damned cool device - a must have for mobile workers. Check it out at www.oqo.com...

Hi Guys!

Well, this device is so cool! I want it now!! Ok I'm too young and so my first PC has been a Dell with Win 3.1...mmm...my father has had a Commodore 128, never used...

My first computer was an Apple IIe my father had bought from a co-worker. My father brought it home one day, dumped a couple of boxes in my room and I said "What's this?" He said it was a computer...I said "What?" and then opened the boxes and started looking at how to put the thing together. It came with about 500 floppy disks with all kinds of programs and games. I was hooked then on the gaming aspect of computers and got into programming when one of those early games I was playing had an "unhandled exception" which resulted in the program code being dumped to the screen. Picking pieces out of it that kind of made sense I thought I might be able to change some of those lines and make the game change...and the rest is history :)

While I don't have a UMPC, I do enjoy my Windows Mobile 6 Tilt - and really like Windows Mobile in general.

The first computer I was exposed to (hmm, that sounds dirty) was a mainframe system at University of Virginia back in 1979. I don't think I ever knew what kind of system it was (I was 9 years old) but it was where I learned BASIC.  I do remember using a terminal that didn't have a screen. Everything I typed showed up on paper... followed by a response. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.  The last thing I did every day before leaving the lab was to do a complete program listing of whatever I worked on.

Having a mile long perforated and tractor-fed record of everything I did gave me plenty to study after I left the lab. I would take it home, make notes on the side, and trace the execution line by line with my finger. Playing the games in my head, over and over...

After that summer, and for the next year, I wrote a lot of computer programs that I didn't have a chance to actually run anywhere. The year after that, I started Junior High (they call it Middle School now... sigh) and met my first TRS 80 Model III, and my first obsession: Raaka Tu.  I can't tell you how many hours I wasted on that game. Even after I solved it, playing it again and again.

The first computer that was actually mine was a TRS-80 Color Computer. It used cassette tapes and cartridges and had a whopping 16k of RAM and used inverse characters for lowercase (green on black instead of the "normal" black on green) display.  The graphics modes were really primitive and you had to use machine language for any kind of performance.  We had a color TV but there was no way my dad was going to let me tie it up for hours at a time with my computer, so I inherited a small black and white tv for my room. I actually had no idea how bad the color palette was on that computer until a few years later when I hooked it up to a real monitor. All I had ever seen was shades of gray until then, so I just assumed it was better than it really was.

Eventually I got a floppy drive (at the bargain price of about $200) and hooked up with my first user group. Back then, they were little more than copying parties and hardware swaps. Once I got that floppy drive, I was a man on a mission.  I spent a lot of time in Radio Shack as a kid. I'd go in with a buddy and he would chat up the sales guy about RC cars and ham radios and stuff and I'd be at the computer copying all the games as fast as I could before he got back.

All my friends (that had computers) had Commodores and Ataris. They had all the cool games. There were a fair number of games available for mine too, but nothing like those systems... as a result, I wrote a lot of my own games.

I've been writing code ever since.