I’m “got a tape drive for my Vic-20” old.

Old enough to have had a crush on Justine Frischmann.

Fifty in a couple of months.

I was a beta tester for cable modems in my neighborhood. Friends came to my (adult) place to play Everquest.

Gonna expand on this since it’s late and I’m drunk.

Loved the movie Wargames long before I had a modem but could never call myself a hacker.

Was on the internet in 1991 through methods that could’ve been called hacking if I’d discovered them myself.

Kept that illegal university access through various friends at the school until commercial (non AOL) became available in 95 or so.

Cable modems came a few years later while I was living with an internet girlfriend who became my first wife. (Only on two.)

Sit down kids and let me tell you the story of the Betamax wars.

My first modem was actually this bad boy https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8355735/magic-modem-for-the-bbc-b-computer-modem

It was modified by my uncle to work on the commodore aniga (basically a switch on the back to just force modem on/off, so you dialled the number on the phone flipped the switch and hung up phone).

I’m “my first computer was a TI99/4A” years old.

First computer experiences were with a Commodore CBM 4032 (and state of the art 5¼-inch dual floppy disk drive) owned by one of the physics teachers at school.

Sitting down, unsupervised, with a group of friends one lunchtime we quickly tired of typing in rude words only to see “Syntax error” every time and we all wanted to find out how to make it work for us.

Lost touch with one of the group, but the rest of us all ended up in tech or software development of some sort.

+++, ATH

Old enough to have used, installed, and maintained V21. And most of the CCITT/ITU data transmission schemes which followed. Also a well known 50 baud network that went before 🙂 (Telex)

I still have a working ZX Spectrum (Frankensteined from mine and a friend’s) and tape player.