Well, I get nostalgic seeing many of the posts above.
My very first computer was something, you'd not call a computer nowadays. In Germany we had an electronic-kits company called "Busch", and I got my first one when I was about 10 or so. It was a great system with the electronic elements like resistors, capacitors, coils, transistors, LEDs, photo resistor etc. etc. mounted on little plastic plates, and you could connect them with cables and little fixes. I played hours with it, and they had great accompanying books, explaining how all the stuff worked, and why the circuits worked. One could buy many extensions to the basic box. One was digital electronics with NAND gates, and it was explained how to wire them to get any logical calculation. Another box was a micro computer which could be programmed with a very basic machine language. I think, one must not underestimate such kind of technical toys. I fear, nowadays they have come out of fashion, and the kids just want a smart phone or tablet to browse through the internet and chat on socalled "social networks", but that's not how you get hooked up to science and technology, but such electronic kits definitely do, and I think it was one of the most important influences in my childhood to get into physics later, which gives me great fun in my live :-))). Maybe today, Raspery Pis and the like gadgets are a great substitute for the electronic kits of my childhood days.
The first "real" computer then was a Commodore 64, first with a "Datasette" (I don't know, how it's called in English) to store code on an audio tape. Later I bought floppy-disk drive (with 5.25'' disks) from my own pocket money, and it was as expensive as the Commodore 64 itself at the time ;-). The Commodore 64 was an alround thing: First of all we had endless sessions with many friends playing games (using a joystick), but we also learned the basics of programming (first with the bulit-in BASIC language, later Pascal :-)). To the disappointment of my teachers, I used to do my homework on the Commodore 64, particularly making plots, which I was never good in drawing by hand.
At school we also were the first generation, who got voluntary IT courses. At my school they had some Apple IIe, and the teachers were of course of the "nerd kind", i.e., math and natural-science teachers who used to tinker around as a hobby and then also got hooked up by the then becoming popular home computers. These were among the best teachers ever (anyway, my high school experience is that the best teachers are those who haven't been educated as teachers at first but became teachers for whatever reason later; this particularly includes my physics teacher who worked some years as a postdoc in experimental atomic physics before she became an ingeneous high-school teacher).
Later on I got of course a PC. The first one was a 286SX, then a 486 desktop. From then on I've only bought laptops for my private use. First, I used Windows (starting from 3.11, 95 etc), but when I started the work on my diploma theses, the PhD students and postdocs told me, you must not use Windows, beause it's bad but Linux. In these days (around 1995 or so), you got Linux either as a set of disks (3.5'') or on one CD, including all kinds of software. I started with a Slackware distribution and soon even compiled the kernel myself adapted to precisely the hardware of my computer (then still a desktop). Of course, I think the advise of the PhD students and postdocs was very right; today, I'm very puzzled by the fact that some people seem to be really able to do serious work with Windows. Whenever I boot Windows 10 on my laptop (usually just to update my GPS navigation device), some hell breaks lose. Last week, it started some "Fall Update". Whatever it was, it took 8 hours to get ready. Fortunately I had the laptop at the institute, where I work on the desktop computer (of course also Linux), so that I had not to wait for Windows to finish an update, I've never wanted to install in the first place. I don't know, what changed. At least Windows kind of works in the same way as before ;-)).
) mine was an 8088, then in 1984 a 286 running windows 3.0 .
