How young?

Our daughter has been able to surf, play and install games for a couple of years now, she's 6! I've relented today and installed a PC in her own room, wireless and all :)

How old were your children when you introduced them to the world of money, sorry computers :D

I have children?! Damn you, Durex!!!

I was five or six when I started. 'Course, back then I was on DOS, I didn't have it easy like the kids these days with their.. mice and their.. task bars and their.. eyeballs.

Noel: You gave birth to yourself?
:P



I was 4 when I started.

I didn't really do much until I learned HTML many years later off of a book "borrowed" from my brother (thus sending me on a very long and meandering journey which eventually led me to Blitz... and then everything else).

Back then, it was just good times playing Commander Keen (still a great game), etc.

I remember recieving a mouse along with some quiz game eventually... it was amazing.


Of course, that's not what this thread is about.
My point is: I think kids should all be forced to start off with a Linux shell (or something like Edubuntu, if you're not completely ridiculous). Otherwise, they'll be corrupted by the simplified stuff in OSs like Windows, thus giving us a generation of people like this.


Edit:
Hmm... right after checking the This link, I realized that my Blitz User Quotes page is using that same sort of appalling "hey, a filesystem is a database, is it not?" sort of thing, and thus appears to be falling to pieces...

My school didn't even get computers, until the year I left. :/

All five of ours were adopted, the youngest being 3 1/2 when we adopted her. We got her started on the computer and edutainment software right away.

With edutainment software being designed for kids as young as eighteen months old, there really is no such thing as too young, it is more a matter of buying your kid software designed for their age group. I prefer to get them educational software so they can learn and play at the same time ;c)

Conan kept trying to go on my Pc so I got one from a local school for him when he was 4. It's wireless and he goes on CBBebies or whatever the hell it's called. I just put a better graphics card in so he can now play better games. He loves my Bonus games and is good at them too :-) He even designed one of the levels!

if I had kids, I'd plop them right in front of google at age 3, and type in "pr0n" then say... this, dear boy/girl is what the internet is for. Also some other things, but mostly this.

Then cry as child services takes them away..... or will I? bum bum BUM.


my first PC was a notebook... not a notebook computer, a notebook.. my dad said "Son, when you can get this thing to play frogger I'll buy you an Atari." it took me all of 2 min to draw a picture of a daddy frog laying next to a mommy frog with a knife in her back and a baby frog standing over her.

I had the Atari 800XL inside 2 weeks... then promptly killed my mother anyway, just to show him who is boss..

Ok.. only the Atari 800XL was truthful in that story. But who cares.

I didn't really use it, I stuck a frogger cart into it and played. I didn't USE a computer till our old arse mac classic. After that we got a win 95 box 66 mhz of raw crap. I burned it out playing starcraft, and my dad had to upgrade.

we upgraded to a 200 mhz off-brand thing that got starcraft to run... we had that for years till I went into high school.. where we got a brand new hunk of crap refirb gateway 400 mhz...

I finally got my own 400 mhz hunk of shizzy my senior year... and had that till it got some worm at school 3 years later... Thats when I got this lump of coal. 2.4 ghz with 128 ram...

meanwhile.. my dad got a top of the line dell 3.2 ghz with 512 ram and a radeon 9700 pro a while back... when the 9700 pro WAS top of the line.

It can run anything on the market today, and thats good enough for me...

why did I say all of that again?

I think I was 4 or 5 when I sat for days on end on my living room floor playing my spectrum. I think we go our first PC (IBM 386, 40MEg Hdd) for 1200Pounds, in the early 90's when i was about 6 or 7.

The guy at the computer shop my dad bought it from told him that computers won't get much better than that :)

Noel: Ah I miss those days, them days where multi-tasking didn't exist, man did games run fast during that era....well, until 3d started kicking in, giving all our CPUs a run for their money with stupid software-renderers, until 3DFX came into play.

Anyhow, guess I'll do this from my own perspective as to gettin a PC, since I got no wife/kids of my own. ;p

Basically got a 486/66mhz PC as a gift from my Aunt as she just upgraded to a godly P1 200mhz (well it was at that time, 9 years ago I think?, I was around age 11), the thing only had DOS on it as Win95 somehow corrupted itself, so I stuck to mainly learning how the heck the thing worked, figured out my sound-card via trial&error in those old setup.exe game apps, and etc, those were the days......more-so because LucasArts was all out on creating great games.
(Monkey Island & Tie-Fighter anyone?)

Finally got Win95 a year later which my cousin installed, learned how slow my PC can be with only 8mb of ram, parents upgraded it to 16mb at that same time period, was not bad for typing up stuff, was crap for games on only 66mhz though, always went back to pure DOS for that.

Never experianced the Internet till a couple years more later, when we had a 3-month AOL trial disc laying arond, parents decided to give it a shot, wasn't bad for the time since it wasn't as resource hogging as the latest editions today.

And now here I am today, mostly having self-taught me everything about PCs I know, which is a fair-bit...'course I wish I learned how to program back then, but I had no idea where to start, and without the net, it's near impossible to get good help without trial & error on your own time.

I got a ZX80 when i was 3 but decided it might be good to play with it in the bath. at 4 I got an Amstrad, a bbc followed and was programming within the year, so yeah, young, is when we seem to start!

boomboom... the guy in the store was right...

If anything, the increase in speed gained since then has been negativly offset by the poor software and bloatware that makes word still load over a 5 min period...

if I remember right... it loaded faster, and I used it for just as much, when I got that win 95 box....


I mean... aside from a hand full of advancements, we've gained nothing that really makes computing 'better' from the pc end... The internet, which works fine if a win 95 compatable broadband service exists (i don't know, but there is no reason it couldn't) is the major advancement since then in personal computers.... the average user doesn't do anything now they couldn't then.... other than hord massive amounts of mp3s

I didn't use a PC until I was about ~11 or ~12 which was mainly used for games, word processing and when I found GWBASIC in the Dos directory I started programming.

I was 15 when we got our first PC. I was 19 when we finally got Internet :(

I was 5 on the Honeywell Dumbterm at NASA hooked up to a DEC (I think) playing STAR TREK BASIC while my Dad ran CAPCOM simulations for the Gemenii Program.

My son is three and a half, and got his own computer when he was two and a half (A $10 hand-me down, 400MHz, 16MB, Win98)
The main reason he got his own that young was a) it was dirt cheap, and b) 'insurance', so he wouldn't break/mess up ours. Too many times that he ran up to my computer and in a split second manage to drag half my files to who-knows-what directory, greased up the monitor, etc. After he had his own, he was ok with leaving ours alone.

He has a bunch of educational games he likes to play (shapes/colors, simple spelling, etc. Blue's Clues, Arthur, and a bunch of other games for preschool & kindergarten aged kids. also loves ms paint. His computer does have a network hookup with internet access, but the only website he can visit through it is pbskids.org which has a bunch of online games. There will be no accidentally running into the goatse guy.

Considering his age, he's very proficient with them. He can operate the mouse, keyboard, play his games, knows how to start and close all his programs, and could play both Zuma and Plobb! to level three before he hit his 3rd birthday.

I did set up windows to launch apps on a single click, because the double-click was a bit awkward.

That said, he rarely spends more than 15 minutes a day on the computer. He likes it, but it's not like he's addicted or that we're pushing it down his throat.
There's also not a chance that it will be in his own bedroom any time soon -- Me, my wife and the kid each have our own computer, but they are all set up in the same room. He can play, but we still want to keep an eye on what he's doing. (Even though it's perfectly harmless stuff he's doing at this age, it's a lot harder to move a computer back out and into the family room again when he's older, since they're bound to put up a fight at that point. Depending on how much space you have available, you may want to reconsider that, Tim...)

Personally I first got a hands-on computer when I was 13, during the 8086 days. The computer I got as a loaner from an uncle didn't have a floppy drive attached to it, so I was limited to about half a dozen CGA games, and GW-BASIC... Ended up creating my own stuff pretty quickly.

Me = 13
PC = internet ready

Me + PC = Pr0n.
Me + PC + credit card = Hot water.
Me - PC = sad.

I'm trying to keep my daughter *away* from computers / consoles as long as I can (She's 2 years and 2 months old now). Instead I try to encourage her to play with her dolls, legos and toycars (toy powerdrills, motorcycles etc).

I seriously think that she will become drooling vidioc if I just let her sit on front of PlayStation at her age... it's more important to learn handskills like freehand drawing and spatial / constructional stuff (legos are very good). But that's just me I guess... I know that she will get into computers sooners or later but and I have no objections about that - I just think that it is more beneficial to let her do other stuff now.

I agree Mustang. My daughter is 6, and she plays video games ofcourse, but only a certain amount of time. I kick her out of the house when it's been enough.

Well, since you're asking....
I was 31 before I saw any kind of computer.
I bought a Texas TI99. (1982?) - Old git, yeah.

Um.... he asked "how old were your children", not "how old were you".

My son's 2, and has been allowed to smash away at the keyboard and wiggle the mouse. He's already cottened on that the mouse cursor movement corresponds to the mouse.

I am not letting him play any further with computers as I don't really think it's good for him at this age. Give it another five or six years :)

We were once children.

Indie -

I think it's great your daughter is being brought up with computers in her life - they will form the basis for most things in her life education/work/play/leisure.

When you say "Wireless and all" do you mean she has access to the Internet in her bedroom? At 6? Surely not! I allow a PC in the bedroom, but I would not allow my children to have an internet connection in their bedroom. I allow my kids (now 12 and 14) to have access to a computer in each and have Internet access - wireless and all somewhere in the house where I can see what is going on (next to mine work PC and in the lounge actually).

As for how old were they... well they have both been using computers all of their lives, they know their ways around Photoshop, 3DS Max, Flash, Premiere, Scala, a little bit of Blitz3D and 3D Game Studio amongst other tools. Hollie made her first 3DS Max model (a playground - which I published here about three years ago). Richard uses Cubasis to create music of all kinds, he won an Educational award last year for teaching himself Flash and movie making (using my DV video camera). Richard has written stuff in 8-bit Atari BASIC too, simple stuff though.

I think just after Hollie was born we used to sit and play Nintendo SNES Super Mario World - for months - she loved to watch it and loved the music too - I had an Amiga then too, James Pond Robocod was the fav. on that.

Both are very competent surfers, they have MSN accounts (with some restrictions), and emails at SmartScreen and hotmail. Both have simple websites online for their friends to visit too.

lol @JB you're young at heart John! That's what matters.

IPete2.


Dang thats why Noel is so clever! He can move through time to interact with his own timeline and learns things from the future to 'test' us with!

I was between 3 and 4 when I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A. I'm showing my age here. Anyway, it had a number of educational games on it, particularly reading and math programs, plus regular games and TI BASIC. It gave me a head start over my peers, who typically did not touch computers until elementary school or later.

For a kid now, I would say that they would need to learn some computer stuff just to keep up, if not to get ahead. However, I would suggest keeping a time limit on how much time the kid spends on there, and keep the educational to pure entertainment ratio pretty high. You don't want the kid geeking out all the time when they could be outside playing.

wow, a popular subject :)

Yep she has the internet but only knows how to find stuff via the bookmarks, and the navigation bar has been removed. How else can she download games from reflexive, install and play them.

I wrote an educational game for my 2 year old and used BlackJumper's Sticky Keys dll which turns off all windows keys etc so he can smash away at the keyboard withtout it exiting to the desktop and then bad sh*t happening. He love's it, had a go most nights before bedtime for a while.

Started when I was 5 with a C64.

If you people know what that is... :))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

but I'm 22... I'm GLAD I don't have kids. And so is my Fiance.
So in order to be included, I had to say MY stuff :(
I'm young enough to be some of you old guy's kid, so back off!

My last 'girlfriend' had a son your age, Dampe. I. Feel. Old. :/

If they're from the same domain, you can point your DNS servers to 127.0.0.1, and manually enter the domain names/IP for some 'allowed' servers in your host file. That way you know they won't get anywhere outside of the couple of domains you explicitely hard-code in there.

children shouldn't be allowed onto the internet unless it's in some monitored state.

What happened to playing footbal or hide and seek with other kids?

I'm gonna have to investigate this parental lock stuff one day because my kid will be able to use google and google image search etc. One day he'll figure out how to circumnavigate it I guess. If it has a password on it initially, that will help. But eventually he's gonna see some bad stuff and there's not much I can do about it. But hey, we all saw pr0n mags as kids and maybe even some dodgy B&W amiga disk too...

really big? so did my last girlfriend... mwahaha... I. feel. dirty.

Hence the PC in the family room as well.

I guess when the kids are older, I'll have to move the PC OUT of their room into somewhere else monitored until they are naughty mid-teenagers. Seems more complicated that having a spectrum, no worry of pr0n there - "is that a nipple?" "no it's just colour clash"