If only Janes Combat Simulations could be reborn…
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I wish for this every day. I’m guessing they’re stuck in some kind of rights hell.
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Your experience mirrors mine. I was lucky to have a TRS-80 given to me by an uncle - he worked at Lockheed Skunkworks…an amazing engineer.
I remember typing those long programs in. Oh God…I think I still have trauma from that. And I remember Eliza…the not so AI AI… 
Oh what a 9 year old’s mind can come up with…
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Remember the FastLoad cartridge?
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AOL got me my wife. Wow. Well…ex-wife…
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Man, CompuServe was my first ever “online” experience and it blew me away.
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You are not alone with that
The amount of time that I wasted typing programs from “your Sinclair” only for them not to work, because of a small typo or font issue … they never bloody worked
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It took two days for my best friend Rob and me to type in the game “Space Warp” into his dad’s TRS-80. Very fun game though. The “space” in question was a 16x16 text grid. I believe “*” were space stations. Not exactly Elite but it was clever for it’s day.
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I definitely want to share my own experiences… Just need to find the time.
Same here! I mostly visited the flight sim groups.
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She finally installed one of those free CDs?
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We had Trash-80s at the University of Miami that I learned BASIC on. With 8 inch floppy drives, LOL.
My funny CompuServe experience. Once I discovered flight simulators that would run on a PC, I went over the deep end (continues today LOL) and wanted to learn everything about them as quickly as possible. I discovered a flight sim forum on CompuServe, about the time that I headed off to do the ex-pat thing for 5 years in Europe. I was mostly based in Munich, but had to go to Milan and Paris during the summer. In Milan, I was initially frustrated in the hotel that I was living in, because I couldn’t figure out how to get the 2 line US modem in my massive laptop to work with the 3 line Italian hotel phone system. It took me a couple of days, but I eventually poked around the wires and tweaked the modem enough that I actually to dial out and connect to CompuServe in Germany.
About that time, I discovered software that would allow me to download forum discussions, upload my replies, and them sign off. I think that it was called Tapsys or something similar. So I happily Tapsys’d for a month. A couple of days before I checked out, I stopped by the front desk to see how much phone bill I had racked up. “Si si, molto bene.” The clerk swallowed hard and said that it would be around $1,700.00 (3.8 mil Lira). What! I felt like an idiot for not checking sooner. So I had to go to the American Express office and cash in more traveler’s checks to support my new CompuServe forum habit.
The morning of checkout I was trying to login one last time, but having trouble connecting. I started poking at the wires with my Swiss army knife and got a big spark and some smoke for my trouble. The line was dead. A little while later, at check out I was prepared to pay the big phone bill. But he said, “Niente. No telephone charges. Arrivederci!” Yes! I love Italy.
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lol …. My wife did exactly the same when we first got the internet back in 95/96, we were with AOL and it used to charge about 1p per min…she was at home with the first babe. …well she managed a £650 phone bill in about 2 months
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I was in a constant state of paranoia about that back in the day. Dialup prices were brutal.
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And then AOL introduced the unlimited minutes per month scheme in 1996 and guess what happened? The demand was so overwhelming that sometimes you had to call 10 times before your modem would finally get through and connnect. Ah the tech Dark Ages had their charms at times.
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I remember losing a good chunk of my disposable income to paying the phone bill and my subscription to Air Warrior III. And then I was pulled over to iEN’s Warbirds, which had an hourly rate. If I recall correctly it was $1.99 an hour back then but I could be mistaken. Amazingly, the servers were well populated and hourly fee kept the vast majority of casual players, kids and trouble makers at bay. The down side was that it kept you poor and I know there were more than a few divorces that resulted from a Warbirds addiction. 
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Ouch. You guys are killin me…I was nearly 30 when the earliest one displayed above came out. All I’ll say is: it took a lot of imagination (compared to today).
And it was only recently (flight sims) that the in-game graphics finally looked better than the intro video!
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Ah, but at the time it was magical. One of the reasons I don’t do any retro-gaming is that I don’t want to lose the memory of how amazing those sims and games were at the time…
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I approach them with a mindset of the time they were released and thus I can enjoy them still. I know for some it’s hard to do… Additional benefit is that after playing retro flight sims for some time, coming back to modern ones just hits differently 
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Technically speaking it’s the first DOS game I ever bought but only because my father lent me the money- Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat.
I literally wore out both the manual and the box. I still have the two 3" disks, one of which suffered physical damage and cracked the shell… but thanks the Sim Gods I found a new box (with 5" floppies) and the manual in perfect state!
If it has to be a game bought with my proper proper money then it would be LucasArts Star Wars- Tie Fighter. Much much later.
If it’s my first first first ever game, it would be a Commodore 64 title for sure…
Likely the much overhyped Forgotten Worlds. 
Silly me trusted a game magazine…
https://www.mobygames.com/game/3871/forgotten-worlds/screenshots/c64/
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