Beat 1977
It doesn't get much older than this... in fact My family was the first in Canada with a personal computer Commodore PET- I think I still have the newspaper articles. (My father was an engineer for Xerox- you know, the guys who invented GUI, the mouse, electronic paper and oh yea... photocopying).
That would have been 1977 ish (I was 12 or so) and no-one really had e-mail, but we could connect to the university computer and leave messages and jokes.
I remember my dad writing his own operating system in HEX, and ripping ATARI games onto EPROMS (Yup. I had every Atari 2600 game ever written lol, all stored in what would become the first FLASH memory chips probably ever built.
Later he built a "house" computer out of a Motorola 68000 chip (almost every computer had one of these in them 5 years later).
Our house spoke (using the chips and language card in a speak and spell)
It monitored the lights, doors, and water table of the house.
It used motion sensors to move a HUGE camera hidden in a chimney on our garden shed- which I still tease my dad about like a crook wouldn't miss THAT on our shed.
He was the person (or at least the computer was), to have the police institute a "non acceptance of computer generated alarm calls"
We still have what’s left of the old PET with its added PROTO boards and 68000 expansion cards he buit for programming the house computer and the ATARI jack on the front lol. But, alas, the old Atari 2600 was plundered for its switches for my old Ninja’s radar detector.
I would like to think I grew up watching computers evolve, I guess it was inevitable that I found myself involved in business that is totally driven by computers and running on software I've built, or modified. I think secretly my dad is disappointed that I chose the arts rather than becoming rich writing code. But I'll just become rich with music instead. I do pretty well now
Let me tell you all something... when I meet a person who "codes", or calls themselves a "programmer", I think back to the double digit lines of hex on that old PET and the chips connected by wire wrap on protoboards, and KERNAL manuals the size of a desk and say... "That's cool. My dad is a programmer too."
