Community poll forum: I started to use a computer regularly at the age of:

IBM 360 Model 20.
8K of storage. no hard drive or tape drive. Punch cards only.

My first direct contact with a computer was in 1968 while in college. It was a terminal located at a college in northern Iowa. I believe it was connected to a mainframe at the U of Minn. I remember using both punch tape and punch cards.

My first desktop was The NorthStar Advantage (1982). It was a 4MHz Z80a-based computer (with optional 8088 co-processor board that ran MS-DOS 1.0) with 64K of user RAM and 16K of graphics RAM. It used two single-sided, double density 180K floppy disk (hard sectored) drives.

My next desktop was the first IBMPC (64K RAM, two floppy disk drives) with a $3,000 external 5mg hard drive.

Both computers were purchased by my employer - my pockets weren't that deep.

Point of interest: After 20 yrs of using MS-DOS(Windows) computers, I am now a dedicated MAC user.

I voted, and never showed up in the results. hehe

In order of appearance:

1974: PDP-11/16. No video. Lots of greenbar. Stored my BASIC code on punched paper tape out of a TTY.
1978: SIGMA 6 mainframe (punch cards) , FORTRAN, et al.; flunked out of UVM CS program
1980: Apple IIe w/ 128MB card. Wrote a game that COULD HAVE BEEN HUGE ("TAR"), and ML image proc stuff.
1983: HP3000 (my first operator job after college), HPUX workstation, Apple Lisa
1985: Amiga 1000! Holy Freekin' Shiite. (the amazement continues until this day)
1986: Kaypro, more Apple IIe (wrote a patch library program for the Voyetra VS synth), Synclavier, etc.
1987: IBM XT, AT
1988: Lots of Amga stuff (worked at a dealership)
1990: IBM PS/2, AIX AS6000 (IT/coding job)
1991: Compaq "portables", AppleTalk networking, Apple Mac IIsi, Mac laptops (IT job)
1992: More Amiga stuff, random PC clones, Linux? Lots of Paradox and Delphi development... (coding job; was a Canadian millionaire for four days..)
2002: Chose CentOS Linux as my preferred Linux distro. (out of work for almost 5 years)
2005: All sorts of Dell workstation and server stuff. XenServer Virtualization, Celeros storage boxes, et al. (my current job at a University)
2006: EFIKA + MorphOS


Yeah, I'm an old fart, but I ROCK.