Bogus poll.

I did say "etc etc". Geeze louise.

Or high bogosity poll.
Or whatever.

So then stay away from it.

Man. The negative. Get a hobby

Some of my IT related experience is professional and some is personal. I've been doing the embedded S/W thing for over 30 years but IT has been a relatively minor aspect.

First computer I worked on was was a MITS Altair 8800. When I worked at TI, I repaired 960, 980 and 990 computer boards.

It's been a wild ride. My first machines were made in the 1950s by companies like Bendix.

Decent bit of Access (what I started on) and Oracle, some MySQL & PostGRES.

Been into building my own PC's (and for others) PC Gaming, and Overclocking for the same amount of time.

I'm actually a Senior Moderator at Overclock.Net as well

just curious, we have new people here

Every year I wonder if they have gotten too easy to deal with and every year people keep calling me

And all at the same company. It's almost all been managing/programming the PBX and related telecom stuff though.

Had a bit of an advantage over the other guys because I could type.

Most of the guys (and yes, they were guys...) wrote programs on pre-printed Fortran forms that they'd hand over to women who punched the cards.

This picture is from the 'sixties, but it was still like that in the 'seventies, most places:



When I was a kid my mom had a friend who had home access to a mainframe. He used a portable teletype (no such thing, really) and an acoustic modem. In those days you weren't allowed to attach anything to the actual phone lines, so you placed the telephone handset directly on the modem and dialed the number on the phone. Yes, dialed.

I'd save programs I wrote on punched paper tape which I'd gently hang in my closet at home, leaving my clothes on the floor.

I've been obsessed with computers my entire life.

One summer I took my two year college technical certificate and got a job at a major mainframe computer manufacturer. But the place was already dying and three quarters abandoned. It was spooky sometimes, you could imagine yourself living in a post-apocalypse world. Where are all the people? Nobody ate lunch in the huge cafeteria even though it was kept clean enough for the county health inspector. Any employees who could had already fled for greener pastures. There was still some contract work repairing and refurbishing stuff like 10 megabyte hard drives as big as washing machines.

My supervisor let me take home tons of computer crap that I'd incorporate into my own home built computers. I'm sure the security guys wondered what the hell kind of place they were working at where strange young guys like me were allowed to take random stuff home. I still have a lot of it (the smaller stuff at least) in my junk boxes.

I learned everything from Mamin Matty, Bane, Thump, Methoes, a bunch of Koreans, Chinese sweatshop goldminers and the good people from 'Fires of Heaven'. People from TI who made that first 'space invaders' game..beep-beep-beep (a kid,my first game ever). so many more, Ne Plus Ultra- the guild of 'the stars' and my lovely Iamiam. can I get a rez please Iam?

My background is mathematics with specialisation in mathematical statistics. But programming for the sake of programming has always been a part of my professional life.

My first language was Fortran in the late 60s...and, yeah, we wrote code on paper and some kind woman (it was always a woman at my university) punched it into cards and someone ran the cards through the computer and produced the output and the cards for us to correct. The computer room was huge (we could look through some windows, but couldn't enter it) and the computer was the size of a small bus.

Since then, I've programmed in various flavours of C, various Modulas, Pascal, Delphi 1,3 and 5 (I seem to favour the odd numbers). I've also done some programming in VAX/VMS and Bourne Shell. I've also done a fair bit of SQL programming in FoxPro and Delphi.

But most of my programming was probably done in various statistical packages. The ones I've used include GLIM, Genstat, BMDP, SPSS, SAS, Stata.

I've retired now, but the programming bug still bites. I'm working my way through a Udemy Java course and I still help former colleagues with advice on Stata (unpaid!!!).