Age

OK, at a mere OCT 20 years I think I'm the youngest on the list - I started out playing around with NIBBLES.BAS on my dad's business 286 Vectra laptop (he worked in Shipping at HP), I can't really remember when, but I was young - around three years old. When dad got his 486, I played extravagant amounts of Commander Keen 4. Started writing tiny programs in the library at school on the 386 there when I turned 7. I have fond memories of lending my dad's HP95LX and playing with it, especially after he got his 100LX. The 95LX was confiscated by my school and subsequently lost by the teacher, and the 100LX was broken by my baby stepbrother who tripped over the charger... and gave me two HP50LX'es... Had a fascination with 1980s computers like the Commodore 64, sat in the basement typing BASIC games off the "Learn BASIC" book when I was around 10-11. I think I was about 12 when a friend of my mom's lent me a machine with Visual BASIC - and I did some very... BASIC stuff with that too, but rapidly started getting a hold of things At age 14 I sort-of got a job setting up Windows XP machines for a local gaming place, where I met Bj?rn Vermo, investor, cctech mainframe guru and list member, and his girlfriend, Debbie, who told me about the Informatics library and the books there. I managed to navigate my way there, and was shocked to find a PDP-7 in the atrium. I did not know much about big iron back then, so it was a great opportunity to learn a lot more. And learn I did - I subscribed to this list (first cctech digest, then cctech, then the full cctalk - addictive :), started getting into Linux, learning to code a Real Language, learning about electronics, and classic computing, etc. I found it remarkable how much one learns when one completely ignores school! Now I just recently got my very own PDP-11, which I with the help of gordonjcp over IRC fixed :) My dream job is working at a museum, maybe even starting a separate computer museum (which Norway, with a very interesting computer history, IMHO really needs, but that's another thread :) Hell, I'd be a building super if they let me use a 360/91 as the furnace :) -- Tore S Bekkedal <toresbe at ifi.uio.no>