Age

I am 43, born in 1961. I got a small amount of exposure to coding in BASIC and FORTRAN in a summer "computer camp" for high school students, but my serious hands-on experience with computing really got underway when I built an IMSAI 8080 which was a hard-core DEC shopw during the time I was there, with PDP-10s, DECSYSTEM-20s, PDP-11s, and VAXen everywhere. I also got to play with the Altos and the PERQs, the latter sometimes more than I cared to. I've had a longstanding interest in computer history, and obtained my first classic machine, a PDP-8, while I was still living in Pittsburgh. I put it in storage shortly thereafter, however, and moved to California for graduate studies. I ended up staying and working in the Silicon Valley, and for almost 20 years my historical interests remained purely academic. VCF 6.0 changed that, and reawakened my interest with the realization that not only were old computers more fun back then, but they still are today! I started collecting old machines again a little over a year ago, and haven't looked back. Strangely, but like a few others here, my nostalgia is reserved primarily for machines *earlier* than the ones I used. Switches and blinkenlights, core memory, hardwired control, no LSI -- that kind of thing. I think that I balk at thinking of anything I remember well as being truly *old*. ;) --Bill