"When I was a young man, barely seventeen... went out to Hollywood to change my dream... Dusty Oklahoma was all I'd ever seen... ...and I was getting older..." Yeah, Louisville ain't a techno hotbed, either... Neither of us would have been any worse off if we'd never been involved with computers. I was going to major in choral music direction... took one required course in music theory and Computer Programming 101... and never looked back, that is, until recently... Agreed; and some would say it's worth filtering every grain of sand in the ocean just to get at the few grains of gold contained therein... I'd say if you a damned good programmer, it's because you've developed expertise, regardless of how you got it. But I know lots of stories about PFYs getting their start in mainframe environments... Regards, -dq