Born 1955. My father was a ham, motorcycle nut, car nut, etc. I made electronic stuff since grade school, worked for an electronics company while in highschool (janitor, then technician, then programmer). Got pretty good at electronics young. Hooked on a Nova 1200, LINCtape, Silent700 on a little rollaround cart around 1975, then bought a SWTPC 6800 kit in 1977?, and got my first lesson in vaporware when I bought 4K BASIC from SWTPC and found it needed 6K to run. Debugged a solder bridge or something by tracing out MIKBUG program execution on the buss with a two-channel Tek tube scope ("give a boy a hammer, everything looks like a nail"). Wrote FORTRAN4 and Nova assembly, then a cross-assembler for my SWPTC machine for the Nova. About the only software I still have from that era, printed on paper. (I'm actually not that nostalgic; I have little interest in the computing stuff I worked on most, CP/M, MSDOS, hardware, 1977-1995. It's a weird coincidence I just got the Nova, though nostalgia certainly affected my decision to take it. Most of the science and tech stuff I'm interested in was made before I was born. ) Got my amateur Extra license a few years back so that I could put my two Korean-War-era PRC-6 vacuum tube handy-talkies on the air (6 meters). Plus mobile HF morse in my ancient Rambler auto :-)

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005, Eric Smith wrote: I generally assume (...) that 'nostalgia' is based upon feelings for one's own past; but I don't insist on that.