First computer used: either an Apple IIc or IIe located in the elementary school's 'computer lab', or a TRS-80 my father (a math teacher) borrowed History Mystery Mansion (or some similar name) game on the Apples. First computer owned: an 8086 PC clone mutt built by some guy who ran a computer store in a nearby town. It had an IBM 5.25" full-height 10MB hard drive, 512K RAM, CGA graphics, a color monitor, and a dot-matrix printer. It came with DOS 3.3. Later, it was upgraded with a 286 motherboard, more memory, a sound card, a 1200 baud modem, and a handheld scanner. I sold it long ago to a lady in another nearby town. First language learned: TRS-80 BASIC Level II First compiler used: Microsoft QuickC 2.5 First program used by people: two very similar programs EnrollDB and LEADB, that I wrote for the local school district in the 7th grade. They were first written in MS-DOS QBASIC (ewww!) and then re-written in C later that year. EnrollDB was an enrollment database and report generator, and LEADB was the same thing, but with special features for the special education department. LEADB had to generate files in a certain format for submission to the DoE. Both of these were no doubt atrocious programs, but for a completely self-taught 7th grader, they were masterpieces. Having no idea of the plethora of algorithms out there, I developed from scratch the bubble sort, and was very proud of it. I used it to sort the database in each program, and each swap was done by moving records around in the database file. Alphabetizing a list of 400 students took about an hour! I hope those programs aren't still in use... First experience with the Internet: see below. First contact with UNIX: using FTP over e-mail from a BBS with a newly acquired Internet email gateway. I lived outside of the OKC LATA, and that particular BBS was the only one I had access to, as it had a toll-free number. I now brag to my friends that I'm cool because I was 'on the net' before the existence of the WWW. -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)subatomix.com