I'll be 47 in a couple months. I never saw a computer until I went to college in 1976 and met a PDP-11/40 running RSTS/E. I lived on the computer for the next 3 years until it interfered with my grades and I had to spend time on classes instead. I got a programming job in 1981 in RPG on an IBM S/34 immediately after college and have been doing software development ever since, on IBM mainframes (COBOL, CICS, Assembler, ADS/O, etc), PCs (Basic, C, MASM, OS/2 PM, Visual Basic, IIS based web development), primarily Microsoft platforms, taking occasional breaks from programming to dabble in the management side of things and fly around the country doing requirements studies, marketing, training, etc. I always tire of corporate management and politics after a few years and get back into the programming side of things until they twist my arm and talk me back into management stuff again. I've been in this cycle of management/ technical flip/flop since about 1986. For the past 20 years I've been involved in development of software for the insurance industry. Ashley