Well, first off, I was born in 1986, so I'm 18. A bit young, but there you go :) Let's see.. where to start.. Well, the first computer I actually used was an Acorn BBC Micro (Master 128 if I remember correctly) in primary school (age 8 or so). I talked to the IT teacher and she let me borrow the manual and some BBC BASIC guides. At the parent's evening that year she spoke to my mother and apparently said "Get this kid a computer!". I got a Spectrum +2A fpr ,y birthday, again with a load of programming books. Wrote a few games, then hit the limits of the hardware. A year or so later I had a fairly high end 486SX/25 with 4MB of RAM and a 160MB Conner hard drive, MS DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. I learned QBASIC, then Visual Basic, then didn't really do much programming until '96, when my uncle let me borrow his copy of Delphi 1.0 for the weekend (including the manuals). I learned ObjectPascal from that :) In '98 or '99 I managed to scrape together enough cash for a 56k modem, then got an account on Freenet UK - my first internet connection, on a K6-II/450. All of 56kbits a second. IIRC, I joined classiccmp in 2000 (might have been a bit later), then joined the MIT PICLIST a few months later. Getting ADSL in '03 really made the mail downloads go quicker - I've had my own fileserver running since mid-'02, late-'03, running Linux. As far as programming skills go - I know C, some C++, x86 assembler, PICmicro assembler (12, 14 and 16-bit varieties -- PIC12, PIC16 and PIC18 devices), QBASIC, Visual BASIC (DOS and Windows versions), Pascal and BBC BASIC. Other hobbies: Well, electronics is the main one. I'm entering the Parallax (www.parallax.com) SX Design Contest - all being well, I should be able to get the firmware for my entry stabilised within the next few hours. It's gonna be a long night! :) I'm a real tech nut - I won't go anywhere without my Minidisc recorder (Sony MZ-N710) and my mobile phone (Nokia 6210 or Samsung V200, depending on which one's charged at the time). Oh, and I've got a bit of a reputation for destroying hard drives when they fail. Usually with big drills and hammers. I'd love to see a thermite reaction melting a defunct IDE hard drive down at some point though :) Gee, I've just written most of my life story.. maybe I'll put this post on my website at some point :) Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem at philpem.me.uk | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... I believe I will take this opportunity to remove my ears.