On 30/09/2007, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: That's what I did, going up to the University of London in 1985, with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K in a full-travel keyboard and a small black-and-white TV. At first, outside of playing, it did some basic stats for me. Chi-squared and so on, written in BASIC. A year or so later, it had a 5.25" floppy drive, a printer port and I was writing essays on it. This made me painfully cutting-edge for the time; AFAIK I was the only person in my year to have their own computer. I also had an account on the college's cluster of twin VAX 11/870s, on which I learned Fortran (which I thought would be useful, but wasn't) and things like email and BBSs and comms (which I didn't think would be useful, but was). -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508