If I don't die by Thursday, I'll be roaring Friday night.

My first programming course was in 1978 and yes, we used punch cards and a dot matrix printer - I hated it. I tried again in 1980 with a dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe but still hated it. Went to Japan in 1984 and learned to use a Japanese word processor in Japanese - really hated that. Came back to the US and started using ATs and XTs and portables you pushed around on a coffee cart... no hard drive but hey, I had a 1200 baud modem now, so it wasn't that bad. Moved back to Japan and things started to change just about the time Windows 3.1 and the Internet started to get on mere mortals' radars.

Then many moons ago, half a planet away I got interested in computers again. But it wasn't so much the computer than the computer had become a communications device. I was intrigued by Gopher and BBSs; Netscape hadn't been invented yet, but it was clear the direction things were going.

Spring forward a few years and I was in San Fransisco drinking the dot com kool-aid, and that, of course, led to a trip to nowhere... so there I was, a veteran BBS sys-op, owner of a personal vanity web site, author of on-line textbooks, a burned out shell of a poster from Eminds, Utne and Brainstorms. Where to go next?

Mindsay

That was many years ago, and I'm still posting here. That should speak volumes.