since 1984. had of course computers in the company i ran but no bloody idea how to handle one.

Since 1966 at Michigan State University when I started my computer science program, using a Control Data (CDC) 3600 programming in Fortran IV with punched cards and getting one compile/execution every day !! ANd being thrilled if there were keypunch errors !!

It was in the early 80's. I bought one of the IBM compatibles from Radio Shack. It had a massive 10 megabyte hard drive. I bought Lotus 123 and used the spread sheet to build a business program. It took a while but when finished, it worked great. The US Internal Revenue Service was impressed with my daily records and monthly summaries. I was lucky, I was only audited that one time.

1967 operating a Honeywell 1200 the size of my living room spending endless hours watching tape sorts, how daft was that! But I loved punched cards and became expert at correcting errors on them by sticking the chads back into mispunched holes with a wet finger - I still remember the Holerith code! 1969 and a Univac 41 the size of my house with disks (fastrands) the size of small cars and a 100mb capacity. Moving on in time: my boss at the bank dumped IBM's first commercial PC on my desk in 1978 and said, here, decide what use this might be to the bank in the future. As I recall I wrote a very bland report that didn't even come close to setting out the true potential.

OK, let me expand on this:-

Forgetting the armed services and then the years I spent in seismic oil exploration with GSI, a subsidiary of Texas Instruments where I spent many months studying their sciences in Dallas Tx. during the 1980’s, some 28 years down the line I’m still a two finger typist but by the <deleted>#k I can fix, repair or ‘nigger’ rig them. When your stuck out in a desert with millions of dollars at stake, that’s your bread and butter -- it held me in good stead up to retirement inc. my last few years with Chevron here in the Gulf of Thailand.

And then again, there was a time for 5 years where I was with a company out of Massachusetts called Foxboro, they based their early technology on a DEC PDP 11, now there’s a dinosaur complete with paper tape streamers and a 16mb storage facility that weighs in about 25kgs.

I could go on but my own personal computer was a Commador 64.

BTW I'm Australian just seems that I spent most of my time tied up with US companies.

Interesting to see the majority here have used computers for more than 20 years. Would be interesting as well to see a simular poll regarding the age of the members on this forum - my guess is most are over 50, maybe even over 60.

And interesting to see that so many with an IT background ended up here...... What's wrong with us IT-nerds?

Interesting to see the majority here have used computers for more than 20 years. Would be interesting as well to see a simular poll regarding the age of the members on this forum - my guess is most are over 50, maybe even over 60.

And interesting to see that so many with an IT background ended up here...... What's wrong with us IT-nerds?

Maybe we are twisted?