Neither Luddite nor Technophile

Perhaps the first computer I actually used was an audio cassette tape drive Timex Sinclair 1000 that my father bought then later returned to make way for a Commodore 64. I tried to teach myself how to program the C64 but got stuck at the peek and poke commands. Somewhere along the line I got an Atari 2600 and pined for the programming cartridge that I never obtained. In college I bought a PowerBook 145B and have been a Macintosh user since. Since the end of the last century I have always been armed with a Palm. Over the years I have gained some rudimentary programming experience in FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and Java. I have also dabbled a bit with JavaScript and even AppleScript. Occasionally I geek out and do stuff with Terminal.app, although I prefer using iTerm or the defunct iTerminal.

 

During a brief stint in the military, I learned basic circuitry and had great fun with the soldering gun. That was, regrettably, something I didn't keep up with.

 

Together with broadband, the internet is an ongoing revolution. I do my bit to have some idea of what's going on by reading various tech sites and learning some of the basics. My skills are minimal, but sometimes others seem impressed with what I know or can do, which often surprises me. Given that everything done online is probably logged somewhere, I've become a bit more concerned about privacy and increasingly make use of Guardster's proxy service.