[Porsche-O-Phile]

You're a man after my own heart Wayne. I remember being a geeky Junior High kid in the early to mid 1980s - had an Atari 400 (the one with the crummy membrane keyboard) but swapped programming tips with a couple of other geek buddies at school. I think even back then we knew computers were the way of the future, even if we got laughed a lot for our nerd-dom. Had a Timex-Sinclair 1000 too and programmed the snot out of it.

I remember vividly getting a birthday gift of a membership to the brand new (at the time) "ComputerPlace" at the Museum of Science in Boston (at the time it was just some spare space in the garage that they finished and put a bunch of IBM-PCs into with a few MIT computer geeks to run it). Was really fun - I coded a rudimentary space flight game loosely modeled after Atari's "Star Raiders" game (that I was hopelessly addicted to at the time). I learned several years later in college (forced to take Vax FORTRAN and C++) that I had absolutely, positively no desire to do computer programming of any type - even though I liked (and still do) the algorithim-generation sort of problem solving aspects, I hated coding with a passion. Many long hours in the dingy basement of the Vax lab with crappy fluorescent lights fretting over the silly syntactical nuances of FORTRAN's old legacy punch-card formatting while I wanted to be out at the beach sorta' killed my interest. I know enough to understand mostly what computers can/can't do technology-wise but the stuff changes so fast now that by the time the ink is dry on a C.S. or C.E. major's degree, they're obsolete. Glad I just USE computers today and don't program them or do IT stuff. Way too crazy.