I was born with a silicon spoon in my mouth

When I think about it, I was really fortunate for a child of the seventies as far as computing experiences went. My father was the Head of Computing Services at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters. My first 'computer' was a TI Silent teletype (with thermal printer) connected to a Control Data Cyber mainframe running NOS and later NOS/VE.

I've always had computers around and didn't even consider one for a career until my first year of university when I discovered that chemisty and physics were really just math once you got up to a high level. Not loving calculus, I went for the more practical math of computer science and have never looked back.

Along the way I used many of the earliest forms of networking (BITNET and USENET) and mailing (manual forwarding with the same networks) and online forums (called bulletin board systems or BBSes back then) . I've used CDC and IBM mainframes, UNIX workstations and X terminals from a wide variety of vendors, many different home and personal computers. I can remember when I was very happy to have just two floppy drives and then how ecstatic I was with a 28MB hard drive. Your average toaster or watch has more RAM these days. We've come a long way, baby, but we aren't finished yet.