I work for a major consulting/software development and technical training firm based in Dallas. I wish I could say that I'm one of their top programmers, but actually I'm in the sales area. I know enough about software to be dangerous...

But hardware...Now THAT'S another story! I build my own computer systems and have for some time, and because of that, I'm pretty proficient in just about all versions of the Windows Operating System.

Not to say that I don't know anything about programming, but my experience goes back to the days of DOS, BASIC, PASCAL, and Latin. (Actually Latin shouldn't be included in the list, but what the heck, it's a dead language too.)

I learned to program on the incredibly progressive TRS-80 and the ti-994A during the days that Atari ruled the world of video games (and dinosaurs roamed the earth). I think my parents still have some of that cutting-edge technology around the house:

• The PONG video game that attached to the family television set, with two giant knobs built into one solid unit and weighing about three hundred pounds.
• My data storage system for the ti-994A consisting of a cassette recorder and later, when we could afford it, the 5 1/4" floppy drive built into an expansion system the size of a VW Beetle.
• The Compaq "Portable" computer, which was portable in the same way that a tree stump is portable. If you really wanted to take it with you, you could...But why the heck would you want to?

(ti-994A, wow...Anyone remember when Texas Instruments built computers? They were competing with Commodore to be the world power of personal computers. Then along came a couple of geeks who started building computers in their garage and named them after a fruit that grows on a tree. And then this other geek decided that "open source" really meant "no copyrights or patents" and "borrowed" the operating system they created, packaged it, and started selling it to the world, with a product name that sounded like it belonged to a home builder rather than a software company. Hmmmm...If I only had a time machine.)