Monday, December 6, 2004

A toe in the water

I've been reading blogs for almost 18 months now and find them both fascinating and a valuable source of information. I've responded to other's blogs when I felt compelled but never felt the urge to start my own. After seeing many friends jumping on the bandwagon, seeing the “live” posts at Chris Sells' Applied XML conference while attending, and talking with Chris Pels, Jeff Julian, DonXML and others I decided to take the plunge.

As for my background, I started programming on the Apple IIe in 1982 and moved on to the Commodore 64. From there I spent about 10 years in the IBM midrange world working on Systems 34/36/38 and AS/400. Throughout that time, I was the “oddball“ in the data centers and computer rooms because I both liked and knew how to use PCs mostly due to buying several PC clones through the years as well as Borland's Turbo Pascal. When Windows 3.1 came out, I jumped into it with a Wang 386 and upgraded my Turbo Pascal to Pascal for Windows and then Borland Pascal. I finally succumbed to the tide and put up my Borland products to switch over to Visual Basic 3.0 and Visual C++ 1.5. I then moved on to Windows NT 3.5, SQL 6.5, Oracle 7 and the world of client server and then COM. From there it was onto DCOM, ASP 3, and MTS. Once J2EE became a viable component technology, my company moved over to it and so did I. However, when .NET was announced I began working with the betas and haven't looked back.

Now 22 years, 3 major platforms, 6 programming languages, a wonderful wife, 3 teenagers, 2 apartments, a condo, and 2 homes later here I am. I still enjoy computers and learning new things. However, years of experiences have tempered enthusiasm with a pragmatic approach to technology.

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