How I got interested in computers

NOTE: This page is woefully incomplete.

• old Heathkit computer kits... I was not allowed to have one (my parents didn't want to put out that much money)... this was back in the 70's. However, I did play around with electronics here and there, and built a tone generator for a shortwave radio, etc.
• I saw a contact email address listed on some product literature, and thought it incredibly foolish that someone would use a computer to send "pretend" mail to someone else.
• took my first FORTRAN at LSU in 1982
• took Pascal in 1986 or so
• went in half with T. H. for an old 386 around 1996, but T. H. bought out my share when I moved out of his apartment
• got an old 286 in late spring of 1997
• immediately upgraded that box by purchasing a 386 board and ram from a used parts place
• played with OS/2 warp 3 for a few months, on an old 80 MB hard drive
• put up an eggdrop bot in late 1997, running on my ISP's shellbox
• upgraded to a 486 board sometime in 1998
• finally made headway with OS/2 in 1998
• the 486 board and half my peripherals burned out in perhaps November 1998. I suspect I had too many hard drives installed, and when I landed my first CD-ROM, the thing croaked after 2 days :-(
• Got new enough parts together for a new box in december 1999 (30 days without a PC? I almost lost my mind over it)
• got a job at a hack shop putting together K6-2 266 MHz machines for the christmas rush in December 1998
• started working at Bayou Lighting January 2, 1999 and immediately started playing with a box truck full of old parts
• wired Bayou Lighting with cat 5 cable
• upgraded all PCs to modern hardware and Windows 95 in spring 1999
• took a spare Pentium 233 box and installed SuSE Linux 6.2 on it, which I purchased from CompUSA
• perhaps 2 weeks into my Linux project, I realized that all of the configuration files looked exactly like the eggdrop config files I had been editing. The light comes on at this point :-)
• got advice in fall 1999 from Scott Harney who was at that time the sysadmin for Fast Band, on how to administrate the SuSE as a dialup router for Bayou Lighting. He metioned starting NOLUG with friends and invited me to come out
• several months later I attend my first NOLUG meeting, and am totally hooked on Linux from this point on.
• Hired on at Fast Band (thanks, Scott!) and begin leaving Bayou Lighting in May 2000
• went full time at Fast Band a month or two later and completely left Bayou
• Fast Band went belly-up on October 1, 2000 and I'm out on the street. It's a long hard road at this point, trying to find another computer gig.

To be added:

• mainframe
• junker that Dean gave me
• advanced video