I started out on the Commodore PET 16K in the 70s, upgraded to one with a built-in tape drive (that was cool at the time!) and finally crawled into the 80s with a ZX Spectrum 48K. It’s hard to remember whether I started playing games or programming first – and sometimes they were intermingled, hacking up existing games and learning silly tricks like PEEK and POKE to change the characters in a Dungeon Hack clone. Since then I’ve used Pascal, 68000 assembler, C, LISP, CLOS, C++, Java, VB, JSP, Javascript, VBscript, DCOM, J2EE, and 4GLs and macro languages that I’d much rather forget. I still game often but haven’t written production code in several years – lately Rise of Nations, World of Warcraft, Civ IV and DDO, whenever the lab team isn’t smoking me at UT 2004 (served by a dedicated Linux server in the lab). I’ve been paid to write client, client/server, distributed, and web applications. I spent many years criticizing Microsoft and then was offered a chance to put my money where my mouth was and contribute to changing the company … so here I am, working in Redmond and having a wild time. Hank and I get along because we can agree on one thing: C++ was the best language ever – because using well it made you feel awfully clever ;)