Well, I was going to wait for the "form" to fill out, to keep my input 
short and sweet, but I guess since a "biography" is the standard, I'll 
write one! WARNING: This is long!

I'm 38, although I tell my daughter that I'm 138... she's 7, 8 next 
month, and has _way_ too much energy for me to keep up with. (If this 
gets translated to a form, that puts me "born in 1959".) She's been 
playing with Macs since she was 3 and I handed her a PB100 with "Millie's 
Math House". She now has a hand-me-down PowerBase 200, and loves the fact 
that she knows more about Macs, and has more experience on them, than her 
teachers... Her school is full of various all-in-one Macs!

I started playing around with Apple ]['s at a local computer store around 
1979, while "browsing" and deciding which computer to buy _if_ I ever 
bought one. The Apple seemed to be more powerful than anything else, and 
it had color, and a built-in BASIC that looked almost understandable. As 
a Physics major at the time, I was just starting to have to use the 
college Xerox Sigma 9 mainframe, and I could also see a _big_ advantage 
to being able to dial-in from home using a modem, instead of fighting for 
time on one of the five terminals (yes, 5!) that we had on the mainframe. 
(Most people used the dozen or so keypunch machines, but those were 
really for programming, not running packaged stuff.)

One day the store had a "deal" on an Apple ][ that I couldn't turn down, 
so I wound up with a 16K computer and a 300-baud internal modem. Ran to 
Radio Shack and got a cassette player so I could load the two tapes that 
came with the thing, "AppleSoft BASIC" and "Little Brickout". My wife 
nearly killed me for spending that much money...

Spent the next couple of years playing in Integer BASIC, AppleSoft, and 
(on the mainframe) FORTRAN. Did some contract work in CP/M CBASIC, 
NorthStar BASIC, and even TRS-80! Decided to change my major to Computer 
Science, which was becoming a "hot" field; we had 150 CS majors (for 
those 5 terminals and 12 keypunch machines) and only 7 Physics majors. 
Learned a little each of COBOL, ALGOL, SNOBOL, APL, LISP, RPG, IBM 360 
ASM, PDP-11 ASM. and lots of other useful stuff... :-) Upgraded the Apple 
to 48K, got AppleSoft on a card, bought a 5 1/4" disk drive, soldered 
jumpers to get 6 colors instead of 4, added a lower-case character 
generator, and had a great home system! To pay for it all, I went to work 
for that local computer store part time selling Apple ]['s, and also 
became an "Apple Certified Repair Technician".

Wound up selling a ton of Apple's to the school district I'd gone 
through; they needed some programming/consulting done and I got the 
contract; worked there full time for a year under that grant, writing a 
gradebook package, installing and repairing ]['s. They decided to keep me 
on, but I had to have my degree. So, I went back nights and took that 
last Art class and a class in "Telecommunications", which was all about 
this new deal, "Ethernet" ;-), and graduated in '82. The school district, 
being a _big_ Apple customer, was "allowed" in on a new computer for 
administrative use in late '83... In January '84, I had a Mac 128K and a 
Lisa to program it with! Fought with Lisa Pascal until Microsoft BASIC 
came out for the Mac, then fought with that monstrosity for a while...

The project we were doing was connecting the Macs to the district's 
"mainframe", an HP3000 mini, for grade reporting, attendance accounting, 
etc. The company doing the HP3000 side of the deal, well, this is a 
public forum... let's just say that I wound up suddenly having to learn 
the HP and PowerHouse overnight. That led to a nice raise when I changed 
"departments", and became an HP3000 programmer! I lost a year or so on 
the Mac around then. <sigh>

When that job fell apart (long story) I couldn't find anything in 
Dallas/Ft. Worth that was Apple ][ or Mac related, so I had to look for 
HP3000 work. Found it at Rockwell International's Collins Transmission 
Systems Division. This was '86. Around late '87, I convinced them to use 
Macs (Pluses!) to communicate with the HP3000 and an Allen-Bradley PLC-3 
we were putting in an automated warehouse. Suddenly I was a Mac 
programmer again. Once again, I tried Pascal, but then went to the new 
"QuickBASIC", and wrote several in-house applications in (spite of) it. 
The only way I got anything to work was with some utilities by a guy 
named Ross Lambert that I'd seen advertised somewhere... he had this 
company called Ariel Publishing... Before long I was subscribing to 
InsideBASIC and had bought ZBASIC. I promptly tossed QB in the nearest 
trash can.

The first ZBASIC app I wrote was another custom in-house app for Rockwell 
called "SQPA Charting". Version 4.1 of that is running today, compiled 
with FB 2.1.3 last week to make a minor change! Unfortunately, it's the 
_only_ Mac app I still have running here; we were bought by Alcatel 
Telecom, the HP3000s and IBM 3090s replaced by DEC VAXen, the 
multi-million dollar automated warehouse system literally torn apart, 
tossed in the parking lot, and sold for scrap. All those Pluses and 
SE's... <sigh> Oh well, they had a long life, and got me a IIci on my 
desk instead of a "dumb terminal".

With the new VAX systems, 90% of my time or more was now dedicated to 
them, and my Mac time dwindled again. So, I started taking on "outside 
contract jobs" on the Mac - using FB II, of course!

Just before the "corporate decision" was made to eliminate all Macs, I 
upgraded that IIci to the 7600/120 I'm using now, with a 5x86 coprocessor 
card so I could "port" VB programs to the Mac. (Meanwhile, at home, I 
went from an SE to a Centris 610 to a PowerBase 200 to my current 
G3/233DT.) This 7600 on my desk is one of 11 Macs left - two years ago, 
we had over 500. Now it's me and the webmaster's group - all else is NT, 
close to 3000 of 'em. :-P

So, by profession I'm a "Senior Programmer/Analyst" for a big 
multinational corporation, doing PowerHouse, COBOL, C, and DCL on a VAX. 
But at heart I still "bleed six colors"; I'm a Mac FBII hacker!

Bill
Whew! That _was_ long! Takes a while to cover 138 years...