I noticed one thing, the 'old' guys (pardon the usage of the term), have been working on computers since their high school or something like that. The newer guys (that probably includes most of the people below 30) have probably done their bachelor's degrees in some engineering, maths or comp. sci. related fields and then moved into this field (a natural progression, I think).
In fact, I didn't use unix till I started working. I had implemented simple commands like cp and ls in C but didn't know how they worked in unix!
The thing that I have noticed over the years is that people learned either the Big Blue (IBM) environment, OR the Unix one... never was there a convergence until recently (last 10 to 15 years).
I've 'dabbled' with varous *nixes since the late eighties... and it has been fun knowing both worlds. It is coming in handy now.
I've never been much with programming. The syntax crap just drives me up the wall. Machine language was interesting. I can do it, and will write what I need to but don't really enjoy it. First job (while going to school) in late 70's was with E-Systems working with EE's building/testing antenna in the GHZ range. Cool stuff, really black box. I always enjoyed working with my hands so I ended up in the customer support end of the field. Liked working with people and helping them. Sun in the late eights build a box called 386i. When you pulled off the side cover everyone who worked on the project had their names signed on the inside cover (Won't see any of that now days). When PC's started entering the market I moved over to networking. Did a lot of backbone taps for TI's network. Finally ended up in the automated data transfer arena. Interesting, pays the bills and lets me do my hobby....
Wow, jimmyc, that's some beautiful woodworking you've done!
Well, I'm 42, but I tell ppl I feel like my brain thinks I'm somewhere between 24-32. The jobs I had all involved computers, and I was "The Guy" in the office to help a user or fix a hardware problem, so I decided that is really what I enjoy doing so I made it my career choice. I'm a Apple/Macintosh person way back from the Apple ][ days, but I'm not a Mac biggot. I live and work comfortably in MacOSX, WinXP/2000, and Linuxeseses. I now work for a large global company as an in-house Mac devloper for their Graphics dept.
My hobby/addiction since 3/18/2005 is Second Life (http://secondlife.com). It's an online 3D community where everything inworld is made by the residents who live there. It has a real economy where many people make their living creating items they sell or by being virtual real estate brokers. Many Univerities (Harvard) and companies (IBM, Adidas, Reebok, Amazon) do real life training inworld. I'd love to show you around if you decide to visit. My avatar name is "Cazzj Brearly". I own 2 private islands, Enchanted & Escape.
I'm probably the smallest here in this thread, I just turned 19, and pretty much as u guys, I first sat in front of a pc (my cousin's) I was 8 years old, maybe 9 I can't remember... it was a Pentium I 100 MHZ, Windows 95.
At that time computers were very rare when I live (Lebanon - Middle East) I didn't know anything about programming nor internet, everyday I used to dig in the files, try stuff I have no idea what they are... when I bought my own PII 400 MHZ win98SE, I had to reinstall windows every week, due to missing files and corrupted stuff...( It's in the name of science ) I started learning programming last year; I'm majoring in Computer Science (2nd year now), I learned a little assembly language, lots of C++, VB.NET & SQL, this year I started C programming under UNIX, and I'm using Mandrake on a virtual machine! Right now I'm teaching myself sockets and networking, I barely find time for them but I'm struggling.
I hope someday I'll work as a system administrator or something BIG in the computer field! I'm now working as a middle man between my university and an institute, we're designing them a database system that may evolve into a server later, and I'm running the system there...
This forum is great, I'm learning a lot from it, and I just wish I had more time to read every thread!
One last thing, sorry for the big paragraph, I got carried away
I suppose I'm an exception then. I'm 26, and I've been working on computer hardware since I was about 12 or so, but stuck to DOS and Windows software and didn't worry about it much. One day, when my Windows 98 computer self-destructed for the 178239057123th time, I finally admitted to myself that having to use an external parallel port CDROM to install Windows 98 to get around driver incompatibilities was not normal procedure, and I should probably get a newer OS. But when I saw Windows XP's completely outrageous price, sheer cheapness compelled me to get a Mandrake Linux boxed set instead. I've never regretted that, it was difficult but I learned a ton, and the price of Microsoft software has only skyrocketed since...
I started learning programming in high school (rpg) as this was thought to be more of a vocational trade at that time.
After 2 years of college in 1980 you could land a job almost anyplace and get the company to pay for the rest of college.
The first luggable computer they gave me to bring home ran off two 5 inch floppy disks and had a 5 inch monitor. This is how we did remote support or you had to drive into the office at 3am. Even in 1982, we were still using punch cards to run programs and enter data. We've come a long way.
26 years later I have programmed in most languages, worked on mainframes, midrange, desktops, intel, unix, vms, ims, cics, db2, oracle, informix, os2, cobol, fortran, assembler, scripting and some stuff that is no longer around.
There is always someplace "to go" in this industry.
It seems that I'm not the only exception at age 26 I started back in `97 (amazingly for me, almost 10 years )with everything related with system administration and networking/Cisco stuff, later had been sys admin of big hosting company and then QA engineering. During all these years I haven't had the time to learn C / Assembler, instead working with bash, perl , python, tcl/expect, sed/awk, and all these handy tools/languages which helps the system administration. Regards to everyone in this forum, recently it became the place that I visit and post everyday.
Wow. 51-60 only 3%? I was fascinated with ForTran in the sixties, and by the time 64kb Commodores were out (the bleeding edge class of super-computers that sent us to the moon and back) I was destined to be a nerd. 21 years in the navy later, and I'm still tinkering. I've always thought building and wrecking an OS was fun, until i finally got rid of my dos1.0 CoCo in 1999, and bought a new box filled with Win98SE.
EEeeew!! It took me all of about 3 months to get comfy with OSS/linux/unix. And yes, I really did hang on to 64kb RAM and a phone-cradle modem for about 15 years. What the heck, it worked. I just finished building a new box and finally stuffed the old 249 mhz MMX under the bed Maybe i'll hook it to my QCam and use it to watch the squirrels raid the birdfeeder. I tend to keep things for a long time.....-O.
My first job was of engineering nature, designing IC mask and sorts. But during that time I fell in love with unix/linux stuff and that's where I started to choose a second job, an IT job this time. Now I work in an outsourcing/solutions company, but majority of my tasks are of shell-scripting nature. This time i'm having fun
Hi,
I have just crossed 27...eventhough I have been in IT for the last 3 years,I am totally a newbie in the Unix env.I started learning Unix just two months back and I believe this is the 'Ultimate place' where we can get more info on Unix beyond the text books..I am learning a lot from this forum and working very very hard to learn
Unix deeper and deeper...
Wow! I fell like all of you are all experienced in your own fields. Im only in my 20's, also a girl which i think is very uncommon here and enjoying my work as a Tech Support in our project (Peoplesoft|Oracle and some other IBM applications). Our servers are all in UNIX and from time to time we really need to do some UNIX programming.
I know the BASIC in UNIX (navigation.. ) which I am forced to learn when I accepted to work on an IT company. Anyhow I enjoyed everything I do in my work and enjoyed time learning UNIX.
I'm glad I joined the forum, Im learning a lot.
I'm 35 this year so I guess I'm over the hill. Male. I work with disaster recovery/business resilience in sweden where I do mainly ESX and Windows stuff but I also dabble in AIX, Linux (prefer Ubuntu), i5/OS, Mac OS X and basically everything I can get my hands on.
I maintain a blog (in swedish) where I cronical my adventures in IT:
Unless you're a swede or inclined to learn it I guess going there won't mean much.
Its rapidly approaching 40 years since I wrote my first program, in Basic, in 1969.
Anybody remember cobol, fortran, snobol, rpgII, univac 1100, IBM S34,... me neither.
) I started learning programming last year; I'm majoring in Computer Science (2nd year now), I learned a little assembly language, lots of C++, 
I started back in `97 (amazingly for me, almost 10 years 
) which I am forced to learn when I accepted to work on an IT company. Anyhow I enjoyed everything I do in my work and enjoyed time learning UNIX.