[Metalab] Hackers don't age, their computers do .. (was Re: neueste Office Home Version!)

[Jay Vaughan]

> 
> I may mistake you for someone other, but aren't you about 30 or 35?

I'm 43.  I was one of those annoying teenagers in the 80's who had far, far too many mad skills for the time in comparison with my peers. I notch it up to having not much else to do in the Australian outback than try to get my Oric-1 (1983) to dial up some random BBS that had copies of all the game tapes we didn't have in the Australian market .. and when that failed, having to write my own godamn software for the thing. (Also: got banned for phone bills.)  I got my first professional job writing software at 13. It was a laser control system for one of my Dads' friends nightclubs. It used a C64 wired up to a speaker to make programmed lissajous patterns .. the 80's clubbers went mad for it.  ;)  Made too much money on things like that, so I dropped out of high school at 16, moved to LA, wrote terminal emulators and game systems and database apps for MSDOS, then device drivers and filesystems and daemons and things for MIPS Risc/OS, and then Internet junk for SGI Irix and Win98/NT (blech!) for 10 years, Internet bubble/burnout blah blah, then music software for Yamaha for 5 years, moved to Germany at 32, worked for a synth company there for 5 years doing embedded firmware/Linux r&d, been here in Vienna for 6, almost 7 years now. Hope that explains my antiquity .. ;)

Yeah, there was a period in the 80's when I was super-productive, about on par with you young guys these days.  Don't waste your youth - if you're going to hack, hack hard so you can chill when you hit 30.  I wish I'd chilled when I hit 30.  I'm doing it now, which is why you might think I'm younger than I am.  Anyway, thanks for the interest. :)


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Jay Vaughan