In 1998 I was in the third phase of my financial career.
First, stockbroker; second, money manager; third,
third market. I knew how to use computers in my work,
but still, at age 45, I had never owned one. I knew about
them, I traded tech stocks; but I lived thru the era of the
development of the spreadsheet; I had no idea of how
powerful it was, or its impact on things.
The boss decided to get into the bond biz, and got
a Bloomberg for the bond guys. This is also a dream
machine for guys like me. Michael Bloomberg had
just decided to get out of the proprietary hardware biz,
and port all the bloomberg (machine) functionality to
the PC platform (all clients and potential customers
already had their own PC infrastructure, so he was
just making integration easier).
I begged the boss for time on the machine.
He said, "When those two guys are gone...NO, when
they have LEFT THE BUILDING - it's all yours".
I was in Heaven. But then I had to learn the PC.
My girlfriend, whose last name was Greene, had an
ancient PC-XT Clone she got from her brother in
Madison, Wisconsin. I was at her place, and she asked
me to take it down to the dumpster and throw it out.
I said, "Why don't we give it to some kid?"
It had a monochrome monitor (orange/gold),
a dot-matrix printer, and a keyboard. 20 Mb hard drive,
8088 CPU, 2 5.25" floppy disk drives, lotsa expansion
slots, a tiny bit of RAM, etc. Also quite a few floppies.
She let me put it all in the trunk of her car, and we
dropped by a friend's place; offered the system to
their highly intelligent young son; but he was not
interested. Too old.
So this machine became MY first computer, as I had
decided to begin assimilating the learning curve
( I still am ). On it was this goofy little program -
I couldn't figure out what the heck it was -
something about this Conway's Game of Life...
Soon I had a donated IBM PS2 286 CPU;
a donated bulletin board system unit with half
a GIG hard drive, and a 386 CPU.
I soon ran into Mirek's Cellebration, Johan Bontes'
Life32, George Maydwell's Collideoscope...
I was into oscillator art...
First website "My Life Pages"
@ angelfire.com/linux/lifepages
http://www.angelfire.com/linux/lifepages