By 1987 I was programming at home in C or Pascal on my Fat Mac with a pair of 800K floppy drives, having upgraded from the original 128K Macintosh with 400K dri

By 1987 I was programming at home in C or Pascal on my Fat Mac with a pair of 800K floppy drives, having upgraded from the original 128K Macintosh with 400K drives. At this point I had graduated past using BASIC, FORTH, and ACTION on my Atari 800 (ACTION was a true wonder). Within a year I would have sold the Mac to buy a motorcycle, one of the best trades I ever did. I wouldn't really have my own personal machine again until '92 when I bought a NeXTStation. I actually bought a PC for a short time, but it was quickly donated to one of the many hare brained schemes my friends and I were involved with. My first job was programming PASCAL, FORTRAN, and BASIC on a VAX. This was a seminal time as I got to cut my teeth on ISAM. By 1987 I was on the brink of going to a new job that was BASIC and ISAM on a mini computer. BASIC is an unsung hero of the mini computer data processing age of the late 70's and 80's. I did all sorts of unspeakable things in BASIC. As weak as BASICs were, I never had to say "No" to a request to do something on our systems because "BASIC wouldn't let me". Just fan the fire hotter and hit it harder, BASIC would do the job, if, perhaps, inelegantly.