I suspect my early trajectory is similar (and my parents couldn’t afford the pre-built version of the ZX81, so I learnt soldering at 11), except my jump was not

I suspect my early trajectory is similar (and my parents couldn’t afford the pre-built version of the ZX81, so I learnt soldering at 11), except my jump was not to the Spectrum, but to the Atari XL because Dixons had a sell-off-the-stock deal where you got a floppy-disk drive + the computer for £100. So I went to 64k after 16 :) These days I live in Sunny CA, I’m almost as senior engineer as I can be at Apple (and I’ve got a good chance of getting rid of the “almost” over the next couple of years), and I’m going to retire early as soon as the kid goes to college. Not bad for a docker’s brat from ‘pool. Can’t say I’ve noticed much Ageism here at the fruit company. I know people who’ve been here for 30 years (I’m coming up on 20) and my direct boss used to work at NeXT.