I'm 53, almost 54. Not everyone over 30 is a technophobe or afraid of change. Access to computers was very hard to come by when I was in my teens, but a lot o

I'm 53, almost 54. Not everyone over 30 is a technophobe or afraid of change. Access to computers was very hard to come by when I was in my teens, but a lot of folks were interested nonetheless. By my early 20s the first PCs were hitting the market. A 48K basic Apple II cost about $2000, equivalent to perhaps $6000-$8000 today. As poor as I was then, I bought an Apple II system in 1979 and have maintained a strong interest in computers and technology ever since. People in my generation (and slightly older) started the personal computer revolution, and much of the earlier work on the internet. One advantage of age is a perspective at how far we've come. In the early 80s I was a systems programmer for a large IBM/370 shop, running IBM's VM Operating System... the original "Virtual Machine" environment. We supported 500-1000 active/logged-in users on mainframes that had 16MB of RAM and perhaps 8GB of total disk storage. It was pretty cool in its day. Today, a $400 laptop could whup that system (in most respects). Amazing really. My colleagues and I have gone from programming in PL/I and Assembler to Basic => Modula2 => C +. C++ => Java => Python/Ruby => and lately, a growing interest in that old warhorse, Lisp. I can't sprint as fast as I once did, and it's harder to engage in marathon all-nighters than it was in my 20s, but in most ways I'm smarter and more capable now than I was back then. So please excuse me (and others like me) if we continue to stay engaged...