Re: What do you do in real life?

["Peter Watson" <paw77@N_O_hotmail_S_P_A_M.com>]

I was already an IBM mainframe systems programmer for an oil company when I 
got my first A][+ in 1981. (Which puts me in good company with people like 
Mike Westerfield and the guys who wrote Bag of Tricks and Beneath Apple 
DOS/ProDOS.)

When I was downsized in 1992, while looking for "real" work I found some 
Apple //-related contracts, and even worked for Apple Australia for several 
months.

In 1997 I was downsized again, but this time I joined a (non-IBM) 
international hardware/software vendor. Although hired as an IBM mainframe 
assembler programmer, within a couple of years I moved into Unix C 
programming. Since my college course ended about the time C started to be 
taught, where did I get my C skills? From writing software for the IIgs! It 
turned out I often knew more about the underlying mechanisms than the people 
I worked with - partly because the IIgs compilers were not always so stable 
and "investigation" was sometimes required.  :-)

I'm still there, and these days I'm working on server and network 
performance monitoring software (mostly Unix/Linux based in my case). I 
still get my hands dirty in code, but not as often as I'd like.
-- 
Peter Watson
-- Write to MS-DOS disks on the Apple IIgs?
-- Impossible!  ;-)