I graduated from high school in a small town north of Milwaukee, WI in 1975. I was a chemistry and physics geek at the time, but also spent a lot of time in the school’s electronics lab, where I built a 4-bit counter out of relays and light-bulbs. That was the closest they came to anything digital as far as actual classes. They mostly were in to building radios from scratch out of vacuum tubes and transistors.

As a junior my parents got me a TI-SR50 calculator right after I had mastered the slide rule. As a senior in a class called “Intensive Physics” they had a TI-SR52, which was my first intro to programming and I never looked back. A few years later I was coding away in assembly language on Intel 8085s and Motorola 6800s. Still coding and loving it to this day on things such as the Spring Framework.

Actually, my "Dyson Animal" gets pretty warm after a a while. And it's more purple than black.

Tell your girlfriend it's fascinating!

http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w225/anon112355/fascinating1ts.jpg

I’m 55 and a software architect. And I still code daily. Most recently in .Net doing WCF services and Entity Framework. Previously, couple years back, I did a fair amount of Hibernate and Spring. In my career, I have been unemployed for a grand total of 3 weeks.

Still love it, and cannot get enough of the latest APIs. And I have cleaned up more crap and bad code from junior programmers and outsourced projects than the Bloomberg idiots can imagine. In fact for most of the past ten years, my work has been cleaning up code and refactoring at assorted employers (and making a lot of $$$ in the process) such that the code is stable enough that engineering isn’t getting hammered with support calls, and the they can therefore afford to re-arch. And this has been in the medical software field!