Antionline Community

G'day all,

I have been looking at a lot people's profiles and reading what they are: as in students, sercurity experts etc. and their ages, genders etc.

I was wondering what type of people make up this great community we have here at Antionline? What you can state is some of the information like mine.

This information includes: I'm 17 and high school student in Australia. I love programming and sport.

Just a little information would be sufficient, just so newbies (like myself) and other people (like moderators and addits) at AO know a little about each person, and what is the mean age of people contributing to AO (just to see how broad the age range is for people interacting and helping each other).

It would be very interesting to see the results.

Thank-you for participating,

I am one of the very few over 40 members (old d00ds) here. I am part owner of an ISP in rural SW Missouri, USA. My partner and I are considered to be pioneers in computer telecommunications. Our development in in this area has helped form our Internet as we know it today. We were actively sending and recieving e-mail using a system we called Fido Mail in the early 80's. When I first became interested in computers and networking, a computer system that could handle the load that your PC does when idleing, was housed in a clean-room that would take up a full city block costing millions of dollars and teams of programmers and technicians to keep it running.

I'm 38 and I just steped out of the 19th Century a few years ago... My first machine was an Apple IIE and I didn't get another until 1997 when I got a P1 33Mhz with 8mb of RAM and a whoping 320 mb HD... A friend showed me the potential of even the old P1 and I got kinda hooked and have been building bigger, better, faster machines ever since... My next project is a dual Xeon machine... A broken back suffered during a drug raid (The suspect tossed my little ass out the second story window) stoped me from being able to continue on with being a SWAT medic and since I like 'puters it seemed like the field I should go into... I currently own and operate The Computer Medic in Ft. Lee, VA and am going to school to learn more about networking and network security...

Hi all,
Well like aealiason I am also one of the (old doods)40 turning 41 the 6th of this month.I have been working on computers for almost 10years, spending time just repairing,upgrading and teaching people win 3.1,win95 and win98.I only started getting interested in networking when I got my second pc , a Pentium 133 ,16 meg ram, 528meg h/disk.My first pc was a 486dx2-66 , 8 meg ram and 250 meg h/drive.It is now upgraded to (don’t laugh)pentium200mmx,32meg ram, 6gig h/drive and realmagic s/card(pci) with only 1meg video ram.

The interesting part was when my kids wanted to start playing games against each other, I had to put in network cards and get this lot to speak to one another.That sparked my intrest in networking and everything just snowballed from there onwards.
At the moment I am working fulltime as a millwright in the milling business(maize meal)

So now I am starting to get into security and I think it could only be worth it.

Regards
V/man :)

I don't feel so old anymore :D

Seriously, I am 27 and my first computer (I got to play with) was an Amiga 2000 (loved that thing!!) and did AutoCAD on it for high school. Then I fell outta the scene, then my mom bought me a 386/25(?) with Win 3.1, a whopping 50 meg HDD, Sound Blaster 16, and lots of games. I did QBasic programming (just a little...) for calculating the area under a Euler Bell Curve using Simpson's rule. I had that box until 1998 when I "upgraded" to an AMD 133 from a unreputable dealer who gave me no original software, support or nothing.... that's when I decided to learn.

Fast forward... I have taken 2 programming classes Visual Basic and C++ (hated both, no substance just history :p ), an A+ class, and MCP (never took any of the tests...I suck). Now after all of that, I decided to learn this stuff on my own and am learning at an alarming rate :)

In between all of this, I have worked for a small ISP that sells wireless broadband, web hosting and programming. I learned how to build boxes and do Windows hosting. I really miss that job. But for now, while my wife is going to school, I will continue what I have been doing for 11 years: homemaking.

Thank you,

albn

Nice post topic, thanks for submitting it :)


Anyway, I'm 31 years old. I've been doing IT work for 11 years now, and have been playing around with computers since I was around 9 years old. My first computer was a TRS 80 (Trash 80) and I too even had an Apple IIe that actually STILL runs (yikes!). w00t Apple DOS 3.3!

I've been in the "security" field now for about 5 years now and I don't see any end to it. I don't do any programming, although I can do basic scripts in a few languages, and most of my time is spent in IDS, firewalls and routers. I'm conversant in all the MS OS's, some LINUX and am learning both *BSD and true UNIX.





El Diablo

Whew, I missed the Old d00ds by a year since I just turned 39. My first computer experience was on a Star 80. Even then what hooked me most was the games (old Star Trek game where your ship was an E, Klingons a K etc.). Enjoyed the computer and used it during college to complete labs and reports. Got my degree in Mechanical Engineering, went to work for the navy designing missile systems (sounds fun, is boring). Moved into three dimensional modeling for Hardware In The Loop (HWIL) simulations which got me back into computers and unix in particular.

Left civil service and took a contracting job as a network engineer with no experience there. Learned it by doing it, designing, installing and troubleshooting networks. Moved to the company's Network Operations group and worked as an engineer there as well as their Unix administrator (Solaris 5 anyone?). With the new NMCI (Navy Marine Corps Intranet) I was put in charge of computer troubleshooting which I really enjoyed and learned a lot about basic problems, especially the dreaded ID10T errors.

Was asked to come to work for a bank by a previous boss. Moved to my new home, wife is going back to school to finish her RN degree. When she is done I am going back to school too to get my teaching certificate and fulfill a lifetime goal to work as a teacher. I do currently teach introduction to computers at a local community college and an hour teaching goes faster than 5 minutes working at my job (at least for me, students probably think differently). Hope this is actually what I want to be when I grow up.

Still love computer games and on-line gaming. Am an avid Anarchy Online player. If anyone else is look me up I am currently playing a level 71 Martial Artist named :eek: Sodamoca5.

Now for the important stuff. Married for 10 years. Have two kids (hers from a previous marriage) both grown and out of the house. Son married this summer, daughter getting married in February. Slated to be a grandpa around March :) Plan to spoil grand children rotten and buy them very noisy toys :D

hehe, this sounds like a support group thing, but I like it so here goes...

Im 19, though closing in on 20 fast. I first started with computers when I was 8, when I got a Compaq Proliena 66mhz with 8Mb RAM, a 500Mb HDD, and windows 3.1. To this day I still remember the feeling when I opened the box and first saw the machine. Since that day i've been hooked, and its only gotten worse. At first I started out with stuff like dialing up BBS's to browse text files, or modifying the .CON files on Duke Nukem to make the weapons fire differently.

Now adays my interest has gotten quite broad, covering computer security, web desing, repair and upgrading, networking, programming, and just about anything else you can immagine. I'm finaly moving to make my hobby and obsession more of a career by working on my Associates of Applied Computer Science degree at my local community college.

I'm 25 , my real name is Allen
I am just grajuated from univercity in mechanical engineering field and I am a member of ASME ( American Socity of Mechanical Engineers).

My first experince in computer goes to time when I was 15, but in that time I was not serious about learning computer. I started researching and learning about past 4 years seriously.

Cheers

Ok, I'm 28 and started out with computers at age 12. First computer was a Amstrad 1512 by Schneider. It was a 8086 box with 512k and 2(!) 5 1/4" floppy drives, and a 4 color CGA monitor. One year later, I got a hardcard (controller and harddisk on one board) of 20MB. Apart from getting to know the GEM (very early windows-like thing) layer on the DOS operating system and programming some GWBasic, I mainly used the Amstrad for games.
Second box was a Mitac 80286, 1MB ram and 20MB HD, EGA video card. This one was the last 'brand' pc I got. From then on I owned a 80486 clone, a Pentium 133 and now a AMD Athlon 500.
I used the 486 for my mechanical engineering studies doing the type of calculations that took all night. After that the Pentium 133 mainly helped me with programming projects.
For the moment I work as a programmer for a Belgian company that sells measurement soft- and hardware. I'm gaining some experience in C++ and NT platform programming.
I know absolutely nothing about networking, but I thought this would be a nice place to learn. It's not my goal to become a network guru or so, but it is my goal to protect my home connection as best as possible (maybe you need to be a guru to do so :-) ).

Well here we go. My real name is Chris and I live in Fort Lauderdale, FL. My first computer was a Tandy TRC-80. I had to save programs I wrote onto a cassete tape. Anyone remember:

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

Yes it loops forever. (until you hit the red break key)

Well, that was the beginning of my passion. I managed to program a dancing ansi robot and I was hooked. The next computer i got was a 486dx 33MHz. *mb RAM and 200MB HD. Sound blaster pro, 1200BPS modem. I started my own Maximus BBS system (Pirate's BBS) in the Fort Lauderdale area and used wildcat e-mail service. It was cool at the time because you could e-mail people in Germany, England etc.. Although it took about a week to get there. :D

What do I do now? Well, I graduated college with my Associates Degree, and I have my A+ cert. I plan on getting my MCSE and the LPI certs also. I hope to get a good job to help me open my LAN gaming business. I hope to have that open within a years time. I know all the win os's except XP. I really have no desire to learn it. I have recently began learning linux and I just today got ahold of a box to put openBSD on. I have also gotten into the security scene and I'm using the BSD box as a target box. I'm not married, no kids, and have no girlfriend. I just broke up with my ex when I left gainesville, and I am having way to much fun to get involved again, at least for now. Well, thats about it from me. laters

Assalamuilaikum..

Hey unixjim .
JP once told me..sometime ago, about the yongest member in AO...he was 7yrs...but hey he was once caught trying to hack his school.....:):

Buy, Presently the yongest GUY in AO..is 9..or 10...yrs old..usually he/she known as aka *Virus* in the chat room.

Thanks

My name is Chelle and I'm 20 years of age. I'm currently in college and working at a coffee shop (BOO!!!) and I love to do web design. I have general knowlage of java script, c++, and visual basics, and of course HTML. But like I've said before, i hope to expand my knowlage to other areas.

I got my first machine when I was 15.

::Chelle::

well i just an 18 yearold Israeli born kid that now lives in Miami FL USA... im currently unemployed but working on starting my website :) w00t w00t.... i frequent on AO's IRC Chat (come visit us)...

Most of my skills(if thats what youd like to call them) are in networking and linux, im no guru but i know how to get around...

I have 2 servers sitting at home but no ethernet switch :/ i will soon though.... 1 server is a P4 1.6GHz 512 MB SDRAM with RedHat the other is an AMD Athlon XP 1.4GHz with also 512MB of SDRAM running RedHat.... Both sit in very perdy rackmount cases hehe

erm.... thats about all for now

I'm just your friendly neighborhood 17 year old American slacker. First computer i had was a taosjiba laptop, i still have it and its two tone screen(white and blue) with a floppy drive. From there i graduated to the pathetic machine I'm using now which i got in 97 or 98 all 200mhz of it. One day I'll get around to building a new one. I know some gw-basic some C some C++ some vb, html, xhtml, css, php, and I know how to do some basic networking things. Oh yeah and I hate binary math, its not hard but its annoying.

I'm weighing in at 39 and I hate to break it to you SodaMocha, but you and I also qualify as 'old d00ds' when you take a good look at the poll. I come from the pre-windows era just like the rest of the 'old d00ds' do, although my experience only goes back to the x386 family.

My name is Brian and I just turned 30 last Sunday. :rolleyes:

Let's see...I live in the Charleston, SC area and I currently work as a Programmer/Analyst for a small software company. I have been doing this for the last 5 years or so and it is what I always wanted to do, so I enjoy it.

As far as my experience with computers, the first one that I ever owned was a Commodore 16. It was kind of like a kid brother to the Commodore 64. A sleek little all-black number that I used to write Basic programs on. It had a tape recorder to save and load programs from. (By the way, to do remember the 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10 programs)

My first "modern" pc was a 8/16 mhz Packard Bell 20826 that had 2 meg of RAM and a 40 MH hard drive. I remember longing for a 40 MB hard drive because there was no way that I could ever fill it up! The machine came with DOS 4.0 and at the time Windows 3.0 was just a fancy DOS shell. (Who remembers the DOS shell that came with MS-DOS 5.0?)

Quote:

---

Who remembers the DOS shell that came with MS-DOS 5.0

---

I sure do! It came with my 386 and I used that WAY more than Windows 3.1 because it had all my games like Ultima and Wolfenstien! Games on 3.1 were soooo awful. That's why I liked the Amiga so much. The games were simply fantastic for that computer (in my opinion at that time anyway).

/me wipes a tear in fond memories past

Well, Im 24 yo and my first machine was a C64, mainly for gaming purposes (how good was the game Burger Time!). I still remember the day that my old man came home with a 5 1/4 disk drive (I also remember it weighing a tonne) and we got to throw away the tape drive. I then got a 386 running Windows 3.1, and progressed in the typical fashion.

I starting working in the network security field 2 years ago, mainly specialising in VPNs, Firewalls, Penetration Testing, Routers... But in the last month or so have been getting stuck into Solaris and Linux stuff (so I would consider myself a n00b in *nix), but finding it exciting.

Hello. My real name is Shanna. I'm 28 and live in Virginia Beach. I first started working with computers in 94 while in the NAVY to do presentations to high ranking officials. From there I moved to web design. I got out in 2000 and got a job as a Requirements Analyst for a goverment contracting company on Langley AirForce Base.

After about 9 months of that, I was promoted to a Systems Administrator and now I'm responsible for about 600 NT/2000 machines spaning 3 networks (2 of which are classifed). As you can imagine, I had to get into security and a little bit of scripting for this job. So far I love it....even on the bad days like today.

Real name is Aaron. My age is 17
I started out with a windows 95 when I was about 10 years old.
I was about 13 when I quit going to school.
My parents were rarely around so I spent most of my time infront of screens.
And I quickly became bored and deppressed but I was slowly discovering JAVA, HTML, VB, & C++.
Then I started to showoff my creations to the other kids in my clan & shareing source code with other peaple. Thats when I was brought to this site.

Hopefully I'll be getting my G.E.D. soon and I can turn some of my hobbies into a job. lol

Hmmm...... well, since I never did a Roll Call when I joined up, this seems like an apt place to tell you guys a little about myself.

I'm 31 years old, never married, and no kids. I've been an attorney for the last 3 years, and I practice mainly in the area of real property. I specialized in intellectual property (copyright, trademark, trade secret, antitrust, etc) in law school, although circumstances conspired to prevent me from landing a job in that field after graduation. Computers have been my hobby for the last 20 years, 10 years of which have been serious and made me a little money on the side. I'm currently considering a career change into the computer field.

I don't carry any certifications and have no formal training in the computer field, aside from one Pascal class in college. I'm entirely self-taught. I admined a couple of student labs on campus to work my way through law school, and that's my only formal work experience in computers.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer II with 16k of RAM, and then I moved up to an IBM XT with DOS 3.3 in the mid-80s. I learned how to write batch files on that system, but that was about as far as my programming skills ever got. I got serious about computers in 1993 with my 486DX/33 and Windows 3.1. It didn't take long for me to realize the limitations of Win 3.1, so I started looking at alternative OSes and have never looked back. I downloaded TAMU Linux and Slackware around 1993/4, and I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp when it came out in 1994. I was heavily involved with OS/2 and did beta/gamma testing of OS/2 products for IBM in the mid 90s, particularly speech recognition software that was eventually included in OS/2 v.4.

When it became apparent that OS/2 was a dead-end platform around 1997, I switched to Linux, and it has been my platform of choice ever since. Windows has always been around me and I've used every version there's ever been, but I've never been particularly interested in it and I hardly ever touch it these days. I flip-flopped around between Red Hat and Mandrake for a while, before getting totally hooked on Gentoo the first time I tried it. I can't see myself ever leaving Gentoo unless Daniel Robbins and company just totally tank it somehow.

So that's my story. Like I said, I'm considering a career change, so if anybody knows of a Linux opening for a bored lawyer, hit me up. :D

Like you problemchild I was remiss in announcing a Roll Call way back when .... well any case time to remedy that.

I am a proud member of the 'Old d00ds' Club, married, two kids, mortgage - the whole nine yards.

I have been in law enforcement for more years than I care to remember or even think about.

I have no formal qualifications and am self taught on all aspects of my computer usage which includes Linux, but should some life situations changes (no mortgage) I would love to go out and obtain some formal education with the view of a career change, leaning towards IT.

I started out many years ago on an old C64 and the rest is sort of history - I have never been far from a computer since as they fascinate me.

I am mainly here to learn, ensure my home system is secure and lend a hand where ever I possibly can. I do visit daily although I tend to read more than post as my skill level pales against a lot of people here.

Thats about it in a nutshell.

I would like to appreciate for the poll.

This is Neo, 26, a Computer Science Student.

First encounter with the keyboard: April 28, 1993.

Then: a 80286 machine with floppy booting enabled used to practice MS-DOS.

Now: P4, 512 RAM, 40GB, 17" LG Flatron, WinXP+Linux.

Programming Languages: C, C++, VB

Dream domain: Artificial Intelligence.

Guys, this is a fantastic response. i feel like i know you guys (and gurls) more already. Geez, well i didnt say much about myself in the opening post so i will start again and expand on it.

My name is Matt Halliday and I am 17 (well on friday the 4th neway...). I consider myself to be a late starter to computers as i didnt own a computer until i was 13. Since then, i have been madly programming stuff im all sorts of languages such as pascal, delphi, c++, html, js, asp etc etc and so on. I have 4 weeks of school to go (it will take forever) then of to uni i go doing Computer Science and Info Tech. At school the best subject by far is IT. My teacher is sooo smart and geeky (grey hair, the glasses, beard, you know ;)). He is the one person that has inspired me to learn Linux and go by the open-source ethic, as mum and dad find it hard to turn a computer on. Oh, and also i remember the first computer i came into contact with, it was an old mac at school in 1995.

Thanks guys, keep these posts rolling in....

I m turning 18 this year well i really have the greatest interest in computers ive started using computer while im in grade school only platform that time is MS-DOS im ammused of what computer had done in our life how it changes our technology rapidly, now im in college im taking up different course (chemical) and also learning to imy mom told me once to shift into computer course coz she knows that im good at it but somhow i really like the other course im taking up right now but computer is part of my life i cant i cant some times if i have problem i turn to my computer and connect to the net all nyt long
hehehehehehe

I am almost 21 and have only really gotten into computers over the past couple years. I wanted to be a sportswriter but after being on the newspaper, I didn't want to put up with power hungry editors that give fluff stories instead of better things like salary cap issues. Athletes give the worst interviews because they can't offend anyone and by the time they are in high school they already have their speech down. Plus, being female, I notice that most of the other female sports "reporters" do not know what they are talking about and are just there to look pretty for the camera instead of doing truly decent investigative work.