As I just signed up, I guess this is as good as any thread for my first post... albeit a wordy one.

Ummm, when I was in High School, a TI "pocket" caculator would set you back what a nice desktop PC does today... so very little computer study there -- I did know of their existance, as my father worked for space program from around the X-1 to the Saturn shots.

Then I went to work for Uncle Sam and got into a different venue of security... to date, I have still done more work with MP5s than MD5, but I digressed into computers in the early 80s and took a few CC courses and stuff -- nothing to really get excited about.

The 90s was a time of great personal study, in the early part of that decade I was a hacker by the early definition of the word... I think my first hack job was to pinout a 8088 and mount a V-30 processor on a seperate socket via ribbon cable -- the 80XX stayed onboard and acted as a primitive North Gate (anyone remember that kit?). Some time later I managed to get a 486 to manage a RAID array and translate back to a whicked fast P150Pro via a SCSI cable... ughh, I feel old.

I am not far from a pension and realize I am getting too old to be the dope on the rope, so I spend lots of time reading and taking advantage of the wealth of information available from sites such as this... and free security courses available through various agencies I work for or with -- I hope to knock out my first certification in Computer Forensics this summer.