I am a seasoned professional with over 35 years experience working in IT. When I started working, most homes did not have a computer, and if they did, it was likely an 8-bit Commodore, Atari or Apple ][ system. Printers were almost all dot-matrix, diskettes came in two sizes, 8" and 5-1/4". If you had a color monitor you were living large, and if you had a mouse in your house it was likely a rodent.To quote Jerry Garcia, "What a long, strange trip it's been." Compuserve and BBSes gave way to Local Area Networks and the World Wide Web, and a sea of 8-bit computer manufacturers were pushed to the side as 16-bit IBM-compatible computers flew out of computer showrooms and landed in homes across America. Suddenly everyone had an e-mail address as free AOL CDs fell out of every magazine on the rack. There was likely as much digital "static" on the phone lines from all those modems and as there was actual spoken conversations.Today, computers are literally everywhere, and everyone is online and connected. I miss the intrigue and mystery that shrouded those of us in the IT subculture of yesterday. Everything I used in real-time years ago is now "retro," and I find myself reminiscing the late nights of restoring systems from tape, hacking away at 3am trying to find the latest software without having to pay, and meeting in abandoned community college lunchrooms with like-minded nerds to discuss how our brand of computer was better than the others.It has been a long, strange trip indeed, but one I am so blessed to have taken and to still be on.--W