I always loved computers. Eve before I had one, I loved the idea of them, the things that made them tick. I blame a combination of Wargames, Star Wars and the general mystery that surrounded them. Shall we play a game?

In the second grade, my school obtained a Vic 20, a monster of a machine, which included a tape drive. There was nothing but a few skimpy manuals and some educational games. And a simplistic guide that offered no information about how to actually making this thing work as I wanted.

Intreguing, but... Nothing you could learn anything with.

A few years later, the school introduced a TRS-80. There was a little more documentation, and BASIC entered my life. And you could actually make these machines do something you wanted them to do. And I was hooked.

Of course, games must come into it, and my family was always good at making games and cheap entertainment. My cousin, four years my senior, was making pen and paper sci-fi rpgs before I hit 8. We travelled in super-hyper speeders to the Medusa galaxy, comandeered Transit Shuttles and journeyed to the limits of the galaxy, through wormholes and into alternate worlds. And then my uncle gave me a copy of Dungeons and Dragons for my tenth birthday - and worlds changed for me. Any time I had spare, I read, reread, memorised the books. Played the Fighting Fantasy novels when there was no one else to game with.

Eventually, I scrimped, saved, and hoarded enough money to get myself a Commodore 64. At the age of 13, I learned everything I could about it. When I stretched BASIC to breaking point, and knowing of PEEKs and POKEs, I wondered what the PEEKs and POKEs actually hooked into to do the magic they did. And I discovered assembly for the MOS 6510. I never did figure out the SID chip completely. The C64 also introduced me to Zork, the almost-grandaddy of text-based rpgs.

High school introduced the Apple ][e, already obsolete when I started and still in service when I finished. I was never terribly impressed with it. My apologies to the Apple nuts. And there met and converted several people to role playing games.

What to do after high school? Well, math and physics grades were a little better than passably good. Flight seemed what I wanted to do. I applied to become a pilot in the air force. Most everything was up to par - but the eyesight was not.

By this time, it was a little late to apply for University. I dither a lot, and had pegged hopes on passing the eye exam. I did, however, make it into a TAFE (which is Australian-speak for "You couldn't make university, this is the next best thing"), and I began to study computers in earnest.

Pascal, logic, desktop publishing. I applied to transfer as soon as I could, and did. Monash University beckoned, and a strange hybrid degree, mixed Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Mechanical Engineering. Digital logic. Data communications. C. Assembly. C++. SQL. What else can we make it do? Study bridge building. Quite honestly, the mechanical engineering part I paid enough attention to for a pass. Stresses and sheer forces in beams? CAD/CAM was the most interesting part, and it wasn't all that interesting. My thesis was on data compression, both voice and images, and I spent hundreds of hours trying to squeeze more voice into less space. Eventually, we ended up with about a 4:1 compression ratio for voice - in real time - on a 386-33.

Then I started working, and accepted the first position I was offered. A jack-of-all trades position, requiring a broad knowledge, but sadly little in the way of coding oportunities.

I'd also kept playing Dungeons and Dragons with some of the guys from high school, who introduced new friends. One of these was Rob. Rob is probably easiest to describe physically as a rugged Tom Cruise, who also sings. Well. And is a nice guy to boot.

Rob is also the guy who insisted I sit down in my computer chair for a few hours and try this MUD thing, which he'd been playing since before the Dwarven Kingdom - Copper, and played back when equipment from the Dwarven kingdom was the hottest stuff in the game. What? I liked Zork, but how does this work? Twenty minutes in, I was ready to quit. An hour in, and I cursed the day I'd met him. Two hours in, and I'd never leave again.

And then, wonderously, I was offered an administrative position on one. And eventually was offered a coding spot. It is amazing how skills become rusty when disused for a decade, and similarily, (after a thousand hours of coding), amazing how quickly they return.

Having brushed off the knowledge in play, it was noticed in my current place of employ. C# (C Sharp, not C Pound) and more code looms large.