I'm back - feeling some better

[steelgreg]

Hi,
I have been a member for a while but last year I was admitted to the hospital 5 times. Not much fun. Feeling some better now. I dodged a major bullet. I was very lucky.
Background:
Engineering, Metallurgical Eng and Mechanical Eng.
Schools: Univ of Pennsyslvania, Carnegie Institure of Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon)
Life work: Steel (with two 'e's)
Programming: Stated with Fortran on a Sperry Univac. Big horse but wasn't very capable by today's standards. Then IBM mainframes to get things done that the IT department didn't know how to do. Biggest job was a 5500 line IBM mainframe program written in the IBM query language of the time "Applications Systems". Called 'AS' for short. Called 'Aw Shit' a number of times in the middle of the night. First desktop was an IBM XT (4.77MHz). You could actually do some good things with it if you just let it run all night. After that a couple of 'white boxes' that I built to get what I wanted. Latest is an ASUS P4T333-C with 9 physical SCSI drives attached. It is soon to be replaced. I'm looking around for a good idea of what I want to use. Think I will go with ASATA drives this time. Finally bought a laptop. Didn't want one before because there were too many compromises that had to be made compared to a good desktop. I got a Toshiba A505-S6997 which as a full sized keyboard so that I can touch type and a numeric keypad. I turned off the Touchpad and got a Logitech Wireless mouse. So far I am rather pleased with it.
I'm a lot older than most of you fellows but you are probably a lot more proficient in codewriting because that is what you do every day. I get into that only when I want to do something special.
Hope this is what you wanted for an introduction.
Screen Name: steelgreg
Email: <snip>
The 'steel' is used in both because I spent all of my life in the heavy integrated steel business.