Indeed, I started out on the Atari and Commodore Pet, Vic 20, 64, 128 and Amiga. I also was doing programming in basic on the Apple II, IIc, IIe, Pet, Vic 20, Commodore 64 and basic/assembly on the IBM PC, XT and AT. That all started in 1985. By the age of 16 I was teaching computers in the elementary school down the street from my highschool in Dundas, Ontario, Canada. By the age of 17 I was working for the Ontario government, the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs it's now called, being the one person on staff in that department that had a clue how to operate an IBM XT with 300 baud modem, doing data entry, communicating with other departments and tutoring. By 1989 I was designing logic gates and other circuits, had obtained a 97+% average in computer electronics and had a thorough working knowledge of the circuits that made up every aspect of an IC, plus the circuitry of an entire computer. By 1999 I had built a successful gaming website on a free service (in frames no less) getting 2000 hits a day, being in the top 3 of every Google search query I targetted. By 2002 I had built and maintained the area's most successful chat and community, surpassing and absorbing both competitors, which ran for three years. In 1997 I started my own company. By 1999 I was running a computer store doing sales, service and networking. In 2000 I incorporated.
In 3q 2007 I had increased volume by more than 400% over the same period the previous year. In 2008 I opened my new, larger office, subcontracting for one of the largest computer firms in the area (for specialty work, evenings, weekends, out of town and network design, sales, deployment and maintenance) plus maintaining my own client base, two national retail outlets and one international tool cabinet manufacturer. Partnerships were created for networking, security, perimeter defense, cabling, website design and hosting, etc. During this time I have built more than 500 computers, sold and serviced more than 3000 harddrives and sold countless terabytes of memory. I have been an inspecting engineer of a steel manufacturing (galvanizing, actually) line, deployed servers, workstations, network solutions (including photocopiers, RIPs and multifunctions) in multimillion dollar manufacturing plants. I have cleaned more than one million infections. I collected (and at one point distributed) several hundred virus engines over the years. Run pirate BBSes. etc. I am now an authorized Panda security, Linksys, Powerware, Microsoft, OCZ and Intel vendor and MS beta tester, the last three projects being Vista, Server 2008 and Windows Home Server. Over the years I have owned more than $60,000 in computer equipment, and have used (and still own many) every Microsoft operating system in existence, save for Windows 2.0, and most of their productivity software, including every version of Office. I have had considerable experience with Quattro Pro, Lotus, Pagemaker, Corel Draw, Word Perfect, Photoshop, Ventura, FrontPage, Expression Web, nVu, etc.
One of my next projects is designing, building and deploying a few workstations to control a set of milling machines in a steel manufacturing plant. Engineering creates the designs with CAD, they get sent down to the floor, these stations that I'm building will utilize Master Cam and the designs to control the mills. These machines are massive. It's a lot of fun actually. One of the more amusing projects I've taken on lately is a computerized automated distribution system. A touch screen computer the size of a shoebox sits on top of a row of tool cabinets. The machinist swipes their card, touches the screen to tell it what tools it needs and the drawers light up and release the cover for the tool. It's an ingenious system design to control inventory, only billing for the tools that are pulled and automatically billing for and reordering inventory. It's a lot of fun to work on. This one unit I'm thinking of is in an aerospace manufacturing plant that makes jet engine parts for private jets, helicopters and military equipment. Unfortunately for security reasons I'm not allowed to take pictures.
So, there's a brief synopsis of my computer history. You can call it fabrication if you like. I call it "fact".
10,000 posts, 9,000 being mostly nonsense and constantly reentering a thread to get your last word and attempting to lend your posts credibility with yet more blather about tool and die or irrelevant links you found on Google are nothing to brag about IMO, but that's ok. When the blind lead the blind, eventually they all walk off a cliff.