My first job was designing the IT system for the Ark, Noah was very pleased with the result and you will have noticed that there have been no reports whatsoever of any Ark IT failures, so that was a good start.

Various roles followed, Project Manager, operations & support (3rd/4th line, I never did fancy the end user stuff). I concentrated on networks for many years, mainly Cisco kit but firewalls, load balancers and the other components that go to make up LANs & WANs. I enjoyed that so much that I spent some time as a Cisco trainer, great fun, but one can have enough of explaining subnetting to people who don't quite understand the difference between collision and broadcast domains.

Although I started in IT with a programming course (COBOL, since you ask) I have tended to use programming as a tool to make my life easier rather than as a full time job. Over the years I have used various languages, from assembler on PCs and microcontrollers, through variations of BASIC (MBASIC anyone?), to C (again on PCs & microcontrollers).

Currently I am self employed and mainly using C for web/database server apps along with JavaScript for the client end.