Anyone do any trades or hobbies?

[Johann]

Whose kidding? My proud nickname is Tyrannosaurus Rex!

And mine is Tatankaceratops. It means "Bison Horn Face" and I think it suits me. If I remember "Tatanka" correctly from Kevin Costner's "Dances with Wolves," then "Tatankaceratops" appears to be a Sioux and Greek combination - quite unusual. More on that beast here: Tatankaceratops - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

"A language called Paschal?" I think that's Pascal you're referring to, named after 17th c. French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, here:

http://www.biography.com/people/blaise-pascal-9434176

Borland Turbo Pascal was very popular in DOS days and there were Windows versions too. Embarcadero Delphi (originally a Borland product) uses Object Pascal in its compilers. That language is described here: Delphi (programming language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . These days, Free Pascal is quite popular with programmers. Somewhere on a CD I have a compiler for (interpreted) Basic that works by first translating the Basic code into Free Pascal before compilation.

I started using (and working with, to some extent) mainframe computers in the early 70s. The first programming course I ever took was in COBOL, still in the 70s. Danged punchcards! My first personal computer was a Timex Sinclair in 1982. It cost around $100 and had 2K of RAM. By comparison, my credit-card-sized Beaglebone has over 250,000 times that much! Ten years after, in the early 1990s, I dusted off the Timex and loaded up some cassette tapes of old programs I'd written -- and they still worked! I also had a massive 16K RAM expander that cost another $100. That computer is now in a local high school's "computer museum" along with my Commodore VIC-20 and some other Pleistocene relics. The Timex-Sinclair could be programmed in its own Basic dialect, and I still use Basic sometimes today - mostly in Windows versions, though.

One of my other long-term hobbies is photography. After about 30 years of film photography, I found SLRs were too clunky and bulky to use while following fast-moving small grandchildren. Around that time, my son gave me a compact digital camera and I've never looked back. For a couple of years prior to going digital, I'd been getting my pictures transferred to CDs as jpegs, so I could crop, enhance and alter them with computer software. Now I have four digital cameras - three Canons and a Pentax. The fun continues!

Johann