It all started back in the early 80's with GWBasic, when i was a service technician for mainly TRS80, when i had to write my own utilities for testing. A little later, the world embraced the IBM PC and forced me to go along with that. Well, at least it brought Quick Basic, what i liked a lot better. Since the DIY market was collapsing, i found me another job, as a firstline helpdesk stooge. In that period i also took classes to learn 6502 assembler, not to use it, but to get some insight of how stuff works. At the end of '88 i found me a job as a programmer, in Clipper. Only then i really learned about structural programming. Still using QB for utilities though. After about three years, the programming was as good as over, and i switched to network administrator, with Novell ELS II on a 286. That finaly turned into a setup of several servers running Novell 3.11 on seven remote locations connected by 64Kb lease lines (whitch i had to share with a IBM 36). Later switching to NDS (which is still superior, but the world fell for the great marketing machine). In that period i also setup a RAS for the employees on the road, visiting customers. A perfect system, and if those darn salesmen would have understood how a simple landline works in respect to dialing, like a leading 0 for outside lines, it would have been a great succes. (yes, some frustration here). Then, in 2006 the curtain fell, i was considered too old, and just couldn't get a job in ICT anymore. So after a number of years of struggle, i finally retired. But now i was bored ! And, spending most of my time on internet, i needed some stuff for checking etc. So, back to programming, just for fun, and a little functionality. So, what and how ? The old stuff didn't work anymore, and a spreadsheet is soooo limited. Looked at PHP programming, but it seems like a huge hassle to get very little done in a lot of time. Tried Phyton too, but never got it to work On december 2017 I couldn't stand it any longer, and just had to get me a programming language again. So I got Strawberry Perl, Tk, and Notepad++. Six days later, I finished my first serious program. Over 5000 characters in 234 lines. Well, not perfect yet, but I'll iron out the rough spots later. Darn! some learning curve that was, especially considering that soooo much has changed since Clipper. Two days later i succesfully finished my second program (very simple one). Now, joining PerlMonks (had a lot of help from the Q&A already) seems to be the next step to get better at it.