first tinkered/trained with analog electronics, followed by digital-logic, then forcing digital-logic to do analog things. If I ignore Basic, the first computer language I learned was APL, followed by C (talk about contrasts). Bounced around "Unix-like" (Wicat), DOS, Unix & Win32 systems. Lots of data-transformation and database projects. Recently began using Perl for small projects, and it's getting to be as much fun as APL was! (note: that last remark was not sarcastic)