Since I was born at a very young age in a farming community I decided it would be wise for me to stay with my parents for about 20 years. That resulted in my growing up on a cotton farm in the Texas panhandle. It was a somewhat picturesque place. How could it have been otherwise, with the largest town in the county named Muleshoe, and grocery shopping in a place named Needmore!

After two years at Texas Tech University I enlisted in the Air Force in 1964 and attended a Russian language training school operated for the military by Syracuse University. While there I met the young lady who would later become my wife. Another technical school at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas then off to Onna Point, a very small installation on a remote end of the island of Okinawa. Two days were particularly notable — when a typhoon passed directly over our installation. We barricaded the buildings and kept everyone inside for 36 hours while mother nature did her thing ripping everything on the island apart. At the end of my tour I was accepted into an education program where the Air Force paid all my expenses plus full pay while I attended college.

At the University of Oklahoma in Norman while studying for an undergraduate degree in Meteorology from 1967 to 1969 I took my first computer courses — using Fortran 66. At that time we were just getting a hint of how vast the potential might be for using computers in the field of meteorology.

We were on the receiving end of this emerging capability called numerical weather prediction while at the weather station in the Airfield Operations at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina in 1970. In addition to weather stuff like hurricanes, snow storms, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, my wife and I spent a lot of time boating and fishing in the many lakes in central South Carolina.

In late 1970 we were sent overseas. Not to Viet Nam like so many others in those years, although I was certainly a prime candidate. We were stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base in West Germany where we had many interesting adventures. The highlight being that both our children were born in the US Air Force hospital at Bitburg Air Base — about 10 kilometers down the road. Bill was born in 1971 and Allison in 1973.

We lived in Germany through the turbulent times of the Bader-Meinhoff terrorist attacks and the massacre of athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. We were also able to travel throughout central Europe including Paris, Liege, Lyon, East Berlin, London, Geneva, Lucerne, Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Lichtenstein, Belgium, Amsterdam, Luxembourg. We saw formula one racing at Nurburgring, went camping with our kids in the Black Forest of Bavaria, toured the Zugspitz, sipped wine in the Mosel valley, traveled through the Swiss alps by rail, and visited Hitler�s Eagle�s Nest near Berchdesgarten.

After nearly 4 years in Europe we returned to enter Saint Louis University for a Master�s degree in Meteorology. A large part of the work at SLU used what was then a huge IBM mainframe tiny by today�s standards. In 1976 it was on to the Air Force Global Weather Central at Offutt AFB in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time this was the largest concentration of computer power in the world for numerical weather prediction. Primarily using UNIVAC mainframes along with some smaller IBMs and including some of the early CRAY models. It took a lot of computing power to do all the automated interpretation of weather satellite data and the number-crunching necessary to produce a continuous flow of weather forecast data on a worldwide scale. I wonder how many people know what 80 column punch cards look like? .

Next adventure was in �Tornado Alley� at the US Army�s Field Artillery Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. While there we also had weather support responsibility for the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Bliss, Texas and the Federal Mobilization Activity at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.

My help was needed at Air Weather Service Headquarters at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois in 1983. It was there that I first heard about this widget called an �Apple�, but the folks that I worked with had evaluated the pros and cons and concluded that the personal computer with the most potential was the Commodore 64. I got one and it served well for almost ten years.

My wife had zero experience with computers of any kind, but when the school system began putting computers into the elementary schools she applied for the Computer Operations Technician position. Suddenly she was the administrator for a network of about 25 Macintosh and a couple of windows computers. In Syracuse, her dad began looking for his first computer and I was looking to upgrade so we asked for her recommendation. She said that all the Macintosh computers combined gave her less trouble than the couple of windows/dos systems, and the Macs were the easiest to fix when they did have problems Consequently both her dad and I each got a Macintosh Performa 450 in 1993. 32 MB RAM, 25 Mhz 68030 CPU, and a humongous 120 MB hard drive and we were set for a very long time, or so we thought.

When my daughter needed a computer for college we did the required evaluation and concluded that the Powerbook 150 was the thing to have in 1993 — I still have it and it works fine today running OS 8.1. For a number of years at work I was blessed with a Macintosh on my desk, then the company decided to go all winders[sic] so I have had to be friendly with Micro$oft for a while now.

A few years later my wife's dad and I both decided to upgrade. In 1997, Power Computing was doing quite well and we each purchased a PowerCenter Pro 210. That was just a couple months before Apple did their thing in buying back their license from Power Computing. They have both served quite well, and both continue working today. Mine has been upgraded with a Newer Technology 455 MHZ G3 and now has 448 mb RAM along with several other goodies. Interesting to consider — both Power Computing and Newer Technology are out of business.

Strange how things work out sometimes. In 1985 there was a person at GE Aerospace who seemed to be running the Commodore 64 User�s Group named Moe Comeau. He showed up again a few years ago — sitting across the aisle from me as we wound up in the same organization and in the same room. It didn�t take him long to convince me that I would benefit by joining MLMUG.

The Downingtown school system apparently lost their sense of value and decided to go to all winders[sic] when they needed to replace computers. Consequently my wife has functioned completely on the dark side for quite a while now. Her responsibilities did grow to over 250 computers and she developed a real talent for installing both hardware and software as well as troubleshooting before she retired last fall. She now is the senior administrator for our home network and has even provided me with a winders[sic] system of my own. I continue to hold the high ground though with mostly Macintosh in my normal endeavors. Never one to hold a grudge my wife presented me with a new 15� G4 TiBook 550 running OS X for Christmas 2001 all the better to perform my duties with MLMUG