I have been programming since the early 1980s: Started in secondary school by pestering my parents to buy me a BASIC-programmable Casio-calculator, then went on to prefer a Commodore 64 over a driver's licence in high school, switched into Pascal before entering the University of Helsinki, Finland. Coded telephone exchange software in Nokia using PL/M-86 to pay part of my way there until I had the chance to learn Prolog and Lisp. Graduated but did not leave, choosing to pursue a PhD in Computer Science instead, so that I could learn Standard ML, OCaml and finally Haskell while getting paid for all that fun! "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition", wrote Jorge Luis Borges.
As my University career is now nearing a premature end due to Parkinson's Disease diagnosis at 50, I bought my NS70 on 2023-10-20 with an i5 CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Linux Mint and coreboot (but no Windows!) for my retirement days - the first machine in 30 years which I had to pay for myself. During all that time I used UNIXes: first Solaris/SunOS and then Linux. You see, when I was studying for my PhD, a few years younger Linus Torvalds was studying for his M.Sc. in the same Department... We met only once and briefly at that, though: He made bare iron bend to his will in C, which to me sounds more like Terry Riley. As you can see by my choice of languages above, we had little in common, even though we both studied the same subject in the same school.