Who’s the UbberNerd?

Open challenge – somewhere out there are an elite few who scored higher, I bow to those few

Arising to Janet's challenge – and ably answered by PZ and Orac among others and no I can’t top PZ’s portrait

1 yah, punched cards, learned COBOL, watfour, watfive, FORTH etc but due to the slowness of the hardware any real time work was done in machine code – same with FORTRAN and promptly forgot all of it when no longer needed, although a FORTH program was pointing the telescope up until a few years ago

2 build computers from liquid cooled over clocked game screamers to resurrecting discarded 286 & 386 for Linux projects

3 did the Rings and Dunes in my teens but was more influenced by Eric Frank Russell, Heinlein & Clarke than Tolkin or Herbert

4 I traveled with a Silent 700 terminal, logged on from payphones in airports circa ‘79

5 not much of a D&D or any of the role playing games however at onetime a bit of a FPS junkie and still grab the occasional fractional hour of yoke time on the flight sim

6 ditto on the trinkets although I did have a Revenge of the Jedi poster and a few tidbits from Sprocket Systems

7 At one point in time had all the original Star Trek on ½” eiaj reel to reel video tape, then on Betamax

Speaking of Beta…

8 still have 3 functioning SuperBetaHiFi decks and an industrial beta deck and a few hundred tapes

9 without implicating myself or former coworkers, lets just say we had access to ‘preview copies’ of the original 3 Star Wars, Blade Runner (do androids dream of electric sheep?) Close Encounters and a few others, sometimes before the theatrical release

10 obscure brit SiFi – StarCops – one of the few shows that was technically accurate with regard to space & the moon – had a great theme song

11 comics, outgrew the typical ones once I hit puberty however I have all the FFF Brothers, Crumb, and a few boxes of various underground comics from the late 60’s through the 80’s along with all the Calvin & Hobbs, Shoe, Bloom County and of course Doonesbury

12 I’ve had a three letter @ email address since the mid 80’s and the same domain since 91