Mechanical Engineer. Programmed professionally for about ten years. My hardware/OS progression was Vax/VMS, CDC Cyber, Cray Y-MP, Apollo/Domain, Sun Solaris, HP HPUX, Windows (yea, I'm old).

Now I develop open-source software for fun.

Brush with greatness:

Circa 1993 my company was part of the NCSA consortium at the University of IL. One day a guy asked if we wanted to see something cool. He brought us into a room and showed us an X Windows program with lots of flashing text that didn't seem to do much. That guy was Marc Andreessen and the program was a Mosaic alpha. I didn't think it would go anywhere. ;) We did setup an intranet shortly thereafter, probably one of the first at a corporate entity.