Gimme some punch cards! I used to work in theater, and my hobby was computer programming. This revelation garnered me a lot of confused stares back in the mid-90s, but after the bust I started to look smart.

All that said, computers are still a hobby, the more low-level the better. I was an ardent devotee of the VAX in college (a mainframe run with a variant of UNIX). Even though I've used Macs since 1985, I still love the simplicity and power of a command-line interface. Must be from all my apprenticeships on the Commodore VIC 20, Apple ][, PC-DOS... The VAX and UNIX remain my favorite, though, although I really didn't know as much as I'd like--I've never programmed in a UNIX environment, for example, only MacOS (though in Pascal and Common LISP--not two languages that would get me very far even if I wanted a job).

I followed the GNU-Linux explosion a bit, but as there wasn't really a viable Linux port for my older Mac 6100, I never followed up on it, and when we got the iMac, I was too excited by video editing and animation to worry about it.

Then along came Mac OS X, and with it, the UNIX-based kernel of Darwin. Well, I don't have OS X. But, fortunately for me, Darwin, like Linux, is open-source, meaning as long as you've got the pipes, you can download the whole damn thing. Add to that, much of the GNU software distribution has been ported to Darwin, and I can go back to my old -csh interface and use such cutting-edge tools as emacs and vi (okay, all I remember are the text editors; give me time). So today I downloaded the GNU-Darwin installer disk image, and tomorrow I'm gonna partition my disk drive and drop back into the 1960s! Woo hoo!

(If you don't know what GNU is, you should really check it out. In a nutshell, there's an entire array of free--meaning royalty-free and freely distributable, not neccesarily no-cost--software out there, most of it for UNIX variants. This software arguably rivals the commercial products you already know about. So there really is a way to never use Microsoft again.)

Watch this space for more geekdom from your favorite Theatrical Computer Nerd.