Following the crowd
On the other board, I used my full name (David Staub) but got a little tired of seeing it plastered in big letters, so I am making a new start here with a new user name.
If Bill Benson thinks he is old, then I must be ancient. By the time he graduated from college, I had already been practicing law for 3 years. I started out in the tax department of a large international law firm, but for most of the last 30 years I have been representing family-owned businesses and entrepreneurs on general business matters. My practice is heavily concentrated on corporate transactions such as mergers and acquisitions and raising capital in private offerings and venture capital.
As law is my vocation, computers and the Internet are my avocation (or perhaps obsession). My first computer was a Digicomp when I was about 11 years old, but programming it by rearranging little plastic tubes on little plastic protrusions didn't hold my attention too long.
My next run-in with computers was in 1971 when I was an accounting major at the University of Illinois. The required computer science course centered around writing programs (in Fortran) that we then put on punch cards and ran on a room-sized IBM main frame. My friends couldn't understand why I would stay at the computer lab once my program successfully ran, but I would rewrite my program just to see if I could get it to use less computer resources.
I bought my first desktop computer in 1982 for my office. It was a Victor 9000 that ran both PC-DOS and what I thought was a better operating system, CP/M 86. It had no internal hard drive, dual 5 1/4" floppies and 256K of RAM. A top quality computer at the time. Although we used it primarily for word processing (with WordStar 1.0), I also wrote a mailing list for my firm, first in Basic and later in Dbase III. Those were long before the days of WYSIWYG. Now I pretty much limit myself to hand coding my own webpages and eschewing web creation programs.
Needless to say, I have a number of clients who are technology-driven. It gives me a great chance to combine my outside interest with my professional role as attorney.
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