My journey down this rabbit hole began in the summer of 1993.  I had been running spitfire BBS (a dos based bbs written in pascal w/asm routines) for almost a year at that point. I was installing a new door game called Legend of the red dragon by Seth Able. I was then and still am now a huge dragonlance fan and have always loved D&D type games, so when i saw this i was on a mission to get it up and running on my 386sx16 (yes 16mhz no math co-processor) with 2mb ram and a huge 171mb conor hard drive. At the time i had 2 nodes. 1 2400baud for incoming calls and a ultra highspeed 14.4 that i used to download content on. So after i finally get this game installed i realized I HATED the color scheme of it, but i loved the game. The black on green was just horrible(now those that now know me , know that is the only way i look at my terminal) so i decided to teach myself turbo pascal 7.0 so i could write my own version of the game. Yes i hated the color that much.. I remember all to well the feeling of conquering comm routines and i/o. I rember thinking "There is nothing i cant do now". FidoNet was allowing me to reach out to the world and i had so many new users and people calling in just to download my newest game or utility.  Then those three letters that broke the BBS world for me for good started calling.. 

AOL.

 AOL now that was a rabbit hole. starting with AOL4Dos (yes they did make it limit of 9600baud connection). In May of 1995 the may test release for windows 95 was sent to me in a MassMail.  it was a spanned zip of 104mb's imagine downloading 104mb and it taking 5 days....that was 5 days of hoping no one picked up the phone..you didnt loose connection and nothing went wrong. By this time  AOHELL was just coming out and the Warez scene had really started to flourish. Once again i didnt like the UI of AOHell so i wrote my own if your from that era you can remeber what came next.  Everyone else back then was big into VB3, i found VB to be to elementary and decided to stay with delphi for all my  AOL_Frame25 endevors. Next Came IRC BitchX,MiRC,ect...running my first Eggdrop was experience i will remember forever.  

I later went on to open my own computer store(hey the 90s and early 2ks were great and a small business could actually make a profit. because no newegg or amazon). Around 2012 i got into Machine Vision programming using line scan cameras for automotive inspections. Halcon by MVTech and Hexsight were some of my prefered API's. 

I now am network admin for a cluster of about 680 users over 20 locations. I absolutely love my job. I have the freedom to develop custom software, manage a wonderful team of techs and design and support a highly robust network. 

My love and joy of programing never left me. I still to this day hate to tell anyone "No" i will most always respond with.."I Can write that!" even though honestly most of the time i have no clue how i will even start. It is the thrill of the chase the finding out of how to proceed to the next level. It is the remembering to breath after you start holding your breath when you hit that build button!

The one regret i have most in this journey is that there have been so few women to share my passion with. For years it seems i have been one of the only women in IT that i know. Only in the past few years have i actually met other women who feel the same and share the passion that i have for this industry!

Mandy
hi, i'm Mandy
