Dutch people of the world, unite! (or at least ancestors, that counts right?)
I’m Jerry. Looking at my profile it says I’ve been here since 2005. IIRC I’d sent the request to Tom like a year before that, and had completely forgotten by the time I heard back. :) I’m 46 and have a wife, 2 daughters (4 & 8), and a dog. A long time ago, back when the Soviet Union still was a thing, I was Russian SIGINT specialist in the Army. My timing was impeccable as the 7th week of basic was during the coup attempt in Moscow, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist half way through language training in Monterey. So I spent the remainder of the time stationed in Texas in the 1st Cav Division. After that I went back to Iowa to finish school, and grabbed majors in Computer Science and Russian. My time since then has been spent programming ending up in the odd space of UNIX and Linux kernels. For the last 6 years I have been working remotely from home, first for Oracle and for the last 4 years for Red Hat.
Gaming wise, I think the earliest platform I remember is one of those original pong consoles. We had an atari 2600 at some point as well, but it really started when I was in between 5th and 6th grade when I somehow got my parents to get me a Commodore 64. It was another 18 months before I got a 1541 disk drive. 4th or 5th grade is also when I first started getting into conflict simulation board games, starting with Tactics II and quickly adding War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific to the mix. Some of my fondest memories of junior high and high school years were the weekly gaming sessions at a local game store with a group of adults who didn’t care that some kid was interested in playing those games as well. One unfortunate thing happened while I was off in the Army, which was my game collection meeting an untimely demise due to flooding in my dad’s basement.
@Brooski keeps tempting me to get back into it though.