In 1991, I'd just gotten my first real programming job for two reasons:
nepotism, and a willingness to write code for $12/hour. I was working
as a contractor to a blood testing laboratory, where the main
development job was writing custom software to handle, process, and do
statistical calculations on blood testing results, primarily for
paternity testing.
My father had been a software developer since the early 1970s, and worked
as a contractor at this blood lab since the late 1970s. As the calendar
had marched toward the early 1990s, technology cruft had collected. The
old TI mainframe, once the primary computer, now only had one job left:
statistical calculation for paternity testing, written in TI's Pascal.
Slowly but surely, the other software had been rewritten and moved to an
AT&T 3B2/600 running Unix System VR3.2.3. That latter machine was the
first access I had to a real computer, and certainly the first time I had
access to Usenet. This changed my life.