Hi, First question is why? (never too old to learn ... moving to a new country and learning the culture and language may be more fun) I am in my 50's having started with computers in 1966 (IBM 1401,IBM 1410 & IBM 360-50) I (with 2 others) wrote a multi-user virtual memory operating system and a FORTRAN 4 compiler for a mini computer system since any available system at the time sucked (worse than dos) Suggest looking into the current marketplace such as IOS, Android, window8(phone/tablet etc). Lots of tools available, some free Write some apps and maybe make some or even a lot of money.

1967 Fortran IV 1968 IBM 360 assembler 1968 IBM 360 channel program (program peripherals to talk to each other without CPU) 1969 COBOL but now it gets interesting! In 1974'ish I convinced the company I was working for to purchase an Interdata 7/32 (first 32 bit minicomputer) It came with an operating system that made cp/cpm look good. It also came with minimal peripherals. It booted using the paper tape part of a telex machine. It had a 2.5 megabyte hard drive and a primitive CRT as a console. I and two helpers decided we would write a better operating system for it. Goal was multi-user virtual memory system (machine was organized into 16 64k segments,1 Megabyte total) Since we did not have driver code for the hard drive at first, the object files output from the existing Assembler (Interdata's) were sent to paper tape (slow telex) which we used to build the various parts of the new operating system (extreme bootstrapping) We ran into a hardware problem in that sometimes a register would be clobbered on segment/page fault The CPU was all ttl chips so I modified the CPU to not clobber registers. Within about 6 months we had a VM machine that could support 8 users and 1 background task. By then we had an Ampex 40 megabyte hard drive (bigger than a washing machine) The operating system used 64K and was not itself paged, and the hardware was limited to 1 megabyte. Next we needed an IBM Fortran IV compatible compiler. In about 4 months we had one that ran in about 48K with no paging. Since segment/page size was a maximum of 64k and users had access to only 14 of them as special linker was written that analyzed the function calls and clustered as much as possible into the same segment. We converted 100,000's of lines of Fortran from IBM to this system successfully. Next came a new CPU an 8/32 which was faster and had 16 megs total, but only 1 meg per task. We converted huge seismic programs (million's of lines of code) to it. Interesting that our system both compiled and ran the resulting programs faster than the existing IBM mainframe's at 1/10th cost. At least one of these systems is still in use due to the special peripherals we interfaced to it. I am currently contract programming (mostly in c/c++)