My music and math background helps greatly. I think the music is helpful for abstaction and symbolism, and a certain amount of the creativity. The math helps, especially linear algebra because I work mostly with complex database/reporting environments

Tom Hamilton Intel Corporation Folsom/Test Engineering

I like to ask four types of questions; 1) - Technical - I need to know if they have the basic skills for the job and tools we use. Basic technical, such as what does Select Case do, and best practices related to using it (Case else). 2) - Interpretive - I need to see how a person organizes their thoughts. 'How would you present this data?'. If they get a report with 200 data points how would they present it to various audiences. They should not try to use a pie chart for 200 data points... 3) - Kobayashi Meru - the impossible scenario. I use this to see if a person can anaylyze the situation and ask for help. We need people who are hungry to get answers. We need to solve problems and locate answers quickly. If we don't know the answer then we need to ask until I find the right resource. Some people will fumble around, may not know the product limitations, or are too proud to admit they don't have an answer. 4) - General awareness - Asking a current events question, or current environment question such as the color of the waiting area, number of [widgets] or something that will demonstrate that this person is observant and 'in the game'. Good luck Tom Hamilton Intel Corporation, Folsom

That is interesting since I'd been an IBM 360/85 FORTRAN programmer (punch card). Moved to a PDP 11/45 which I wrote an interface to the little HP using HP Basic. I went on to work with the DEC 11/70's, and DEC/VAX 11/780 machines for several years. And now Dot.Net - how cool is that? It's hard to believe how far computing has come, and can't wait to see where we can go. The first hard drive - a 5Mb Iomega brick. IBM PC/5150 with 2 360kb 5.25 drives and a cassette port. The first gigabyte class hard drive unit was $3000 Bernoulli boxes anyone? AST AboveBoard/SixPack boards to boost memory from 512kb to 640. - So you could do something really cool - a VDISK... I still some have interesting software including: DOS 1.1, Lotus 1.a, DBase II R:Base 4000 WordStar DisplayWrite MultiMate (boy did that name get some ribbing) The thumbdrive I carry is 200 times bigger than that first PC hard drive, what could we possibly do with all that space (5Mb) -- modified at 16:01 Wednesday 5th April, 2006

Anyone remember the HP 9845B? no disks, 16k ram and dual cassette drives 1980