Today is my landmark birthday.

I am now three quarters of a century old.

When I got married in 1964, my husband was a COBOL programmer. He also looked into BASIC and showed me some code on paper.

When we visited the computer museum in Boston (don't remember the year), he showed me how to program a punch card, using one of the hands-on computers at the exhibit (the size of a refrigerator lying on its side). I still have that card. (My husband passed away 3 1/2 years ago.)

The first time I programmed on a computer was in 1980 on the TRS-80.

I got my Masters in "Computers in Education" in 1990. I had taken three programming courses -- GW BASIC, Pascal, and LogoWriter.

I was a grade-school teacher and had 3 computers in my classroom -- a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe, and an old IBM PC that someone had donated. I wrote programs for each of them in BASIC. I was known as the computer expert in my school.

I retired in 1996 and got two part-time jobs teaching computer science courses. One was at a parochial school using Apple IIe computers, and the other was at a local college using IBM PCs. The two part-time jobs kept me busier than one full-time job. I really preferred teaching adults, so after one year, I just kept the college job.

I soon specialized in computer programming, using QBASIC and Visual Basic 5, with samples of other (DOS-based) languages as part of the introductory class. I'm still at the college, but we had to drop QB after Vista came out, in favor of Visual Basic.NET. I now teach the "Introduction to Programming" course using VB 2010 with a sprinkling of C# at the last class session.

I'm a member of several computer users' groups. I attend regular monthly meetings of the VB SIG at the Microsoft office in NYC, and have been going to those meetings since VB 3 was released back in the early 90s. I never did come across a QB users' group.

I'm still using Windows XP so that I can run my old QB programs in full screen. My desktop computer is partitioned with Windows XP and Windows 7, but I hardly ever use the Win 7 partition. I really dread the new Windows 8 that's coming up. Maybe I'm getting too old.