On Sat, 06 Feb 2016 09:15:03 -0700, Don Y
wrote:

Years ago all I did was fool with computers but I did little actual work
but now I'm actually doing useful things.

Given that my job is designing them, I tend to want to have very little to
do with them in my "off time" :

I used to fix them but I did dabble in the software.
I wrote an online diagnostic program that ran as a DOS job with very
little impact on the customer. It was 360 assembler (PIOCS).
When fixing them became "cut open the box and replace it" I moved to
service delivery, fixing the process and in that job I became a user,
crunching data. Databases were my life ;-)
I did write an inventory program in dBase.
Trying to get a bunch of hardware guys to actually use a computer was
tough but if you make the user interface easier than filling out paper
logs, they will do it. I barcoded everything and made it a design
point that nobody ever had to enter the same thing twice. It ended up
being pretty successful. Even the hard core critics became fans after
they stopped "losing" parts.