[callahan]

There is a common belief in the car world that a person's favorite car for life will be coolest car introduced when they were around 12 or 13 years old (for me that's a 3rd Gen RX-7, fwiw). I think there is a lot behind this, natural design progression as well as car-craziness in the years leading up to being driving age.

On tech stuff, I think a similar adage applies. It has to be something very cool that was released at the right time and had substantial impact on you personally. For me, that's the Octane. I can still picture the first time I saw the glowing lightbar of an Octane front and center in an otherwise dim room of my universities' science center's computing lab. And then I spent may hours writing FORTRAN code for it (I never really learned a more useful programming language, unfortunately).

Internally, although it's a new discovery for me (so there goes the adage), HP's PA-RISC systems are quite impressive.