Good afternoon!

My name is Dan FitzGerald (they/them/theirs), and I heard about this group through my friend Connor!  I work on big iron at IBM, five years as a z/VM kernel developer, several years in the z/VM and zFirmware space, a couple in HPC tooling, and am now in the z/OS sphere.  Since I was in middle school way back in 1996, I have been interested in collecting old PCs, particularly (you guessed it) 1980s era IBMs and Apples.  Two years ago, I picked up a 5155 at an estate sale, learned how to solder an XT-IDE, and got it running with a CF card.

I have been interested in joining this group for some time, and made it to my first work weekend the first weekend of March... just in time for COVID lockdown 5 days later.  I'm still in the beginning stages... learning how to solder boards and just play around with equipment.  My current project is getting an XT-IDE and a CF card into a 5170, then figuring out how to get it onto my home network.  Projects on the queue involve fixing the floppy drive on my PS/2 model P70 portable, getting a faster dot-matrix printer, and building a fume extractor for my workbench.  From there, who knows?

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"..you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again... We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them." - TJ Watson, Jr (1963)"