I was good with COBOL but immediately hated the work environment. I (still) loved data centers, but hated being the guy chained to the terminal. I wanted to be the guy the terminal slave called when his login was broken. And off I went to the digital frontier at the time.
I got a few really tempting offers starting around 1998 to write code again, and back then I still remembered enough I might could have pulled it off. But I still didn't want to do that and besides, Novell sales and support were still good and I was busy getting businesses hooked up to the internet. Bonded modems? ISDN? DSL? Cubix, Citrix, Netware Anyware, 66 blocks and missing punch down tools, Cat3 preinstalled for the bonus win.
If there's one thing on this Earth I hate worse than cheap tape drives, it's shared MS Access databases. There, just had to get that off my chest.
I was a Novell dealer learning NT4 on the side because I could hear footsteps. I have Novell to thank for introducing me to Linux with a free copy of SuSE 9.1, then 9.3. I guess they could hear the footsteps too! That was all before 2000, and I spent the next 20 years trying to drink from a firehose. Now it's all virtual, you can't get cut and bleed on the bare metal anymore.
I'm looking at a sailboat on the Intracoastal as I type this. If I get up and walk over to the window, I can look straight out the sound into the Atlantic. I can throw an ammo can of my latest handloads in the car and be at the range in 20 minutes, or I can be at the boat ramp in five. I got rid of my smartphone, don't need it. I work for my family now, but rarely do I ever get to tinker with hardware that isn't mine. But once upon a time I saw and did some cool things.
I'm glad we made it, I hope everyone else does too. ;-/