gobliin

How much did your grandfather do to have a life like this? I mean did things just happen with one event leading to the next, or did he have to actively seek out opportunities?

Which was the first computer you worked on that had a "character set"? Could you elaborate a bit on the history of how characters and strings were read in, processed and written out on the first computers you worked on? What is your opinion on ASCII, and was it a seminal change? I know that many IBM computers work(ed) with EBCDIC, so it seems to me that ASCII was not well received at IBM. What is your opinion on Unicode?