>Recently I heard a well known figure in the Foxpro community make this statement:
>
>"Foxpro programmers are not computer science graduates"
>
>I have a degree in computer science, am I the only one? Could I get a show of hands (of pixels?) of who has what kind of computer background?

B.A.Sc in Mechanical Engineering. The ONLY computer course I took at university was punch-card FORTRAN on a S/360. Learned to program an HP 29C for numeric solutions of differential equations.

As a hobbyist, bought a Jim Ferguson Big Board I from a friend - CP/M, 64K, 5 MHz Z80B, dual 650K 8-inch floppies. Bought Turbo Pascal 1.0 for this platform - worked like a charm. US $ 49.95, one floppy, single pass compile/link. MS Pascal at the same time was US $300, 3 floppies, nonstop floppy switching to compile then link.

Learned dBASE III+ at my first and only conventional engineering job. Found the programs impracticably large and slow for the XTs of the day. Switched to FoxBASE+ 2.10 - execution speed increased by a true factor of 6 ! I've stuck with all versions of Fox ever since.

I've taken community college courses in both PC assembler and C. However, the introductory courses basically concentrated on "Hello, world" type applications. Markus Egger has it right in his tagline - life is too short to try to get things done in low level languages.

Bottom line - tech background but basically self-taught.