I like options. And contingency plans.

So I've been adding development tools to my Windows partition (currently stuck on Windows 8 since the 8.1 upgrade won't play nicely with my Win 8/Fedora dual boot).

I upgraded Strawberry Perl, added Ruby and Node, made sure I had the full JDK 8 and removed an older version of Python. I downloaded a new Python but haven't installed it yet (mostly because I'm not using Python at the moment).

I also have Netbeans ready to install, and I'm thinking of giving Geany a try in Windows. I use it a lot, especially these days for Java because I can compile and run in the editor. Otherwise I use Notepad++ for my editing.

I don't have everything working on this side, but I can certainly mess around with Perl, Ruby, Java and JavaScript. I know I could get a full Linux command line environment with Cygwin, and while I'm not yet ready to say that defeats one purpose or other, it's not something I'm considering at this particular moment.

That's me on an ADM-3A terminal at UC Santa Cruz some time in the late '80s. I'm using whatever version of Unix the university had at the time. I can see from the screen that I'm running the talk program with one of my friends on UCSC's Unix B system.

Unlike the other Unix machines (all named with various letters), Unix B was open to anybody who wanted to start an account.

With the help of a photocopied manual called "Unix for Luddites,"available for a couple bucks at the campus' Bay Tree Bookstore, you could learn vi for writing, nroff for formatting and a smattering of shell commands to get your papers printed on a mysterious, before-its-time laser printer somewhere deep in the campus computer center. Your work would eventually end up in cubby holes for later pickup.

While the ADM-3A was the coolest, most retro-looking terminal, even back then you were a little lucky if a DEC VT100 (or similar) was available. Its screen was green and clearer, its keyboard less mushy.

You were really lucky if one of the even-newer Wyse (unsure of model numbers) terminals was in your college's computer room (or the college next to yours; though a Porter student, I gravitated toward Kresge's much better computer lab/room). The Wyse terminals had amber screens that were even clearer than those of the DECs and (more importantly) featured nice, clicky keyboards.

But for sheer design, the ADM-3A was (and is) a classic.