Guy Gervais

I'm Guy Gervais, born in Montreal, Canada in 1969. I live in a suburb of Montreal with my wife and three kids.

I currently work as a software developer / sysadmin for a local company. I mainly develop LOB (line of business) applications and maintain many hundreds of thousands lines of Visual Basic 6. Our new developments are on the .Net platform, using C# and Visual Basic.Net on SQL Server.

I've also worked in C, C++, Pascal, Cobol, Delphi, Synergex DBL, Clipper, PL/SQL, a bit of Java and probably a few others I forget.

I've been doing this for a pretty long time; I started programming when I was about 7 or 8 when my dad showed me a little BASIC on his workplace DECSYSTEM-20. I believe my 1st program was something like:

10 PRINT "ENTREZ VOTRE NOM:"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "BONJOUR " + A$ + ", COMMENT ALLEZ-VOUS?"
40 GOTO 10

As for hobbies, I enjoy programming very much; I like to check out new programming languages (currently playing around with D). I like puzzles, enigmas and brain teasers of all sorts. I like to play video games with my kids and watch good movies and TV series with my wife.

Yes, the DECSYSTEM-20 was at my father's workplace. We had a terminal (with no screen, it used a roll of thermal paper... much to my chagrin, I couldn't use it to play Startrek or Empire. Colossal Caves did work though.)*

We connected to the workplace using an "acoustic coupler"... a very primitive modem in which you would put your phone. I believe it connected at 300bauds. We later update to a VT-52 terminal. I was pretty lucky to have access to all that "advanced technology" (well, for that time) at such a young age.

I learned English pretty young, before school. Many of the kids in the neighborhood where anglophones, so I learned a lot just having to make myself understood when we played together. I also remember watching kids TV shows like Sesame Street which would teach the alphabet and numbers in a playful manner. I also loved comic books (Batman, Superman and similar) and the English comics where much less expensive than the French translations.

While English is thought in schools, I find that it is insufficient for the children to become proficient in it.

• Interesting tidbit: While playing around with the D language, I learned that it was created by Walter Bright; the vary same that wrote the original 1971 Empire video game.

The forum needs a way to identify new messages... I hadn't noticed that you had replied to my profile, and only noticed it because I saw that Nicolas had posted an entry here.