In conversation with a colleague on IRC the other evening, I nipped upstairs to the machine room, scanned and uploaded this photo of myself and my colleagues at University of Aberystwyth Computer Unit, circa 1990, in the era when I was first fighting to make sense of DES S-boxes and trying to make E-expansions go faster.

I am definitely an old fart – kids today (ahem) would probably take for granted the ability to scan a photo and instantly have someone in the Netherlands looking at it a few seconds later. My cheap home ADSL bandwidth is more than 9 times what the entire University had at its disposal when the photo was taken.

Incidentally: I’m the tall guy, with the green jacket. The sad thing is to look back on that team now; I have a fair idea what’s become of most people since – friends, associates and bosses – and a lot of it does not exactly classify as pleasant. Some of it soap-opera. Rather too much of it verges on tragedy.

That’s life, I suppose…