I was born and raised in what was then USSR. I grew up with a computer architecture that was a Soviet clone of DEC's PDP-11; Russian and PDP-11 assembly were my equally native first languages. After being dragged kicking and screaming into the (much inferior to DEC) IBM PC-compatible architecture around age 11, I had been a DOS jockey for a while. In my DOS days I had studied everything there was to know about floppy disk copy-protection schemes (and the underlying physics of magnetic recording and the workings and idiosyncrasies of the standard controllers) in the process of developing Floppy Disk Analyser, a copy-protected floppy disk copying tool. I had also delved heavily into the world of 386 memory managers and the use of protected mode in the DOS environment (DOS extenders etc), and wrote my own MMM386 memory manager in the process. Upon reaching the independent adult status I had joyfully said "good riddance" to the PeeCee (pee sea) architecture and returned to my DEC roots. I have fully embraced DEC's VAX architecture (PDP-11's direct successor), but just the hardware part of it. Instead of DEC's OSes like VMS, I run UNIX - and not any UNIX, but UC Berkeley's original UNIX for the VAX. As the world's last known site still running a VAX 4.3BSD variant in full production operation and planning to continue doing so indefinitely, I have become this operating system's de facto owner. My personal interests outside of hacking are very diverse and range from cell & molecular biology to exopolitics.