Hi Helen,
> I am writing this post as a brief introduction to myself, for the group.
Nice to hear from you - that's an impressive history and one I respect deeply.
Having only written my first code in 1980, I'm a good couple of decades behind you, but always had computers as a core interest even though life took employment in other directions - at least until five years ago when I found myself able to look around and choose a job that I wanted, and I applied for a role in Exeter as a Linux Sysadmin. I still work there, an excellent company, and have expanded that core set with DBA training and more recently, cluster administration. Working with equipment that costs many tens of times that my car did is still a big thrill, and seeing 'htop' respond with 80 non-hyperthreaded cores, 512Gb of ram, and knowing there's another 12 identical nodes is pretty awesome for any tech person. My colleagues and I maintain around 200 linux vms as well.
I'm also a Debian person at heart and run it at home on a couple of servers, although EL is my professional toolset. But with the recent nasty political changes in Redhat since IBM bought them, we may yet end up embracing debian there, too.
Anyway, welcome to the list, I think you'll fit in just fine.
S
