Born in Lisbon in 1954, male, married university professor, of the MD-PhD sort; currently teaches medicine students to use word processors and spreadsheets.

Main hobby is was photography, with a couple individual exhibitions.

Many photos of mine are on Usefilm and DeviantArt.

Contributes to the English Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikipedia, Wikiversity and Wikiquote, where Xyzt1234 user pages exist.





38°32′06″N 08°10′30″W / 38.53500°N 8.17500°W / 38.53500; -8.17500

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This user

  • remembers smoking in buses, trains, airplanes and hospital infirmaries as a matter of course
  • flew on a DC-3, a Noratlas, a DC-6 and a Caravelle
  • flew a Chipmunk and a T-37 as student
  • remembers carbon paper, copy paper, and retyping an entire work because of a single typo
  • had his life saved by this new medication, tetracycline
  • remembers having thrived on unpasteurized cow milk
  • was considered badly retarded by his rather illiterate Portuguese primary teachers
  • remembers when there was no TV in Portugal, no FM, and only 4 radio stations
  • remembers using London-style red phone boots, double-decker buses and mail pillar boxes in Lisbon
  • remembers having sent and received telegrams
  • made standard 8 mm movies in black and white
  • made and edited 16 mm movies in color
  • remembers watching 70 mm movies
  • remembers when bikinis were still unthinkable if not forbidden in Portugal, and that many people sunbathed in dress or suit
  • remembers houses without bathroom (or kitchen, or plumbing) and still knows of many within a 2 km radius of his country house
  • was taught set theory, probability theory, algebraic structures and basic calculus in 10-11th grade
  • remembers when photocopiers were so expensive and far-fetched that stencil stayed an option
  • remembers that the poorest women and children went barefoot
  • knows first-hand that you have to kill if you want to eat (plants are alive too)
  • was born when world population was two billion something
  • once thought that the year 2000 was beyond his wildest imagination
  • once thought that autofocus was an interesting possibility for photo cameras
  • remembers calling operator to phone out of town
  • briefly operated a telephone switchboard
  • remembers Lisbon almost without cars and no outdoors
  • remembers the Tagus with dolphins and clear waters and seeing the bottom
  • received only the smallpox, polio and tetanus vaccines as a child
  • had mumps, chickenpox, measles, epidemic hepatitis and you name it and feels great, thanks
  • remembers taking six hours by car from Lisbon to Oporto, about the same to Évora and eight or so to Serpa
  • learned to use a slide ruler and tables of logarithms with six decimal places
  • remembers having used a time-sharing teletype with BASIC
  • learned to program with a Ti-58 calculator
  • this user's first personal computer was a Sinclair ZX80
  • this user first did word processing with LocoScript running on CP/M on an Amstrad PCW 8256 computer
  • used WordStar 4 as a text processor (though WordPerfect 5.1 was far better)
  • first computer at workplace was a Wang_2200
  • remembers colleagues who used punch tape and programmed directly in octal with the computer's console switches
  • used punch cards
  • remembers using MS-DOS 3.1
  • and Windows 3.0 and that it wasn't very good
  • was the sysop of a BBS he set up working
  • remembers when there were no ads nor commercial sites on the Web. And when there was no Web.
  • is a Civilization IV and Flight Simulator junkie and flies on the IVAO network
  • was a doctor when hearing the patient and a thorough physical examination were important and would have loved to have worked for the Médecins_Sans_Frontières, but thing$ being a$ they are...
  • this user etc.