Grew up in New England, spent a few years on a Navy submarine (WWII vintage) and then moved to AZ to finish a degree in Chemical Engineering in the mid-1970's.

Spent hours in a room filled with card-punch machines building card decks to run batch FORTRAN programs for class. In one of our labs we had a DEC PDP series computer - all of the I/O was through a teletype-like keyboard with a long roll of paper. Both input and output were typed onto that paper roll - no monitor. Programs were stored on and loaded from long thin strips of paper punched with holes. Had to make sure you made a new strip once in a while because the holes sometimes got worn or torn and generated errors.

In the early '80s I bought a Times Sinclair 1000 computer for about $80. http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html Came with 2K RAM (that's right- 2 K!) that could be expanded with a plug-in RAM module up to 64K. Programs had to be stored on a standard cassette tape recorder - nightmare!

I started working for a large energy company and was thrilled when I got a dual-floppy IBM PC that could run Lotus 1-2-3 and IBM DisplayWriter software. Taught myself some assembler language and wrote a bunch of goofy little utilities for my own use - had to write one to convert DisplayWriter files from EBCDIC to ASCII because the files often got corrupted.

Thought I was in Heaven when I was given an IBM PC/XT with a 10MB hard drive - couldn't image how I would ever use that much storage!

As my engineering work took more and more of my time, I had less and less time to learn and/or program in the newer languages of the time(C, Pascal, etc). Now I manage a pretty active R&D program for my company and am basically a user/consumer of software rather than an author.

I do still look for and try lots of software and really appreciate the experience and recommendations of all the other DC folks.

I've got PaperPort 11 (not Pro) and OmniPage 15 Pro both at home and at work. I've got a Canon 5000F flatbed scanner at home and a Canon 2050c document scanner on my desk at work. I do quite a bit of scanning at both places, but what I really use PaperPort more for is document management - and mostly for documents that are not scanned, but are typical text document, spreadsheet, PowerPoint type files that either I or my colleagues created.

Once you've told PaperPort what drives and folders to look in on your computer or network, it displays thumbnails for the files it finds - not just stuff that it scanned.  It knows how to display quite a few file types. Because I organize my files in folders by project or technology, I can usually get to the folder I need pretty easily - then it's just a case of browsing the thumbnails until I recognize the file I'm looking for. At that point you can display a larger view of it in the internal viewer, or you can open it in its normal program. There are buttons for the normal file manager functions like arranging by name, size, date, type, etc, but you can also drag the thumbnails around on the screen to arrange them differently.

There is a file indexing and search function (All-in-One-Search), but I've found it to be pretty slow. I think that if it runs into pdf files that are images rather than documents, it tries to do an OCR first and then index the file. I normally use Copernic or something like that if I need to search for text in a file.

It does also have some basic image editing/enhancing functions, but I don't use them.

I've used OmniPage once in a while - for basic documents it works fairly well, but if there are very many fonts, columns, images, tables, etc - it has problems.

I can't remember which, but either PaperPort or OmniPage came bundled with the PDF Creator and PDF Converter - both version 3. I've used PDF converter a few times on simple documents. When I'm reseachting stuff on the web, I'll frequently send selected parts of web pages to the pdf printer driver and save the selections as individual pdf files. It's nice because they are searchable. Later, if I need to, I'll convert them back into a text document from which I can cut-and-paste. I also get quite a few protected pdf files, and it won't open them.

I've recently been using Jet Audio free version http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/jetaudio/ and it seems to be able to play just about everything I need.

At work I often stream Slacker.com http://www.slacker.com/. They have a downloadable player, but I haven't used it.