Design
In the 90s I started using Pagemaker, Photoshop and Macromedia Director. Later accompanied by InDesign and Illustrator which mostly relieved the old tools – mainly Photoshop. And today new tools are taking over: Sketch, InVision and sooner or later UXpinStudio.
When it comes to office communication and project planning, Visio, PowerPoint, Word and Excel are the standard tools I use.
Programming
In 1991 I started playing around with Turbo Pascal on a then state-of-the-art 386-PC. By the end of 1996 I found myself programming in the tremendous Lingo (Macromedia Director), which was again replaced by ActionScript 2/3 (Adobe Flash) later.
Doing more project management and administrative stuff starting around 2000, a little bit of HTML(5), CSS3 and some JavaScript and PHP helped me keeping up with the dev guys.
But the best of learning to program was to learn the language programmers speak – not only in terms of code -, but more how developers think and approach issues. Today there are some very handy animation and interaction tools: Principle, Origami and Axure.
Systems
To my pleasure – after using MS-DOS and Windows – I luckily got to know an Apple Macintosh in 1998. Since then I had worked on machines running Windows and macOS and iOS – with some minor experience in Linux.
If you feel like looking for the tools I on a daily basis now, feel free to read my blog post on macOS setup and tools.