We are both here because my mother decided to give me a present when I was young. A Comodore Amiga 500.

But my first contact with a computer was my cousins Schneider with a green monochrome display. Their computer came with a manual, actually a book. In those days we were used to write our own games line by line from the book into the computer and play the game.

Then PCs. 286, 386 and wow 486 with turbo button. First with DOS, then we could start Windows 1.0 from DOS and before the safe shutdown we had to write "park disk" in order to save the hard disk reading head touching the disks.
At school, we had to learn to make our own boot disks on 5.25" floppies as the computers had no hard drives.
Some time after school I bought my first own computer. A Pentium 1 with 333MHz. That was when I got my first computer virus. This virus was bad, it erased the board EProm and made it unusable.

Then came the internet.

Starting with V90 technology, I discovered the Internet in the late 90s. I remember like it was yesterday.
I was a complete beginner and a friend of mine helped me to connect a modem to my first Pentium computer. After a lot of carrier noise, the computer was finally connected to the Internet. There was no Google yet, so he showed me Altavista and said: "Now you can search." Search for what?
But I adapted quickly to this new idea of information delivery, and soon I was curious about how these websites were built. So I copied the code, modified it and learned step by step how websites worked.

As I am a trained technical engineer, it took me a few years to turn this hobby into a profession. Since then I have gone through simple html and web development using jsp, java app development for the first smartphone prototypes, system administration including oracle cluster used for hospitality software.

My conclusion after all these years is that there are too many different technologies that basically do the same thing. What I try to do is to reduce the variety of technologies and systems to reduce the amount of training and maintenance.

Know I feel save about what I do with computers. I prefer Debian for everything and have fun with leaving nonesense as comment or variable names in code I write.
The best part is to start with nothing, a blank page and after a while have a product that works perfectly and does everything you want it do.

The whole idea of a personal computer and what it is used for has changed in such a tremendous way the last decates and I am glad to have had a front row seat to that process.

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

Robert H. Goddard
US physicist & pioneer rocket engineer (1882 - 1945)

Valentin Staubmann

IT-Engineer @ iqoqi.at