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In this part of my blog – which I will call “My Life Story” as a working title – I try to give you an insight into my life so far and how it came to establishing this weblog and my preference for Microsoft Excel.
This “Life Story” is structured into several parts which are
- The early years and a electronic bread box (1974 until 1987) - this page
- Dufferent places and new people
- Education worth some 1000s (1991 until 1994)
- The hard times (1995 until 2000)
- South to the sun (2001 until 2005)
- The present times (2005 until today)
The early years
I was born in 1974 in Hilden, a small village in the Rhine area in Germany. That was the yeat when Germany became soccer world champions for the second time, the year of “Rumble in the Jungle” when Muhamad Ali became champion against George Foreman, the year when Nixon gave up his presidency and Gerald Ford became the 38th president of the United States.
To be honest, I didn’t notice very much of all these things happening, I think I was to busy with getting fed, sleeping and trying to make my first steps and sounds throughout my parents house.
From the first years of my life I only remember that we lived in a nice house with a huge balcony in a small town near Duesseldorf, called Meerbusch.
The first big change in life when my parents forced me to go to school. It was all so nice at home, I was the prince in my own little kingdom and my parents were taking a lot of care of me. So why did I have to leave, why school and loosing all this exclusiveness? Well, to be honest, I liked school (in the end).
One other remarkable thing I do remember was when I got my first computer. It looked like as a child I always was a little bit tech-savvy because although it was forbidden to me to touch the VCR (we had a VHS one) and the TV I was able to explain these things to my father when he was totally confused with programming the video recorder for some Formula 1 races (yes, he was a big fan of that). Maybe this was the reason that I received my first computer at the age of ten from grand parents who lived in Berlin.
It was the famous Commodore C64 – often referred to as the bread box because of its look – which at that time was very popular in Europe (I am not really sure about its popularity in the US and other parts of the world). It had an amazing 64kB RAM. Mine was equipped with the luxurious data storage option of a FDD (floppy disk drive). My best friends C64 only had a so called Datasette (which is a concatenation of Data and Cassette) which run on tapes. If you by accident put one of these tapes in your cassette recorder you could hear a cacophony of sounds very similar to modern fax machines. This machine was so funny and lightyears away from a graphical user interface (GUI). And still, it was addictive. My grand parents where very generous to me and also booked some private lessons from a young student who not only showed me general things about this machine – i. e. loading a program started with the line LOAD"PROGRAM",8,1 – but also the very first steps in programming.
The programming language for that computer was BASIC (no, not Visual, not Quick, not anything else, simply BASIC) and you didn’t need a compiler or something similar. You switched on the C64, which was usually connected to a TV, it was there (no booting necessary) and you could start programming. But in the end, this was not what the C64 was famous for. Its popularity came from Gaming (not so far away from todays situation). There was and is a huge amount of games for this little box available. Classics like Arkanoid, Uridium, Bubble Bobble and Gauntlet became popular first on this computer. It were amazing times, because another advantage of this machine was the fact that it was capable of playing three voices at once. All these tecchie sounds that became again so popular as ringtones have all been invented on Commodores C64!
You could also program relational databases on it as well as do some advanced programming with sprite movements and collision programming which I had at least the chance to sneak into.
As you can see from the length of these paragraphs, the C64 influenced my whole life strongly. It introduced me to the world of computers in general and from todays perspective I have to say, it was a good school that we (yes, my friends also had some of these computers and they have been excited seeing the difference between floppy disk and Datasette) went through. It made learning some other computer things in the end much easier becuase the first graphical user interface for the C64 – called GEOS – was published years after I have been presented with my first computer. Today, I still have a C64 emulator on some of my machines (oh my god, is that really plural I am writing in?) and it always throws me back in time whenever I turn it on. In case you are interested in a virtual C64, take a look over here: C64 Emulator overview.
Next will be Part 2 about the seondary school years, a movement to the Eifel and working in the school magazine project.