My childhood was quite ordinary. I was an enthusiastic lego engineer and later as well an enthusiastic model railway fan.
With 12 or 13 I stopped my old hobbies very abruptly. In the following two years I was regularly irritated about what to do with my time. The chances to grow up as a frustrated teenager were high.
The Beginning
With this little computer, an old b/w TV set and my tape recorder as storage medium I learned quickly to write first programs in BASIC.
My visits on the outside of my room reduced to school and the computer departments of the big department stores. There I met like-minded persons and made first steps on other homecomputers. I became a computer kid.
With only 1 KB RAM, the ZX81 turned out to be too small for my ideas. The aquired RAM extension to 16 KB never worked reliably. My thoughts went in circles around the question whether I should switch to a Commodore VC20, the ZX81 successor Sinclair Spectrum or to the „big“ Commodore C64.
The Global Village
I started reading everything about acoustic couplers, modems in general, bulletin board systems and Datex-P, the german X.25 network. The desire for such a device became intolerable. In late 1984 acoustic couplers became affordable in germany. I bought a Dataphon s21d and the serial extension for the C64 userport.
Commerce
In 1987 I replaced the C64 with a CP/M+ system. After some publications of BASIC programs in a computer magazin and some experiences with dBase II and 8080 assembler it was clear to me that the next system had to be a PC compatible system.
I did my first commercial programming job with a newly aquired IBM AT compatible system in 1988 for a little but fast-growing software company in Hannover. I used dBase III/III+, CLIPPER '86/S'87 and Turbo Pascal. Since that time I permanently evolved my knowledge in computers, operating systems and programming and I'm still working on software projects.
Unix
In the end of 1988 I installed my first UNIX-like operating system. It was a Xenix/286 on which I started my private UNIX crash course. Some other people in Hannover started nearly at the same time with UNIX and it didn't took long until we joined and met regularly. Together, we explored themes like C under UNIX, curses, uucp, bnews, usenet maps, smail, cnews, emacs, X (at that time X11R3) an so on.
In the beginning of 1989 my Xenix machine was part of the german SubNet (.sub.org). Via uucp the machine had e-mail and UseNet connectivity.
It was also the Xenix machine on which I first experienced the PROGRESS 4GL & RDBMS. A few years later, at the beginning of the 90's, I worked some years in commercial projects with this database and 4GL system.
1998 till today
Do I need to say anything on Windows? Yes. I did a lot of programming with Microsoft Windows, C++/MFC, C and Visual Basic from 1995 to 1998 and I have to admit, I liked it.
When the iPhone 3G came to germany in mid 2008 I bought one, registered as an iPhone developer and started to code iPhone Apps in Objective C. iPhone programming is great fun and reminds me of the early days in which a single person could create complete solutions. This is completely different from my daily Java project work with big development teams, db admins, business analysts and multi month project plans.