OSfOM

Moin,

I'm Markus, in my mid-fifties, and I live in southeast Lower Saxony, Germany.

In the early 80s, I was very lucky that my school offered "computer science classes" – mainly because it was a hobby of the headmaster, who, logically, also became one of the teachers. In the beginning, I remember a room with "medium data technology" that had an 8" floppy drive, three terminals, and a CBM. Later, the first proper computer lab was set up right next door, with Apple II and TA CP/M computers.

My first computer was a C=64, which I was able to treat myself to in the summer of '84 through hard work (digging up and cultivating about 150 square meters of lawn in the garden :)). As an oddity, it came with a green monitor right away :). Thankfully, my father wanted to build a fence around it a bit later, so the old rabbits wouldn't always munch on all the vegetables... the reward was a 1541...

After that, my C= journey continued with an A2000, which I bought for Christmas in 1987 – I had to scour pretty much all of Bremen to find a "2000er." A remarkable part of my 2000er era was ALF, who eventually joined. Well? Who knows the Amiga-Alf? With an 80 MB hard drive. I still remember the message during setup: "Wow! 80MB, that must have been expensive." (Editor's note: Oh yes!)

During my studies in the late 1980s, I also encountered Sun Workstations for the first time.

The next noteworthy station was an Archimedes 3000 in 1990 – that machine was also really expensive. Greetings from Seemüller Munich – and I remember there was a small shop in or near Landsberg that "specialized" in Archies.

After that, I continued with various PCs, became an OS/2 devotee (and, of course, a Developer Connection Member), an (ex)-Fido-Node, and an (ex)-BBS operator :).

I look forward to your comments and suggestions!