My first love for the computer started with my first computer, an Atari, which I bought in 1986. It was a 520 ST, two years later followed by a 1040 STF, which, in 1994, I swapped for a Mega 4. I worked on those machines until the beginning of 1998, and they have served me flawlessly, five days a week, twelve hours a day.

The Atari was much ahead of its time. Nowadays it is normal even for PC users to have a fully integrated graphical interface, but that didn't come about until 1993 ("Windows 93"). The Atari had all that as early as 1985. So had the MacIntosh, of course, but Ataris were in those days among the cheapest computers. It remains an enigma to me how they still managed to lose the battle on the consumers' market.

In 1998 I switched to a PC on which I ran, initially, both Windows and , and afterwards only Windows.

In the mid '90s, after persistent prompting by a friend, I discovered the "wonder world" of C, the incredibly rich and flexible computer language. Computer languages are for writing computer programs which are supposed to solve problems for us, but like so many things which initially have a purely practical purpose, they can become an end in themselves. Especially C has a lot to offer along those lines. The language is so rich and flexible, that for any non-trivial goal there is an almost infinite number of ways to reach it. It becomes a challenge, then, a sport, to find the shortest, or the most elegant, or the most cryptic way. There are even contests for writing "the most illegible" C-code. In this respect, C is not unlike combinatoric play in chess and checkers - and it can be as addictive as these games!

The very few programs I wrote were mainly for the Atari. One of them was an important and extensive program: Okami, an offline mail/newsreader, written by Wolfram Rösler, but further developed by me. Hitherto I only wrote one Windows program, called Unit Converter, which converts imperial units into metric ones (very useful for translators!).