Regarding "tech", I got into programming on the Commodore C64 (Basic, MOS6510 assembler) at a tender age, and moved to the Atari ST 520+ (Pascal, C, Modula-2, F

Regarding "tech", I got into programming on the Commodore C64 (Basic, MOS6510 assembler) at a tender age, and moved to the Atari ST 520+ (Pascal, C, Modula-2, Fortran, Forth). The former forced you to go into the weedly deeply if you wanted to use graphics programming, so I did. The latter was a beautiful machine to learn (32 bit linear address space!). I wrote my first game on the C=64, and my first compiler on the ST as well as a statistics package for a relative who used it for his quality assurance work at his job. Back then, if you wanted information, you had to hang out in the magazine section of the local bookshop, where you would eventually meet other people buying the same magazines. Each issue contained software (games, tools) as BASIC or hex printouts that you could type in. We would dictate each other the hex codes, swap cassette tapes (a music medium repurposed for storing programs and data) and share what we had learned ("Try POKE 650,128 if the cursor flashing bothers you."). I still memorize the memory map of the Commodore (what is where in the 64k memory cells 0...65535). To get hold of Linux as a teenager, I had to ask my mother to drive me to the nearest university in 1992, to be able to download 50 3.5" floppy disks worth of an early distribution (Softlanding Linux System (SLS)/Slackware). Because two disks were faulty, the whole process had to be repeated. I will never forget the moment the X11 logo appeared on my 33 MHz 80486 (4 MB RAM, yes that's "MB", not "GB"), which was especially purchased to run Linux. At university, I learned Scheme and C systems programming on "proper" UNIX workstations (HP 9000s running HP-UX 9.03) with 21" colour CRTs. After working multiple jobs on top of full-time studies, I was able to buy myself a refurbished HP 9000/715-75, which occupied most of my 9 m² student dorm room. Unlike any PCs that my friends used, this box ran for 6 years with no single crash. Today, I run an R&D team at a large international information company, where we conduct applied scientific research in machine learning, natural language processing and search engines.