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My first contact with a computer was around 1987. My father was working in a big corporation as an accountant and I had the opportunity to pay him a visit during one full day. I had a school assignment that consisted in writing a stage persona of the character I was about to perform in the theater group. My dad showed me the word processor Lotus Manuscript, which was in these times in its infancy, and explained me the commands for writing a title, a paragraph, highlighting some text in bold and italic, and how to switch between input and print preview mode. That was really magic to me. People who only know our current word processors that work according to the WYSIWYG principle (what you see is what you get), will have a hard time to understand how fascinating that must have been. Anyways, back in school everybody was impressed by the professional look of my text and I was so proud to tell them, that I had actually written it all by myself on a computer.

Later, when my dad was allowed to take home a laptop computer, he introduced me to Lotus Symphony, a spreadsheet software that allowed me to do some crazy calculations. Like Lotus Manuscript, it was running on DOS, so the user interface was very far from graphical.

Then, I think that must have been in the early 1990's, came Windows 3 with its graphical interface, the computer mouse, and loads of new programs like the word processor Ami Pro, the vector graphics editor CorelDraw and the database software Borland Paradox. While my friends were attracted by the games on Commodore or Atari, I was absorbed by fully professional software.

One day, my dad gave me a task. The new company he was working with had a database mess: their customer database was split in several regional databases for performance reasons, and in order to send out the monthly mailing to the customers, they had to reconcile these data sets in one master database. That would mean at least half a day of work for one person. With the new Borland Paradox, the quantity of data was no longer a problem, so I had to reconcile the data once and for all, reorganize it in relational tables and automatize the mailing process. The company would pay me for that. This task seemed overwhelming and I remember asking my dad in disbelief whether he honestly thought I would be able to do that. His answer was clear: "I am fully confident you can do it". He gave me the Paradox manuals, a series of 5-6 books totalling several thousands of pages and weighing around 2-3 pounds. Programming was an essential part for fulfilling this task, so I had to learn the programming language ObjectPAL hands on. Needless to say, I was up to the task and once the program was finished, I had to write a manual for it. Looking back, despite all my modesty, I think I did an excellent work, of a professional quality. I was also very proud that the person who had to spend half a day per month, could do the same task by just pressing one button.

Around 1995, everybody started talking of the world wide web. I was studying at the university and asked where I could access it. Almost nobody knew where the computer room was but I finally managed to find it. We had several Macintosh SE and later Macintosh LC II in one room and I learnt html and a programming language to make web pages interact with a database. That opened a whole new world to me. Even though I was not taking any computer classes, I was one of those always present in this room, whenever I had the opportunity.

To cut the long story short, after finishing my studies, I got a job at a computer school as an instructor. I was really happy that I had turned a hobby into my job. It helped me deepen my knowledge in computer science and get acquainted with Linux and other open source software. Since then, my personal computer has always been running one of the many flavors of Linux. First it was Mandrake, then Ubuntu and now Linux Mint.

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