In the past months of trying to figure out who I want to be I got pulled back to ground by the recent insight who I am. To illustrate this, I'll write a short series on what defined the person leaving Vienna in 2008.

Back in school, when I was about 13 or 14 I had little idea of computers, I didn't have access to one undisturbed (the only computers I had access to was a Mac I and a C64 both at our neighbors, and both at that time terribly outdated machines). We only used them to play games, since this was my friends interest. In our house though we had (I still have no idea why) some PM magazines focusing on computers (Dating back to the mid-end 80ies). They came with full listings of basic programs, hardware hacks etc. It was this horrible publication opening my mind to a different world of computers. A computer as a creative device.

Due to our schools curricula we received programmable calculators with the intention to do some BASIC programming and having something to do advanced math with. These were fantastic machines: I was the operator with a pocket calculator. I immediately started to type lines and lines of code. Fantastic worlds opened with this simple device. Some time later I got a 16MHz 386 (with astonishing 1Mb of RAM), someone in school had a copy of Turbo Pascal and the door in programming simple stuff for DOS was opened. I loved DOS, it was simple and clear. Some years later I received a laptop running windows 95. As big the step was hardware wise, I wasn't satisfied. I swapped a neat system I completely understood with something I didn't. Not being able to write programs that would integrate as easily as with DOS frustrated me. Entry Linux - I was immediately hooked on the promise of a system that is intricate yet transparent. I tried SUSE on my old 386 and since the 80Mb of hard-disk were pretty filled by a small install, I decided to ditch out folders I thought I didn't need - there goes /bin. Luckily I found a good book on sale including an old version of slackware and I started to understand the stuff. This also lead to the discovery of nntp and de.org.ccc. A post there started off a regular meeting in Vienna, including Jule, Steff and me. It took a while to get going and growing but soon I was connected to the active techies in and around Vienna. Some time later we founded a club with the primary goal to obtain some space to hack. The name: "Chaosnahe Gruppe Wien" in short CNGW.

It would be exaggerated to claim CNGW had any influence on anyone but the people immediately involved. However it increased my knowledge and it tightened the network of interesting people I was involved in. I started to enjoy tinkering with both hardware and software and thus evolve in the geek I was about to become.