1977; I was with my Mum visiting one of her friends. Bored out of my mind I poked around her living room and peeked underneath a cover, expecting to see a typewriter - it was a teletype terminal with the earcup telephone/modem receptacle, a stream of z-paper folds neatly piled up like some holy sacrament, with which my Mums friend was learning computing. She taught me a few commands, which I still remember and use today .. "ls" .. "cd" .. "cc" .. and she showed me a few lines of this 'new powerful language' she was learning, C. It was the first time I saw a printf(), and the precise moment I learned the real difference betweeen a \r and an \n and what it meant to the paper scroll, rolling underneath endlessly.

1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.

1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.

1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.

1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family had the foggiest clue what I was doing to burn those Ready's into the screens.

1987; I have by now become an Assembly programmer and a budding C hacker, and knew far too much about anything to be bothered continuing with my studies, so I drop out of high school and get myself a job on the only electronics assembly production line in Western Australia, at that time, at first stringing endless marine cable harnesses, then touching up a near endless stream of clothes-iron temperature controllers as they pour through the wave solder, and then eventually I get to touch-up the box full of Australias first home-grown modem product - which didn't work, until me and the hardware guys realized there was not enough space between various components near the connectors - necessitating a redesign, a failed schedule, and an abandoned project as the designers gave up in light of the fierce competition from Singapore and Hong Kong and so on. Well, I at least got a patched-up PCB to play with, and with that I taught myself how to write a MODEM driver - first for CP/M, the only operating system available to me at the factory, and then .. when I showed other engineers in the lab that it could actually work, for MS-DOS, on the brand new PC the factory bought for the purpose of demonstrating the one Australian modem that was ever made in Perth. I got paid handsomely for that project, my first proper terminate and stay resident program ...

1988; I arrive in Los Angeles, California, my skills having sharpened enough to cut my teeth on writing an undelete program for the funky proprietary filesystem that Progress/4GL was using to bypass all the OS cruft that got in the way of performance. Astonished that I'd gotten it working (it was easy), the company offered me another project, and then another, and then another .. and after a year, with a litany of things under my belt - a multimedia engine that made fancy graphics on CGA and EGA (and eventually VGA) without requiring additional artist fart'ery, I was ready for more. Always another adventurous thing to write/compile/build/run/test/debug. And so it was, one beautiful glorious afternoon, a brand new MIPS Magnum pizzabox showed up on my desktop, far from the operations room I'd usually have to card my way into, halon emergency mask lessons and all, and suddenly .. I was a Unix/C programmer, and I had daemons to write, systems integrity to check, and a whole set of legacy terminal-based software to port. I need another terminal, but wasn't getting one until I actually wrote the terminal, on the brand new PC that I was also using, less enthusiastically. I wrote the terminal, I used it to log on to my MIPS box, I gained access to the ops room from a grand distance.

1990; BBS'es had my eyeballs pretty much glued to the screen, day and night, and from this it was a short step onto the Internet. I spend every moment of free time parsing USENET, downloading code, getting it to work on my pizzabox, sharpening and refining things, such that my boss just gave me endless challenges to complete - no longer doubting that it would happen, but rather expecting it.

1994; I participate in building the technical backbone of one of America's biggest ISP's at the time, and after a few weeks of hair-on-fire T1 configurations, modem-bank alignments, DNS and USENET server setups, I sit back, turn on the wire tap, and watch as a veritable firehose onslaught of daily new customers from all over Southern California spend 95% of their newly gained online time, downloading porn. (Oh, and I subscribe to minix-list to get me some hot Unix action on my mostly-useless 486, and as soon as Linus' little project hit funet.fi, I am hooked, line and sinker, as a Linux developer.)

2000; I'm burned out, I have a room full of SGI gear, and too much money. Motorbikes, Hollywood girlfriends, trips all over the country. I decide, its time to make synthesizers.

2001; I move to Germany to work for one of Germany's greatest synth companies, and spend my idle time in the Ruhrgebiet learning German and writing firmware loaders, USB drivers, and other such mundane things. I make a lot of cruddy synthesizer music, I learn how Germans party, I find myself far too many distractions.

...

2026; I'm sitting here in Austria, surrounded by 40 years of computing history, which still works just as it ever did over the decades. I can count my productive, shipped userbase for various big commercial projects literally in terms of millions, accrued over the decades, but all I really wanna do is hack on 80's computers and make them valuable again.

I've introduced 40,000+ folks in Vienna to the concept of retrocomputing, giving them hands-on time with machines many of them have never heard of, let alone considered worthy of attention .. a pimped out ZX Spectrum 128+, an Amstrad CPC6128, and an Oric Atmos - each with peripherals designed and built in the 21st Century, to bring each machine up to date with such things as USB storage, class drivers for mice and serial lines, and brand new display capabilities. The microcontrollers in these peripherals are many thousands of times more powerful than the original Z80/6502 CPU's in the 40 year old computers they are serving bytes to, but this doesn't matter any more. The only thing that matters is the fact that there are still brand new software titles being written for these machines every single day. Yes, the Oric Atmos gets new stuff, the Speccie and the Amstrad too of course, and .. any day now .. the Atmos will have a browser, surf the web, download software - finally catching up with its peers in terms of capabilities.

What a wonderful journey its been. One day, all of these machines will find other eyes and hands to entertain, but until then .. I hack on. And on. With dreams of the Nullabor journey still etched in my mind, a never to disappear "Ready" prompt floating in front my eyeballs, its time to read a bit more Hacker News, dig into some of the great repos' from todays preening, and build some stuff.

Holy cow!! Tech has been like a coiling vine around the trunk of your life, and what a life it's been. The C64 was just one of your many computer branches. :)