SWISSDIGITIZATION.CH

My mother worked a few hours a week for the church and had to maintain a membership file there. She also looked after the membership file of her gymnastics club there (SVKT Women's Sports Association) on that computer. I guess it was a Commodore of the VIC-1001 series, but it was already equipped with a floppy drive. I saw the computer once, but was not allowed to do anything with it. I still remember her story that it took her half an hour to copy a floppy disk. And for that she had to change the floppy disks umpteen times. 

The two years older neighbor boy got a Commodore C64 and so his computer was my first active contact with a home computer. At first, the neighbor boy just had data cassettes that were the same format as music cassettes. Later, either at Christmas or his birthday, he was given a 5 1/4 inch floppy. I was often at his house and played some games there or watched him playing. We played World Games on his computer a few times, which had the advantage of including multiplayer. I may also remember that he had an Asterix game (Asterix and the magic cauldron), which fascinated me a lot. You had to fight Romans and hunt wild boars in the game.

I also got my first taste of the Lucasfilm adventure game Maniac Mansion there. However, I could never play it with him. But he showed it to me. I still remember the scene when the mummy appears in the bathroom behind the shower curtain and the existence of a green and a purple tentacle in the game. One of them is supposed to be friendly, but I found them both creepy and peculiar. At first, I didn't even understand what a tentacle actually was. (The concept of an adventure game fascinated me a lot, but I had to be patient until I had an Atari Mega ST 1 before I could play an adventure game myself.)

Because of my experience with his computer, it was clear that I also wanted a computer.