SWISSDIGITIZATION.CH

My first system was the atari 600xl.

my dad got it on a sale for christmas with three games: pacman, quix and jungle hunt.

I was hooked from the first moment. We used to battle at pacman for new highscores and tried to reach new levels to find out what fruit would appear next. The joysticks were real crappy digital ones. We often had to repair them ourselves because small springs on the inside would break and render them useless. 
Sitting in front of our old Saba Tv and actively controlling what would go on there was magical!

Quite early we got a nintendo game and watch called greenhouse. It was obe of those two screen games. My dad and I would challenge each other for new highscores.

The biggest challenge was to reach 999 points, because we wanted to know what happened then.

The disappointment was huge when obe of us finally achieved that task. 997, 998, 999, 001 wtf?

it should have been clear, but still, after that the drive to go on playing was gone...

At the time I got my first "real" computer, an Atari 1040stf, almost no one of my peers had one, except a guy called Alex.

So we had both a computer with "Zack Mc Cracken" on it. We discussed for month how to get past the two headed squirrel, how to enter the huge pyramid on Mars etc. etc.

The other kids on the schoolyard just watched us and didn't get the appeal of ganing. We were the weirdos, the strange kids.

Today gaming is a huge industry, but back then it was just a bunch if nerds having fun...

When I was young we used to go to Naxos every summer break.

There was a restaurant at the harbour where we would eat often.

in the backyard they had an arcade with many of the classics. I loved arkanoid and frogger.

After dinner I got some Drachme coins and went to chase another score.

the player placed their coins on the lower edge of the screen to show ho's next in line.

when I could enter a new highscore it was an overwhelming feeling. It gave me so much joy to enter "DEE" Zoday I have no clue why I chose thise letters, but they remained the same.

During secondary School we just had changed tve computer systems from the zx-spectrum to mac classic.

we didn't really use the computers for much. Mac write and Mac draw were ok. We even produced a school paper with it. The secret hifhlights were Shufflepuck and Leisure Suite Larry.

Later on we didn't really use computers at School. We only programmed a bit BASIC with programmable sharp calculators.

My Performa 630 and later the G4 tower with a 17 inch screen I used mainly for gaming,

I even used to move the whole tower to a friends house for lan parties!

Then came the internet... I got a discette with the "ppp monkey" software and a piece of paper with magical numbers to configurate the system in order to connect to the internet with my 56 modem.

When I started Uni (SFA to become Secondary School teacher myself) I got a Mac Laptop via the Neptun programme.

it had a Dvd burner. Tha was incredible. My friends and I even made a short movie thanks to the tech.

now I'm a teacher myself and we use all technology available to us: macbook air, ipad, the Ultimaker2 3D printer, codebugs, makey makeys, thymios, everything!

i even teach courses in programming (scratch), CAD (fusion 360) and film (imovie).

Lots has changed in the last 30 years...

At School I had a friend who was really into Synthesizers. 
He had a tg-77, a juno 60 and a Bit one.

one day he needed space, so I bought from him the Crumar bit one. With my Atari mega ste 4 (48 mB harddisc), some midicables and a cracked version of Cubase i was ready for the musical world. But the bit one only had analog sounds. So I got myself a QY-10 from Yamaha as a general midi module and had so much fun with it. My setup was small and I could only record on tape. It was great!