Stuff I made

A bit of History

I was born in east Germany (GDR/DDR) in March 1983.

1986

My Dad bought his and my first Computer: The C64.
He told me the basic commands on this machine, when I was 4 years old.

1988

Two years later he upgraded to a C128-D with 2 external Floppy drives.
(I wish we would have saved this machine, the disk library was huge!)
On this machine, I learned how to read and write discs and started writing little programs in Basic, when I was 5 years old.

1989

My Dad bought a used Commodore PC 20.
Sadly I never saw it, he gave it to my sister. 😉

1990

“Die Wende” – the big turn in Germany
My dad bought his first 286 IBM clone and was not happy with it.
So later he bought a 386 and I got the 286, my first PC!
I got used to Norton Commander, DOS commands and of course DOS Games!
EGA and PC speaker with a 12 MHz CPU…
Shareware loaded via dial up modem and BTX…  Apogee was King!
I was 7 years old and wanted more!

1991

Big upgrade!
My Dad went all in and bought a whole bunch of PCs for his first company LAN. A 486 Novell Netware Server and some 386 clients with DOS.
Got my first 386 with 25 MHz, but with VGA 256 colors now! Wow!
So many good games to play! BTX was the Internet of the time.
28 kbs Modem was glowing in the dark.
Wolfenstein 3D made the round…

1992

The year of new sound!
My Dad bought me the first Sound Blaster Card!
(And I still have it!)
Suddenly games had real music and sound effects!
What a blast! Dyna Blaster, Lemmings, Jill of the Jungle…
Windows 3.11 came around.

1993

Got my first 486 with VGA and Sound Blaster.
A friend of mine bragged with a copy of Turbo Pascal.
I took a copy and bought a big book to learn it.
Windows 3.11 had more apps to use.

1994

The year Doom arrived!
Doom was barely playable but it was King!
486 as mainstation and a 386 on my bed for lazy coding.
Had my own lazy network via Parallel LPT cable.
I wrote little programs in Turbo Pascal.
I was 11 years old.

1995

Doom clones and 3D was the hot stuff.
So much new games… most 2D…
I looked deeper into Turbo Pascal…

1996

My Dad bought me a Pentium 90 Mhz!
The year of Duke3D and Quake.
I wanted to make 3D stuff so bad, I learned how to create maps for both.
Created a bunch of programs in Turbo Pascal in the meantime.

1997

Everyone changed to Windows 95, but DOS was still around.
3DFX Voodoo cards became a thing and 3D was king from there on.
Turbo Pascal was already dying, but we still had no real internet.

1998

In our technical class, we build a Computer Interface on the COM which could lit up LEDs. Teacher told us to us MS Basic, but I used Turbo Pascal to compile an .EXE.
In a followed up class project we should build a team of 3 to create something with the interface.
I told my mates: Do nothing, I’ll just do everything.
The result was a fully working model of a traffic light at a crossing which was fully programmable at every possible state.
Teacher took it and used it as a showmodel for years to come.
I was 15 and I wanted to make games finally.

Later this year, I created this:

My fist game: MAFIA in 1998