My personal journey with computers really began in 1995. A year prior, I was enrolled at the University of Leipzig studying to become a certified translator for Russian and English. As an elective, we were offered an introductory computer course in the university lab. This was the pre-Windows 95 era—likely Windows 3.1—where navigation required typing abstract command lines. I understood absolutely nothing. The instructor eventually assigned us homework on floppy disks: find someone with a personal computer, install the software, and run a few basic tests.
The only person I knew who owned a PC was my brother-in-law Peter, a lawyer running an insurance agency in the Ore Mountains. He agreed to let me use his computer, though he was understandably uneasy about it. Sure enough, during the installation, his entire agency system crashed. It was a deeply traumatic experience for me, and I refused to touch another computer for an entire year.
The turning point came during a summer job driving heavy trucks—a license I had obtained in East Germany as a teenager. Working for a freight company, I noticed a clerk operating a PC in our small office. One day, she introduced us drivers to a mouse. A graphical user interface where you could simply point and click—it was a completely foreign and eye-opening concept to us back then.
