I will never forget the feeling of my glowing cheeks when I inserted the pac-man cartridge in my brand new Atari gaming console on Xmas Eve 1984 for the first time while the rest of my family who had gathered round the TV set was hoping that this new game device would not ruin the regular TV reception. This was so to speak the start of my interest in microelectronic.
             After two years time I advanced to my first real computer: the famous Commodore C64. As a result of this I spent the rest of Xmas Eve 1986 alone in front of a screen again arousing my parents' suspicion about the sense of this new technology.
             At the BG Eisenstadt I learned with Basic and Pascal my first programming languages at the age of 14. At that time collecting and exchanging games on floppy disks was one of my greatest pleasures for my friends and me.
             As I got older playing games was not that interesting anymore and so I quit the
             digital world until I had to use PCs during my studies at the BOKU Vienna. By this time in 1992 computers were supposed to make our life easier. An opinion I can't share from my experiences then because whenever you needed something especially quick for a lecture the computer used to crash and sometimes you lost data in the nirvana of Windows 3.11.
             But technology improved and today I can hardly imagine to have written my dissertation without electronic help like searching for books over the Internet or making coloured graphics from basic data.
             By the time I started to work in a civil engineer's office in 1999 Internet and PC had become an everyday tool. Instead of Indian ink we used AutoCAD for planning and 3D-visualisations for our customers.
             Taking a glimpse into the future of IT we will on the one hand hopefully develop machines that serve and obey man and not make him a slave of an operating system and on the other hand not get lost in the sea of information the web provides today.
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