I’m seeing the potential danger that this blog becomes yet-another-searchengine-blog. That’s not what I have in mind, even though search engines play an important role in my (business) life. This blog is about getting older in cyberspace. Its working title was actually “coming of age in cyberspace” – but that sounded a bit silly for someone well in the second part of his Thirties.
Those few readers this blog might have out there may have wondered about the title :tz:. What does it mean? Has it to do with music? To answer this, I need to tell you a bit about an old friend of mine. He goes by the name of “Bern” or “Bio” or even “Bio-Bern” and – yes – he’s a musician. Bern is one of two hard rocking scientists who form the group Bodenständig 2000. Never heard of them? Check out some online samples – but beware, their style is quite unusual. It’s called Micromusic and is played solely using some vintage equipment like old Atari or Commodore computers.
Even though we scarcely meet these days, I know Bern more than half of my life already. Back in the early Eighties we were computer nerds, geeks, freaks. He still is – the last machine he fell in love with was the Atari Falcon – while I became “serious” (some substitute this for “boring” ). Actually Bern started a career in still-being-in-the-Eighties, which is quite remarkably.
Many years ago – before Al Gore “invented the Internet” – both Bern and myself were pretty active in bulletin board systems. The equivalent of PDF at that time were ASCII-text newsletters, formatted for a 80×25 screen. And it was back then, when Bern toyed with the idea of a newsletter called “Technozid – The magazine for the aging Nerd” (for the German Readers “Technozid – Das Magazin für den alternden Computerfreak”). He never published more than one issue, which is a pity and I wonder if he still has it. But this issue and the name he chose for it planted a seed in my brain, which is about to bear fruit now. Or so I hope.
technozid » Crossroads
[…] These consequences would have triggered other events. I would have met other friends, who would have influenced me in other ways. I would have never met Bern – the single most influential friend in my youth whom I met at a critical point in time – with the result that I never would have started to work with computer science. Most likely, being a sailplane pilot would have influenced my decision to pick my discipline at university. Probably I would have chosen mechanical engineering or aerodynamics, with a career path as mechanical engineer. I’m not sure about writing. I “my” universe I worked as a freelance journalist and bookwriter and still writing is an important part of my current job. I tend to think that in the “sailplane parallel universe” I would have started to write too – maybe for aeronautical magazines instead of computer magazines. Most likely, I would not have moved to another city for university. Sailplane society life is very demanding, and working ones way up the social ladder in a flight club is a time consuming process which I would have probably not endangered by moving to another city. The influences on my personal life – which I want to keep out of this blog for now – can be easily imagined. This blog – it would not exist either. Probably not a loss though… […]