When we (my wife Alisa and I) first arrived to Australia (15 years ago), we settled in West Ryde, where the rest of my family lived. First thing I bought was (surprise, surprise) a computer. There used to be a computer shop on Ryedale Rd where I became a regular :) As used to big electronics stores as I was, I was shocked when I was told "ok, I can get this computer assembled for you, come back in 3 days and it'll be ready". Three days? I wanted it right there and then. I've learned a thing or two since then :)

Not long after we arrived, Alisa and I both decided it'd be a good thing to earn Australian IT qualifications. Alisa enrolled in Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering at UNSW and I enrolled in Diploma of IT (PC and Network Support) at Meadowbank TAFE. I breezed through it, having more trouble with English than with subject matter. After I graduated (and assembled and repaired lots of computers for free) I started playing with a thought of my own business.

EUROBYTE was born! No, actually before EUROBYTE was born I went into a partnership with a good friend of mine. The business was supposed to be called Cyber Net. We (actually) went to Parramatta to register it (doing it online was just a dream back then), but we were told we couldn't register the name because it sounded similar to somebody else's business name. Bugger! We stood there dumbfounded… "What do we do now?" We weren't coming back for this. At the time we were still having this German mindset that didn't let us get a car, but use public transport instead, which back in 2000 was pretty much pain in the a… (now in 2013 some would say the same thing, but we don't really know as the aforementioned mindset has long gone and we're now driving a car like everyone else does). "Cybex Net!" Aha! Similar to what we wanted and still sounding like coming straight from the Star Trek, which we thought would be so cool and so techie. Cybex Net didn't travel far into the future. It turned out that this partnership wasn't a very good idea. I realised that some people are simply not built for self-employment. He's still a very good mate though.

I actually found my perfect business partner in my wife Alisa. EUROBYTE was born!

To be continued…

I'm finding it hard to believe that it's been (already) 20 years since I discovered my passion for computers. I used to live in Germany at the time, working as a TV technician. Btw I was toying with electronics as far as I can remember. When I was 6 years old I got this shiny robot toy, which could walk and talk and do other nice little tricks. We're talking 70s here, so this toy was a big deal for a 6-year-old boy back then. And what did I do with it? I disassembled it, took the electromotor out and used it in an attempt to build an aeroplane. So no wonder I ended up doing electronics in school and then ended up working as a TV technician as soon as I was out of the school. Now back to Germany… I still remember traveling from Nürnberg to Mannheim (some 250km) to visit a good friend of mine (another TV technician and electronics buff). He just moved into a new place and was excited to show me around. The first (read: only) thing I noticed was a white box with a monitor placed on top of it. "Is that a computer?" It was one indeed. And it was a "mighty" 386 PC with 1MB RAM (yes, you read that correctly… not GB but MB… imagine that?). I spent quite a few hours playing silly (as some would say) games on it. Needless to say, my mate ended up spending more time in front of his TV than talking to me… and I ended up spending more time in front of his computer than he did.

As you're probably guessing, I got myself a computer as soon as I returned home. It occupied the best spot at my place… with views, close to the heater and kitchen, and reasonably far from the TV (as I didn't want any conflict of interest). I purchased a number of peripherals as well: a printer, a scanner, a joystick, big speakers... Interestingly, although their prices have dramatically dropped since, the actual peripherals haven't changed much. That is in terms of how they look and how they work. What has changed though is how we connect them to our computers. Back then, you had to be very (with a BIG emphasis on 'very') tech savvy to be able to install a printer (for example), or anything else for that matter (hardware or software). There was no such thing as 'plug and play'.

These were the times of Duke Nukem and Descent and many sleepless nights :) These were the times of the (scary) black window called DOS in which you had to enter commands and instructions. These were also the times of so-called T-Online. I didn't quite understand that internet thing back then (and it wasn't really internet as we know it today), but I was happily doing internet banking, booking travels, and checking out tourist information about Nürnberg and surrounds. People around me were in awe with the computer. I remember a friend of my mum's asking me, now that I had this machine that knows everything, to find whereabouts of her cousin "whose name was such and such and who went to such and such school".

So, I found myself spending a lot of my (free) time on computer tinkering. I even joined the (long) queue outside Conrad (a German electronics store chain) wanting to buy Microsoft Windows 95 on the first day it was released. Soon enough I was assembling a computer for my brother… then for a friend… then for a friend of a friend… and, although there is no a clear separation line (or things are getting a bit blurry as I get older), I'm pretty sure it is around that time that my hobby became my life.