IT & Internet

Right in the middle or just the beginning?

Since I first came in touch with a computer at the age of 10, I've been participating in the development of the PC quite from the start. Back then the standard was a so-called "IBM compatible" PC XT, driven by an Intel 8086 processor working with a clock speed of overwhelming 4.77 MHz. On such a machine I wrote my first Turbo Pascal applications.

Computer programming has always been one of my hobbies, and when DOS programming became more and more useless through the success of Windows 95, I switched over to the programming language Borland Delphi. This language made it easy to create database applications; for example I wrote my own CD database and a database to keep track of tennis tournaments and match results.

I also experienced the childhood of the internet. From the so-called "mailboxes" over FTP downloading up to the first browsers like NCSA Mosaic I recall everything with a smile, though it was not really that long ago.
The development since that time is amazing - when a 9600 bps modem used to be state-of-the-art in the beginning, today even 56000 bps are quite slow. Along with the speed of the networks also the contents changed, both its quality and also its quantity. Not long ago one had to search for a long time, today there's almost nothing you can't find on the internet. So it was only a matter of time until I had my own place on the world wide web.

When I went to college, along with my first email account came my first bit of web space. Soon I had my first pages online. The contents were all tennis related: "Joe's ATP Tour Statistics" and "Joe's Tennis String Forum" were my main projects beside my private homepage. Later, when commercially hosted web space got affordable, my projects got their own domains.

Continuously I improved my web design skills. "Joe's ATP Tour Statistics" was discontinued because of lack of time and I concentrated on "Stringforum.net", a place for tennis players who string their own racquets. The most recent of my internet projects is my private homepage you are currently visiting.