Am I that old yet?!?

I just finished watching Netflix' series about Bill Gates. Impressive. Even more impressive to me: When I realized, that I was part of all that history! When I see the youngsters these days with their 1st world problems (Maslow pyramid step 0: WiFi), I think: guys... You have no idea!

I remember by the age of 7 going over to my friends house and his dad had this superexpensive PET with a matrix printer and he printed out a mickey mouse over 3 pages with ASCII Characters. Awesome. That was the time when I was sold. Sinclair ZX81, Commodore VC20 with the Datasette (Remember the sound that it made, when you put the tape it a regular tape player? Hihi...), VC64 (with Floppy VC1541, remember? Was almost as expensive as the breadbox itself + Hypra Load of course), Amiga... US Robotics Modems (I loved it, when the 28'800 came out... So damn fast...)

I used to have fights with my brother all the time, until that moment when we bought magazines with listings of some software in it. (Imagine: Listings over multiple pages and you had to write it down!!!) I dictated the lines (DATA 123,24,68,129,20....) and he wrote it. One heart, one soul. Our parents didn't believe it. We got so hooked, that they had to put a lock onto the attic door, where the computer was ;-)

Then the first XP PC's came along... A whole new world... The first computer club was founded in my home town - i was maybe 12 and a friend of mine and I thought: Hey, let's program a layouting tool to design some printed circuits... Oops. Was harder, then we thought ;-) Finally, ORCAD did the job...

286, 386, Math Coprocessor, 486... Atari/Amiga Fights (Marble Madness was the killer), the first affordable laser printer... And along the way came Windows 3.11. A game changer. If you imagine the innovation and the speed of new and better technologies at that time... Scary! Let's be honest - not everything worked that good, but the visionary ideas, that was something! I remember a computer course where they taught people how to use a mouse (the cable needs to face away from you). Babadush!

I also remember when I first used the internet. 1994. Nothing was there, expect some universities and "this-is-my-hamster-homepages". Remember the animated GIF "under construction"?. Yup, it was on my page as well. When I look back, I had sort of an idea, where this could go, but let's be honest, I never thought, that I was looking at the next world revolution.

When I see the world today, where the abstraction level of the metal goes further every day and think about the big WHY? I often think, is it really better today? Can we really solve the business problems faster? Is the management bullshit bingo "Time to market" not longer a boring sales argument you can't stand hearing all over again? (Remember VB6.0? That was Rapid Application Development. DLL Hell, yes, but you could get shit done.)

Answer? Yes and no. Coming from a time with the big monolithic apps (Say yes to Cobol :-)), 3 tier architecture, over to MVC Apps, Web Apps (Remember Flash, ASP, ActiveX, Java Servlet? ;-)) going to over Docker, Kafka, AI, ML, Tensor Flow, Hadoop&Co... Yes, we have a huge new toolset and a massive new world of opportunities, but what comes out of it at the end of the day? What are the real skills still required? What is the tradeoff, the new problems? Innovation, Ideas, brilliant minds, visionaries, that is still your main ingredient. Sorry mom, nothing changed there.

My message? Don't get lost in technology (although it's tempting), focus on your customers needs, understand him, solve his problems, put yourself in his shoes, think out of the box. Be lucky to have such a huge toolbox - the only problem is to find the right tool ;-)

And whoosh, you get up the next morning having survived the so called digital transformation...