From time to time I suffer of Retro-Flashbacks… a very serious condition that can only be cured by sharing it with others 
So while I am ripping some old CDs in the background to preserve its content for eternity I share some screeshots of my old BASIC friends, which laid the fundaments of my later business life:
Lets start with Turbo-Basic from Rob Zale:
Turbo-Basic eventually became PowerBASIC and in that time I switched back and forth between PoweBASIC and Turbo-Pascal though always felt “at home” with BASIC.
Luckily I was priviledged to have a very good teacher (Dr. Kurt Salewski). He opened a whole new world for us nerdy kids. It was kinda “Dead Poets Society” but with very alive technology. Still going to school I’ve had the opportunity to develop small DOS helpers for a software company (checksum and file integrity tools for software distribution on diskettes).
And then everything was very fast. We’re in the beginning/ mid 1990ies. Windows 3 came along and I know I did not like it. For some years Ive resisted and loved my MotifUI in Geoworks but Windows95 (more NT4) marked the final switch to Windows twith Visual-Basic and laterVisual Studio.
And here we are now: 25-30 years later. Ripping all these CDs before they lose their strcutural integrity.
One last thing…
Here is the first appearance of something called RealBASIC 5.5 together with a keygen-tool, for evaluation only, of course. 
It’s taken from a CD burned in 2006, one year later I switched completly from Windows to Mac and bought of course a license.
Together with this boy:
So the old man stops telling stories from the great war… for now…
