ARGE Informatik am GRG21-F21

About 1996/97 the computer science lessons started at my school, at that time limited to the 5th grade (9th grade) as a compulsory subject. Here fate set the course: The freshly baked and ambitious IT curator Herbert ‘Jumbo’ Muska came into my life as an IT teacher. He was characterized by an unconventional and effective approach to challenges in general and the teaching in particular. While the parallel group was programming fireworks graphics in Turbo-Pascal … we were doing … what actually? To be honest, I can hardly remember what the standard curriculum was, it was crucial for me that Prof. Muska knew how to promote the actual talents of his students and also liked to improvise. So it didn’t take long until I had my own workshop in the basement of my school, where I spent a large part of my free time playing around with old computers.

Together with other school colleagues, we founded the ARGE Informatik am GRG21-F21 [^url-grg-21] [^url-argeinformatik], and modernized our IT infrastructure on our own. As a first step, Prof. Muska organized the sponsorship of a newly equipped IT room, named after the sponsor Hewlett Packard “HP Center”. It brought us Windows NT 4 clients and an NT 4 server and thus laid the foundation for an initial, serious network and user administration.

Fig. 46 The “HP-Center”, a modern Computer Science Lab sponsored by Hewlett Packard

Fig. 47 My desk in 1999 in the “HP-Center”, the Computer Science Lab “EDV 1” sponsored by Hewlett Packard

Fig. 48 My desk as an system administrator in 1999: Windows NT4-Server with a HP SureStore CD-ROM server

Fig. 49 The network layout of the ARGE Informatik am GRG21-F21 in 2000 right before the construction of the new annex and the following move in our new facilitys

My online world also got bigger: Due to a cooperation with an internet service provider who tried to expand his network by radio and wanted to use our roof as a relay station, we were probably one of the first schools to be connected to the Internet with a 2 Mbit line, which was a sensation at the time. For mere mortals, as well as for me privately, there was 28,800 baud, later 56 kBit modems, and if you were lucky possibly 128 kBit ISDN connections …