About Harri

My computer experience started it with the famous Apple II computer. I am still thankful to my father for being so progressive and willing to invest into such a machine at a time where nobody else around us owned a personal computer. And I am still thankful to my uncle for providing the machine to us. With the wisest choice ever: he did not hand over computer games until Christmas. Instead, all the floppy disks we owned for several months had software like VisiCalc, a word processor, and the like on them. No chance to get distracted!

My first contact with this computer? Very embarassing in hindsight. But note that this was really the first contact with a computer (other than a programmable calculator). At most, I had seen magazine ad showing a dad and his son happily playing Donkey Kong on an Atari. So when the computer booted and showed its prompt, not knowing what to do with such a device, I naively typed in my name and watched out what the machine would answer:

> Harri Porten
Syntax error.

So my name translated to computer language is “Syntax error”. Great discovery!