This one is Liar. His long nose is a give-away (sorry, it is not very clear on the photo). To impress people he embellishes everything he says.  His hair is made up of a net  full of smallish fish… that is all he can catch with his tall  tales. Sometimes I wonder if he believes his own stories. He certainly doesn’t look like a very happy person.

I started working with computers in the early eighties of the last century! I am showing my age now :)…  My first job was at a computer book publisher. I was the first person in the office to get a hard drive… the envy of the entire company.  All the others still had to fluff around with the “5 and a quarter inch” disks. If you have ever seen one of them, you know why they were called floppy. My dad bought his first computer in the late ’70s. A Commodore with a tape recorder attached as a storage medium… so a hard drive was pretty cool. But everything moved very quickly from there on.

I don’t reminiscent much about the times, I hardly have contact to my peers from then, but I clearly remember the gold rush aura that surrounded us. We were cool, man, and we owned the world. In reality we were pasty-faced nocturnal creatures, trying to find our place in society by simply creating a new one. Chat rooms were all the rage in our circles.  (Remember those prehistoric modems on which you had to place the hand-set of the telephone?)  The Web wasn’t invented then and there was no commerce on the internet, it was primarily a military and scholarly network. (By the way, monitors came in a choice of green or amber and when you wanted to create a graph you had to stack asterisks on top of each other, do I need to say more?)

In the editor’s room we had a bet going. One of the male editors had to pretend to be a woman in the chat rooms. To win the bet – a crate of beer – he had to keep it up for six months undetected. He won! This experience was quite an eye-opener and I guess it explains my suspicions of social networks.