The Beginning (1985)

The adventure started for me back in 1985. After months of saving money and devouring piles of computer magazines and brochures, I finally made the decision. On the advice of a salesman at Dixons, I bought my first real machine: a personal computer with an Intel 8086 processor.

Once home, I carefully unpacked everything and connected it all according to the manual. Full of hope, I pressed the large red switch on the front. The beast came to life. The room filled with the hum of the power supply, a lot of beeping, and the typical crunching sound of the boot procedure. I thought: this is it!

But reality was a cold shower. I stared at a black screen with a lonely, blinking green cursor. You have to imagine: there was nothing of what we consider normal today. No Windows with colorful icons (there wasn't even a mouse). No internet to dive into the world. Did I get stuck? There was no Google to look it up and no YouTube for a quick tutorial. No forums, no social media, absolutely nothing.

I was digitally completely isolated. Armed only with a manual as thick as a phone book and a healthy dose of desperation, I began a journey of discovery. A scavenger hunt that grew into a passion, which I will tell you all about in this blog.

From Blinking Cursor to Server Room

Over 40 years after that blinking cursor appeared on my screen, things have grown—through much trial and error—into a fully automated home. My meter cupboard now looks more like a server room, running everything from Home Assistant to media data servers within a Proxmox environment.

But before everything worked as I envisioned, I learned a lot—and got frustrated even more. The tutorials and explanations I found online often turned out to be just slightly different from what I needed. Why? No idea—but that’s how it was.

In this blog, I take you through all those setbacks, because that is precisely where I learned the most. Expect stories about problems, failed experiments, and hard lessons, because success stories are rare here… but all the more valuable when they happen.

What Does the Future Hold?

I am currently busy preparing for our new home. The plan is to do it right this time—better than all previous attempts where I started with conviction, only to discover halfway through that my ideas weren't practically feasible. Scripts that didn't quite understand my intent, software that proved stricter than hoped, and systems that constantly remind you that ultimately, it's still just a 1 or a 0.

In the new house, I want to approach everything differently. The foundation will be a solid homelab, with as many local AI models as possible to make the house smarter. No dependence on the cloud, no worries about whether that one server is still running, but systems that monitor themselves. AI that observes, learns, and where possible, solves problems independently—without me having to intervene constantly.

In the coming period, many blog posts will cover this: choices, failures, improvements, and hopefully also what does work. The bar is set higher than ever, but that’s exactly what makes it interesting.

At least as important is that it doesn't just work technically. The house must also be logical and pleasant for my family. They need to understand what is happening, not have to fight against it, and above all, experience it as a useful and valuable addition to daily life.