That evening, the little one in her belly was kicking more than usual. It wouldn't be long now and, in his last letter, my grandfather hadn't hidden his desire to return home. All of this, in the darkness of those years, provided him with the light to keep going.

The radio struggled to tune in. There was interference and they could hear many planes overhead. The volume had to stay low and the lights at minimum. Finally the white noise transformed into a distant voice, and her sister-in-law also came closer to listen to the latest news.

"Attention, important news from the front. The ship Italia - formerly Littorio - was sunk this afternoon. No survivors. I repeat. No survivors".

A sharp pain. Darkness. A thud. It was his ship. He was dead. She was alone. With a little girl in her womb who wanted nothing more than to come into the world. And her beloved, young and handsome husband was no more. How many other things would life have to take from her? How much suffering? Why?

Her sister-in-law tried to revive her, in vain. Suddenly, the radio interrupted the news for a new announcement: "Correction: the ship Roma has been sunk - there are perhaps few survivors - the ship Italia was hit and severely damaged, but managed to reach safety. No casualties reported".

She opened her eyes. Perhaps, this time, things hadn't gone so badly. For a moment the joy of the news was overshadowed by the awareness that on the ship Roma there were many of their friends. But he was alive. And this, for her, was all that mattered. She stood up, with a small bruise on her forehead, and felt another reassuring kick.

It was 9th September 1943. The sea was magnificent. The island of Asinara was an earthly paradise and my grandfather's young eyes fantasized: "one day we'll come here, my family and I, to visit these places. Free". And while his imagination wandered, enemy planes began to fly menacingly over their fleet. He understood immediately and ran to his commander. From there, pandemonium.

Agitation, noise, ears covered. Waves of heat, fragmented by minutes of disturbing silence. Many things happened, but when you're trying to save your life, you move more by instinct than reason and memories tend to become confused. Only the orders, because in war you follow orders, remain objective and absolute.

The bombs were falling, the anti-aircraft guns couldn't do anything. The planes were too high and the bombs, dropped from 5000 meters altitude, were too fast. Some ended up in the water, some produced non-fatal damage but the ship Roma, their sister ship, split open at the second hit. The young sailor who dreamed of returning to his wife and daughter could do nothing but watch, continuing to follow orders and securing his own ship. Yet they all stopped and clearly saw what was happening. The bomb that hit the ship Roma produced such a blaze that it deformed the hull and many, very many died burned alive, before their eyes. But two of his friends didn't. Disfigured by burns, they threw themselves into the sea. Nothing could be done. They were too severely injured and no one could abandon their own ship. They screamed my grandfather's name, repeatedly, begging for help. The orders were clear and their conditions too severe. He watched them die like that, before his eyes. He never forgot and those screams haunted him for the rest of his life.

They managed to escape to safety. A few weeks later, he received a letter from my grandmother. The little girl had been born and was doing well. Because of what had happened and thanks to the birth of the little girl, he managed to obtain leave to return home.

However, it took time and, while traveling, he couldn't receive other communications.

As soon as he arrived in town, instinctively, he ran. The joy, enthusiasm, happiness of embracing his wife again and meeting his daughter were impossible to contain. The boots were heavy and uncomfortable, but he didn’t feel a thing. He was out of breath, but it didn’t matter. He had to run home. A casa sua. The war, in that moment, was far away. Mind and body, for the first time in so long, were in the same place. In the place where they should have remained. Free. Together.

Suddenly he met an acquaintance and greeted him. He seemed almost annoyed but, buoyed by the beautiful feeling, he stopped to exchange a few words.

"Condolences for your daughter. You didn't deserve this, with everything you've been through".

He had to sit down. A sharp pain. Darkness. A thud.

My grandmother's letter, with the news, was still traveling. His daughter, his little one, the one he thought about while his friends' ship was sinking, the one who gave him strength to go on in the worst moments, was no more. He would never hold her in his arms. He wept.

As soon as he managed to get back up, he ran to my grandmother and embraced her.

They remained like that - embraced and in silence - for an indefinite time.

The fateful day has arrived: today I turn 28 years old and celebrate the 20th year of owning a personal computer. Precisely on December 19th, 1987, I received a wonderful Commodore 64 as a gift, equipped with a recorder (not the famous Datassette, but a compatible one that often worked better than the original), two non-microswitch joysticks, and the famous "first cassette". What was it? It was a strictly duplicated audio cassette that one of the two Commodore stores in the city gave to those who went to buy a C64. It contained old games (the first one on side A: Pole Position) that were very popular at that time, and we all saw that first cassette as a symbol of owning a computer.

I did everything with it and tried to avoid letting it steal my childhood. However, my interest was so great that I collected countless cassettes, a beautiful floppy drive 1541-II (which, even today, I believe was a jewel of aesthetics), and so many games that would envy collectors. My favorite? Probably the legendary Zak McKracken which, almost twenty years later, I still haven't finished. Zzap was a must-read, and I fantasized seeing "The Games Machine" or TGM on newsstands, dedicated to expensive and unattainable 16-bit computers. The hidden dream? A Commodore Amiga, just like my cousin's.

After years of C64, my parents promised to give me an Amiga 500 if I did well in middle school (it was 1991). The promotion came, and with it, the Amiga. It was an Amiga 500 1.3, nothing special, but it was beautiful because... it was mine! :-) Unfortunately, I sold the C64 and bought a dot-matrix printer. It's still in use at a relative's house. Over time, I took many expansions: almost immediately, 512KB of additional RAM because I wanted to play "The Secret of Monkey Island," probably the most beautiful graphic adventure of all time. Then an external module with 4MB that allowed me to create many RAM disks and put my floppies on them, to avoid the wild swapping that was so popular at that time. I also took an external floppy and an "Action Replay" cartridge, but I never used it enough. Years passed, and I had the opportunity to try an IBM PS/1 at a friend's house. Although I wasn't impressed, I immediately understood that the future would be on a PC. The Amiga was mostly a gaming machine (in my perspective at that time), and I was growing up. I also remembered that my uncle had a beautiful 386 PC in the office, and it looked really professional. In short, I wanted a "professional" computer too.

It was in September 1993 that my first PC arrived: an Olidata 486 DLC at 33 Mhz. I think it had 4MB of RAM and 120MB of disk, but I wouldn't swear to it, it's been a long time... The processor was a Cyrix and was famous for having a bug for which you had to disable the cache to run some programs in protected mode, penalizing performance. Obviously, it was one of the few 486s without a math coprocessor (which I emulated, with terrible results, via software).

A year later, my first laptop arrived: a Compaq Contura Aero 4/25, a really small and lightweight sub-notebook. It was fantastic, I loved it: its gray-tone LCD screen was almost illegible with so much light, its trackball was inconvenient, and it tended to break the screen hinge, but... it was my laptop! It was a 486SX/25, had 4MB of RAM and 85MB of hard disk. The novelty was that it didn't have an internal floppy but an external one that could be connected via PCMCIA. I wonder if it still works today, maybe on my modern laptop! It was around that time that I became interested in networks. It was the era of FidoNet, and I connected once a day (sometimes twice) to download mail and messages. The calls, strictly long-distance due to the absence of BBS in my city, were always quick, so I didn't have a big impact on my bills. I became a national moderator of VREALITY.ITA and a co-sysop of a local BBS. I was only 15 years old, and none of my friends understood exactly what I was doing and avoided asking for information not to be faced with an incomprehensible monologue, but... I liked it, and that was enough for me.

I openly (almost) attacked Usenet because, in my opinion, it would have induced many incompetent people to participate and, in return, greatly worsened the quality of the conversations. I thought that the Internet was too "dispersive," suitable for general use but not very technical. In part, I was right, the dispersiveness is there, but we have still found a way to have our space and avoid too strong "overflows." However, the fact remains that today, the Internet is accessible to everyone, and the mother of idiots is always pregnant. The conclusions are obvious...

I won't go into the description of all the hardware that has passed through my hands in the following years; it would be impossible and too boring. Perhaps the noteworthy moment was an unspecified day in September 1996, the day I saw an advertisement somewhere that for 10,000 lire, they would send you a box set with six CDs directly to your home, including a "free" and "open-source" operating system. I ordered it, curious. A package arrived containing an archaic Red Hat and a Debian. I did some testing, but I decided it wasn't for me. I still had a way to go (and my Internet connection was still too slow).

I decided to try GNU/Linux again in 1998, before enrolling in university. I put Debian inside, and this time, I was really hooked... the rest is recent history, and I don't feel like telling it. It should be quite clear from what you read on these pages.

I've seen things change, I do things that I couldn't even imagine five years ago, and unfortunately, I don't do some things that would have seemed obvious a few years ago. Anyway... happy birthday to me! :-)