I was born on 1981 in the former state of GDR which now belongs to the Federal Republic of Germany. My first experiences with Computers was on an Atari 2600 than changed two a C64 and finally to a PC in 1993.
Since that time it was a big part of my life.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I do not know if extraterrestrial life exists but we will never find out if we do not try to search for it. If there were dangers from searching for E.T.s you would have two stop all kinds of science because you could not know the resulting dangers.
I am running Seti@Home because my Linux Based Router gets bored by only masquerading some TCP/IP packets. I guess it is a good way to show what shared resources can do to help the science (you can see the success of this by watching the 'copies' of seti@home which search for medicines etc.).
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.