They call me Ozzie. It’s a nickname from school that stuck with close friends – a playful twist on my last name.

I started to develop programs when I was ten years old, on a computer my parents got me, the Timex Sinclair 2068:

I spent most of the time typing in the BASIC programs that came with the manual and trying to run them. On each successful run, I’d then change some stuff and see what I could do with it. Fun times, programming and playing lots of Bomb Jack and Target: Renegade.

A few years later, my friends and I upgraded to our first home personal computers. I’ll never forget my first PC: a Goldstar (now LG) with an Intel 80286 processor, running at a blazing 8 to 12 MHz. In high school, I took programming classes where we studied MS-DOS, Pascal, and dBase.

Back then, there was no internet, but I still found a way to prank some classmates. I looked up their home addresses and landline numbers in the yellow pages, then built a simple MS-DOS program that displayed their information when I typed in their names. Luckily, the school’s floppy disk drive used the same 3.5″ format as mine. I saved the .bat file to a disk, brought it to school, and staged a fake “hack.”

The reaction was priceless—some were terrified, convinced I’d somehow accessed their private data. The idea that a computer could expose their personal details was unsettling. A few even reported me to the teacher. It was my first real lesson about privacy and personal data: just because information is available doesn’t mean it’s yours to use however you please.

Decades later, after working as a programmer, database administrator, and IT lead, I now find myself as a data protection consultant. Looking back, it feels like I’ve come full circle—from playing with data as a teenager to safeguarding it as a professional.