A story of passion — from Merlin to the App Store. Forty years of computing, told simply.
My first electronic object didn't even have a screen: it was Merlin, a toy with red lights. I spent hours figuring out how it worked, reproducing the sequences.
“It wasn't just a toy — it was already the beginning of something.”
One Christmas, my mother gave me the Atari VCS 2600. Just one problem: no working television at home. So I salvaged a broken TV from the neighbours, opened it up… and repaired it. Pole Position, Crystal Castles, Kangaroo — everything became possible.
“I understood that you could understand things, repair them, create.”
My godfather, who worked at an international bank, brought me back from Japan a Nintendo Game & Watch (the game “Fire”, which I also used as an alarm clock for school) and a Casio calculator watch whose every key played a musical note.
“For a kid in the 80s, it was science fiction on your wrist.”
A neighbour owned a ZX81. What a shock. “One day, I'll have a computer.” For my birthday, I got the Atari 800XL: I copied lines and lines of BASIC. With no cassette recorder at first — everything vanished when you switched the machine off!
“When the program finally ran, it was a small victory.”
My first summer job paid for an Amstrad CPC 464, then came the CPC 6128 and its 3-inch floppy disks. We programmed, swapped tapes between friends, discovered. With my first dot-matrix printer, my very first printed message: “I love you mum”.
“It was more than text on paper — it was something tangible.”
My mother gave me a choice: VCR or computer? It was the Amiga 500, then the Amiga 2000, bought through hard work. With the QUARTZ group (Diego Fernandez, Sylvain Keygnart, François Mouret), we created demos that pushed the machine to its limits — even digitising images with a camcorder and red, green and blue filters.
“Now I was no longer just playing. I was creating.”
A job ad: “If you love playing, come join us.” An interview in a booth, on a NES. Hired at Nintendo France: hotline, shops, trade shows. Zelda, Mario, the Game Boy and Tetris — and the stars in people's eyes.
“I am exactly where I am meant to be.”
The Joystick & Joypad magazine on Minitel, then the legendary publisher Ocean Software — the origin of my nickname “Alocean”. Then Canal+ Multimédia: under the name “Mister Teknik”, I became a WEB-J on canalplus.fr, filmed live from the web studio, answering viewers' questions.
“Before Twitch, before YouTube… there was canalplus.fr. The ancestor of YouTubers and streamers.”
Then I founded my own company, Ordixpress, and spent time in engineering at Systra. Life's turning points, all the way to Switzerland.
In Haute-Savoie, I built websites for a hairdresser, for a friend starting his business. In Switzerland, a break from IT — but not an end. Self-employed, I did computer repair and IT training for the elderly: passing on knowledge, reassuring, making tech accessible.
“I never really let go of code.”
For the past five years, I have been supporting people with disabilities at the Les Perce-Neige Foundation, in the canton of Neuchâtel. A vocation from the heart, which directly inspires my apps: 🌈 Pictovista, 🌾 Koilia, 📖 BookVista… designed for accessibility and inclusion, and published on the App Store and Google Play.
“From the kid who repaired a TV and copied programs on the Atari… to the creator publishing his apps on the stores. The loop is closed.”
Nintendo, PlayStation, emulators: I never stopped playing. It has always been a part of me. And I know that somewhere… you understand exactly what that means. ☺️