Question: "Close your eyes and picture yourself at 4 years old on the floor of your room - what are you building or creating? What's around you?"
I'm sitting cross-legged on the braided rug my grandmother made, arranging my wooden blocks into a classroom. Each block is a student, and I've given them all names - Tommy, Sarah, Louise. My favorite doll, Mrs. Henderson, sits in the teacher's chair I've made from my music box. The afternoon sun streams through the lace curtains, making patterns on the floor that become the classroom windows. I can hear Mom grading papers in the next room, the scratch of her red pen like a metronome. I'm teaching the blocks their ABCs, using the same sing-song voice Mom uses with her real students. Even then, at four years old, I knew exactly who I wanted to become.

Question: "What is your earliest memory? What feelings or sensations come to mind when you think of being a small child?"

My first memory is standing on a wooden stool in Papa's bakery at four years old, my small hands deep in dough while the pre-dawn world slept outside. The warmth from the stone oven wrapped around me like a blanket, and Papa's rough hands guided mine, teaching me to feel when the dough was ready - not too sticky, not too dry, just alive under our fingers. The smell of yeast was so strong it made me sneeze, and Papa would laugh, his mustache white with flour. Outside, Lyon was still dark, but inside our bakery glowed golden, and I felt like we were the guardians of morning, preparing breakfast for the entire city. That feeling of being awake while others slept, creating something essential with my hands, it settled into my bones that morning. Even now, at 72, I wake at 3 AM without an alarm, my body still keeping baker's time.

Question: "Tell me about your home in childhood. Do you remember your room or a special corner where you liked to spend time?"

Our apartment in East Berlin was gray concrete outside, but inside my corner was a universe. Behind the heavy green sofa, I'd built my laboratory - cardboard boxes became computers, drawn-on with markers to show buttons and screens. Father's old radio, taken apart and spread across newspaper, each component labeled in my five-year-old handwriting. Mother would find me there, surrounded by wires and questions, trying to understand how voices traveled through air. The window above my corner looked out at the TV tower, and I'd imagine signals bouncing between it and my cardboard machines. In 1964, technology was magic, especially in the East where we had to imagine more than we could access. That corner smelled of dust and old electronics, of possibility. Even now, when I design systems, I'm still that girl behind the sofa, believing I can make voices travel through air.