I first got involved with SIGCHI in 1991, when I went to CHI '91 in New Orleans, since I had had a demo accepted. It was a great conference, and I got to hang out with some quite well-known HCI people in jazz bars in the evening as well. It was my first ever visit to the USA, which added to the excitement: only a few months earlier I had been for the first time to the (then still) USSR for the very first East-West HCI conference, as relations thawed under Gorbachev, and consequently I was on the streets of Moscow during the coup against Gorbachev. It was an exciting year for me in many ways.