I have a childhood friend to thank for introducing me to "Autobahn."  He
gave me a copy on a cassette tape when we were in high school.  This was in
the mid-1980s.  Always interested in electronic music, I started collecting
Kraftwerk's stuff -- on LPs.  (CDs were still too expensive for me at the
time.)  I spent many nights at the workbench in my garage in Fort Worth
experimenting with electronic circuits, and I even built my own vocoder from
scratch using the schematics from Paia Electronics.  I wanted to duplicate
that robotic harmonizing voice Kraftwerk used.  It worked, too.

I still listen to a lot of Kraftwerk's music, particularly "Franz Schubert"
from _Trans-Europe Express_.  "Numbers" from _Computerworld_ can, IMHO, be
called one of the ancestors of today's techno.

Another friend gave me an LP copy of _Rolf and Florian_, an album that two
of the original members of Kraftwerk recorded in the early 1970s.  It's not
very good music, but it does have a good picture of the two of them taking a
break in their recording "studio" -- which looks for all the world like a
factory basement.

There have been several remixes and covers of Kraftwerk's songs over the
years, and in some cases they're pretty good.  I have a couple of CDs full
of "tributes" to Kraftwerk, and the one of "Autobahn" (sorry I can't
remember the name of the group that performed it) did it very, very well.

Even Kraftwerk's newest original recordings are still good.  Great traveling
music!