About Me

In my family I'm the third generation to be involved with IT. My grandfather was a civil servant in the Steiermärkischen Landesregierung (part of the government in Graz, Austria) and was certainly on of the driving forces behind the founding of the first data center in Graz (Rechenzentrum Graz). Shortly after, the biggest computer in Austria landed – a UNIVAC 490. This being literally as the processor, one of many big crates, fell from the fork lift and so could only be delivered weeks later.
He moved to Düsseldorf/Germany in 1969, after taking on an offer from Mannesmann and soon was immersed in helping to develop Mannesmann Datenverarbeitung GmbH (the IT department of Mannesmann).

My father touched his first "real" computer in 1963, a UNIVAC 422 training computer housed in the data center in Graz and later, in 1975 moved to Germany to work at Sperry Univac in Sulzbach. He was responsible for the technical support of the first commercially available microcomputers (i8080) and so paving the way for me to have early contact with computers.

Aside from some programmable HP calculators, our first computer we had at home was an ORIC1, closely followed by an Atari 800XL. Mostly used for playing games, they did confront me with my first programming language: BASIC. Being the year 1986 though, no actual programming was being done, but the interest was sparked – this was the way computers could be told what to do!
In 1989 my father bought a state of the art 80386 computer, with a whooping 1MB of RAM, 40MB of hard disk, 16MHz and MS-DOS 3.2 and my real interest in computers started two years later in 1991. He bought "Master-C", an interactive C learning tutorial plus "Power-C", an affordable C compiler and debugger for DOS. Thanks to him, I got a steady supply of computer literature (mostly in English) and software. Since then, learning and understanding programming languages is one of my hobbies. This ranges from C and C++, over Pascal to later ones like Clojure, LISP or Haskell.

Now my interest in computer included also operating systems, which resulted in using OS/2 since the release of 2.0 to Warp 4, or hanging out in bulletin board systems. The latter one started, when my father bought one of the first affordable 2400 baud modems, recommended by the BYTE magazine and directly shipped from USA. Part of my pocket money was later used to get an extra phone line, so I could operate my own BBS.

I am fortunate enough, that I could turn this passion into a career.