Who am I?

I'm just a freelancer trying to do a good job, that's all. My electronics experience started around 1976 with a Radio Shack-like morse-code oscillator. Since then, my electronics interest was "mildly interrupted" for some time until I had the money to buy electronic components, PCBs and a soldering iron.

My programming experience started with BASIC on one of the first Perkin-Elmer Interdata 16-bit systems and moved through assembler programming on the Rockwell 6502 to the Z80 (which I still love).

In the early eighties, I learned UNIX system administration on a Nixdorf Targon and this was my start into the world of mainframes.

Soon enough though, I was confronted with AT-Compatible IBM-DOS computers and I could hardly grasp how insufficiently these machines were built ;) I nearly took apart the registers on the i386 when it came out, albeit I could not afford that for some time. I was amazed by what you could make out of these processors but there I was stuck with IBM-DOS and GEM at the time. Well, my first 386/25 board is now pinned to my wall for decorative purposes...

Having been frustrated with DOS and Turbo-Pascal and programming on a machine that gave you nearly nothing compared to UNIX, I was later introduced to Coherent, which was affordable, UNIX-like (though quite 16-bittish) but gave me back a proper command line that I so dearly loved. The appearance of MS-Windows 3 did nothing to encourage me to learn moving mice around and I still try to avoid it.

I did a lot of Z80 assembler programming for my self-built boards on a DOS machine because there was a nice editor and a good cross-compiler, both of which I still use today because my machines are still out there, working well. These are almost all so-called Tally-Interfaces for the broadcast industry and I dare say that my love for embedded systems has been there ever since.

Since then, I have done quite some programming, mainly in Turbo-C and Borland-C++, first for MS-DOS, then 16-bit-wise for Windows® 3.something , then NT and 2k with the use of the MFC®.

I recently started out with Trolltech's Qt and I then tried out some JAVA programming but the IDEs don't run well on "slow" machines (well, if you call 1GHz slow ;)

The appearance of Linux changed my interest in PCs altogether. I got my first SuSE 4.4 (Kernel 2.0.15 or so) in 1997 (when was that exacty, I forgot?) to build an ISDN router and then I saw Xfree and... well.. wow! I loved it! I guess I had been hooked since then... even to moving mice around!

Now my love for the embedded computer got a jolt with the appearance of uClinux and the first uCsimm computer kit and the mastering of Linux programming (in C) and the power of what you can achieve for free and all the people helping you. Awesome! That's roughly where I am now...

Just recently some customers asked me if I wished to design their Web pages; I replied: Well, I'm not a designer, I'm a technician. But I did not give up; I do some designing but I like to Keep It Simple, Stupid, and I started off with CSS and PHP4, which I think is a very nice scripting language.