Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Three Secrets... ;-)

Thanks to Eberhard I have to tell you three things about myself before I am supposed to hand over the baton to some of my colleagues and friends...
  • I started my programming carreer with the Amstrad/Schneider CPC 664, the second edition of this home computer that was the first one with an integrated a floppy disk drive (strange 3" format). After a few years a got a mouse for this machine and wrote a completely useless icon editor for fun (in basic, of course). I thought icons would be a cool thing to edit... :-)
  • I am one of the authors of Discovery DTP, a full-featured desktop publishing system that I implemented for the Atari ST/TT, together with a friend of mine. The program was published as shareware by the ST-Computer magazine, a german computer magazine for Atari at that time. This was implemented in C and we worked on it for several years. And, of course, we implemented everything on our own, including virtual memory management, vector-font rendering, text formatting and much more... I still have the source code on a CD. Fun to read... I think I made every single mistake that my software engineering professor at the University talked about years later when I started to study computer science.
  • My first (and last) computer game that I played intensively was Sorcery, a really strange fantasy game for the Amstrad/Schneider CPC 664. I found a screenshot of that game, looks really cool...
And now, the next three people in the row: congratulations to Sebastian, Robert and Stefan.

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