Private Life

I was born in a snow storm in April 1958 in Kiel. Grown up in a very small village between Kiel and Rendsburg in the country in the very northern part of Germany.

I went to school in Achterwehr, then to the Max-Planck-Schule in Kiel and then attended the boarding school "Internatsgymnasium Schloss Plön" ("Butenplöner", school). It was a really nice time in Plön! I studied electrical engineering at the Fachhochschule Kiel for some years when i got an offer to start my civilian service at Hörgeschädigten Technik Münster GmbH near Münster, a company developing and manufacturing telephones for deaf people. After finishing my two and a half years civilian service i moved to Hamburg to start studying technical computer science at the Fachhochschule Wedel.

Very early i discovered radio listening with diode-receivers and experimented with vacuum tubes which i build out of old radio receivers and germanium transitors until an illegal radio transmission of mine was detected by the "Bundespost" ;-) I build all sorts of receivers (and transmitters) and listened to short wave transmissions of Radia Amateurs all night long. In 1979 i bought an Eltec EUROCOM 1 single board computer (6802 based, 2K Eprom, 1K Ram, hex display and keyboard and a "Kansas City" audio tape interface for mass-storage). At that time the Internet did not exist and almost no literature about microcomputers was available in Germany. I knew noone who owned a computer or who had something to do with computers. I started to find out everything about computers by myself by try and error.....

In the early 90's Corinna and i decided to marry and in 1995 our doughter Lea was born. Lea changed our life significantly and we soon discovered that we wanted to move away from Hamburg. During the year 1996 we build a house in Rellingen, a nice small town nearby Hamburg. In 1999 our son Lars was born and a new level of noise entered the house :-)

Music:

My favorite musician is Frank Zappa. I believe that i own all records he ever made as well as some bootlegs. Especially i like his guitar solos. My favorite is "village of the sun" from the album "Zappa in New York".

I read everything. I love books. I enjoyed reading Rudy Rucker, Stanislav Lem, Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, Janwillem van de Wetering, Raymond Chandler, Jurek Becker, Heinrich Böll, Douglas Adams and many many more.

When O'Reilly started the Nutshell series at that time, i used to buy every new book from them when it was released. This has changed when they started sell NT and Linux crap. The books of W. Richard Stevens and Douglas Comer are absolutely phantastic and helped me a lot in understanding networking.

Computers:

My first computer was based on the Motorola 6802 chip. I always liked the architecture, but it was not as popular as the 8080 or the 6502. First i programmed it by directly keying in instructions in hex (i still remember that 0x86 was LDAA) then i ordered an assembler and linker/loader from the US - on audio tape! - and was then able to write assembly language in a line-orented editor. A 5-bit Baudot teletype served as a printer to print out listings and soon i began to write my first operating system which had to be written because i interfaced two Phillips micro digital tape drives as mass storage devices (floppy disk drives were far out of reach of by budget at that time).

In the years of my civilian service i got in touch with the Intel 8080 and the brand new Zilog Z80 (and its CMOS version NSC800). I assembled a 8080-based computerkit (Eurocard format) and a Heathkit H8 terminal. The operating system was CP/M 1.8 and i explored the BIOS and BDOS and did all sorts of experimentation. We bought a texteditor, "Wordmaster" which later became Wordstar. And we heard about a startup company in the US named Mircosoft which was successfully marketing a Basic interpreter.

Later, when i studied technical computer science, i bought a "real" Motorola 68000 based computer it had 265k Ram and two 5" floppy drives. It used CP/M 68k, but later i bought a copy of Microwares OS/9 realtime operating system. I built a SCSI (SASI at that time) interface and wrote a driver for it, and my first hard disk drive was a Seagate 5 Megabyte drive: wow, plenty of space!

When i read in Dr. Dobb's Journal about 386BSD, i forgot my Motorola 6800 and 68k history and bought my first PC to run 386BSD 0.0 on it. I've never regret it. Since then i'm supporting and contributing to FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, although i'm using only FreeBSD for several years now. My main contributions are

• the "pcvt" console driver (which emulates a DEC VT220 terminal almost completely) is part of all three operating systems
• the isdn4bsd ISDN driver package for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and BSD/OS. It is now part of the base system in FreeBSD and NetBSD.

In Summer 1998, a meeting of some BSD hackers took place in our house on a nice summer weekend.

Every month i try to attend the meeting of the BSD User Group Hamburg. Its a good chance to meet nice people and get fine chinese food.

In January 1999 i got commit privileges for the FreeBSD source tree to be able to do engineering work on the FreeBSD sources and my traces can be seen in many parts of the system.

I like character terminals. Recently i began to collect old DEC terminals, i have a VT100, VT220, VT320 VT420 and a VT520. If anyone has a VT52 or a VT05 or a Heathkit H8 or a Televideo 925 for me ....

I like telephones. Especially old ones. Got it ? ... :-)