It all started with the internet account we got at the central information department of the University. I - the little first term student - was confronted with these big computers running UNIX operating systems: A great challenge. I only knew DOS and Windows at that time.

To be able to use the offered opportunities and to understand the system I installed the free PC operating system Linux (Distributor: S.u.S.E) on my PC for test purposes. In the beginning I intended to use Linux as alternative to the established operating systems. But after only a few days Linux became my standard operating system because of its superiority in nearly all interests. Now I use Windows only in those cases a Windows applications is necessary.

As time went by I got used to the system and understood how it worked. I learned more about it and in the meantime I feel quite secure in administration of Linux (and in general UNIX) driven computers. Since then I installed and administrated TCP-IP networks, PPP server and clients, sendmail, HTTP server, databases and hardware.

And the best of all: All you need for your work can be found in the internet. FREE!

OK. It's not true that there are NO problems in using Linux: In 1995 there was no usable office application for Linux. Staroffice or OpenOffice for Linux or applications like MS Word for Windows where out of sight. And that's a big "bug" if you have to write texts.

Not really satisfied with the word processor I used up to that time - MS Winword 2.0 - I talked to a fellow student who showed me LaTeX. Convinced about the opportunities, the quality of the output, and the freeness of everything you need I begann to write all texts using LaTeX. In the meantime I only use WYSIWYG-systems in those cases whenever other people will have to work with those texts I wrote.

My interest in distributed object system started during my project seminar Integration of heterogeneous databases using CORBA-technology. The CORBA specification made by the OMG became one of my major interests.

The OMG is an international consortium whose task is to create specifications. One of these specifications is the Common-Object-Request-Broker-Architecture (CORBA). It defines how different object request broker (ORB) have to communicate and which functionality they have to offer. Additionally the OMG defines services and facilities. The implementations of them can be changed because they all have to fit the same specification.

I made my first practical experiences using the ORB implementation NEO from SunSoft during my project seminar. I had to integrate the DB2 system to it. But that wasn't about CORBA during my studies: I continued implementing CORBA-based applications during the WASA2 project: There the ORB implementation OrbixWeb became the backbone of the system.

In private I try to keep up to date in CORBA topics. JDK 2 and Mico (GNU) are the implementations I'm most interested in at the moment. But there is so few time (I had to and have to write test for my diploma) that I can't get forward.

In the meantime nearly all application systems base on databases. Relational database management systems are most used by now. I made my first experiences with databases by developing database schemes under DB2 for Solaris (see also: project seminar).

Getting interested by knowing more about the possibilities of database systems I started evaluating these systems for my own interests. I played around with databases like Adabas (SAG) on Linux, PostgreSQL on Linux and Solaris, and O2 (O2-Technology) on Solaris. As part of my work as student worker at the chair for computer science at the institute for Wirtschaftsinformatik of the Westfalian Wilhelms-University, Muenster I had to administrate a DB2 database on Windows NT.

Customer orientation in firms and organisations leads to more concentration on processes to reduce costs. To reach best results efficiency and a continuous control of processes are very important. Workflow management systems try to support these tasks.

By using WASA during my project seminar I collected my first experiences in workflow management systems. This was the beginning of a "great" friendship. The opportunities and the sense of such systems made me curious.

As part of my diploma thesis I began intensive investigations on WFMS. Espacially I examined research activities of several universities. The results influenced my results and the WASA2 project. In teamwork with four fellow students we developed a running prototype of a CORBA-based workflow management system.

Already in primary school I began to concern with computers. My father got a ZX-81. I never reached more than tipping some programs out of journals...

When I was in the sixth class we got a Schneider (Amstrad) CPC-664 computer. On this computer I made my first (really) programming experiences: Mandelbrot and so on were investigated to satisfy my thirst for knowledge.

When I got the subject computer science in school (in Germany this is in the eleventh class) I had to learn a new programming language: Turbo Pascal. I wrote a program for writing bills and one special application in procedural Pascal for one related of mine. When object-oriented programming became famous I transfered the applications into object-oriented Pascal - Turbo Vision was my best friend ;-).

During my studies I learned several further languages: C/C++, Ada, Cobol and exotic languages like Scheme and Prolog. The greatest interest grew during the project seminar and the WASA2 project: JAVA. The continuous object orientation, the power, and the platform independence offer more powerful opportunities that I know from any other language. The only disadvantage of Java is: It is to be interpreted at runtime. So all programs are quite slow. But to fix this problem I installed a just-in-time-compiler. ;-))