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Jugendjahre
By now you might wonder who this "boas" is. I am an IBMer :-)
I was born close to the Black Forest. You have heard of it. It is where the cake comes from. And the wine. So how did I get on the wrong path and into Computer Science? People in the Black Forest have lot's of time in the long winter to think. They have a history as engineers to invent things, like the cuckoo clock. Quite early in the 80s, my Dad bought me a Kosmos CP-1, it had a 6 MHz 8bit CPU (Intel 8049) a foil keyboard and a 6 character LED UI. Programing was in machine code only. That was the start of my personal "you-need-to-have-the-latest-gadget" quest. So I upgraded to the Commodore 64. At my High School, we had a few IBM-compatible PCs that soon had me writing code in Turbo Pascal. When I was finished with my education, I found a job in the Boeblingen Development Lab supporting VSE/ESA customers and development of mainframe operating system components. College never taught me what I learned from this skilled team and the smart customers. For many decades they had build a heritage of ongoing refinement on how to run business critical production environments your round. But all these green screens and funny keyboards which of course were called Terminals. So a couple of us back in Germany had this idea to port Linux to the mainframe. Of course, the rest is history. With pride the code changes to the kernel were hosted on a Linux/390 system running at Marist College, you can still visit the page from back then. Since these days of my early youth, I got involved in other areas on Linux, such as on embedded devices and on the Cell chip. Right now, the design of Virtualization Engine keeps me busy.
| by Boas Betzler | August 3, 2005 in People Permalink |
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