I was still doing custom development work during all that time and directly started full-time work for one of my major customers, Microtech where I quickly went from 'new guy' to 'in charge of designing and developing the application framework for our next generation software'.

When I was 15, while still finishing school, I started my own registered trade (which required getting special permission from a family court as a minor), building custom PCs and doing custom development work for a number of customers.Īfter 10 years of school ('Realschule' in Germany), I started an industry apprenticeship as ' Kommunikationselektroniker Fachrichtung Informationstechnik' (“Communication engineer specialized in information technology”) and finished it 1 year early with a top grade. I've learned plenty of other programming languages over the years after that (Everything from Assembler to Smalltalk, and more recently Java, C# and many more), but Pascal (now in the form of Delphi) has been my language of choice ever since. I dabbled with GW-BASIC on the PC but found it lacking, and so, shortly after Turbo Pascal 4.0 came out, I started learning Pascal by looking at examples and a pocket-sized 'Turbo Pascal 4.0 - The Reference' book. Still have fond memories of that time.Ī year later we got a 'family PC' (a 286 at first, a bit later a 386) which I was using on and off, but the Atari was my mainstay for quite a few more years. I taught myself programming using Omikron-Basic by looking at the examples. Not just playing games, but also figuring out how to make the computer do things I wanted it to do. I grew up in mid-west Germany, along the Rhine valley, in the '80s and early '90s, moved to Australia a bit over 16 years ago, and am now living in south-east Queensland, north of Brisbane, with my wife and our 6-year-old twins. I got my first computer (an Atari 520ST) when I was about 8 and was instantly fascinated with it.

For those in our community who want to know a little about the man behind the ElminsterAU handle, could you tell us a little about yourself?

With fire and sword hidden cache