My name is Alfred Arnold and I am...well...way older than 34 years. But on that photo, I still am ;-)
After surviving school, I studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Aachen and made my PhD at the Research Center Jülich (which is about 30 kilometers to the northeast of Aachen). For the next four years, I worked as a software developer for ELSA AG, Aachen. My task was the development of software components for the LANCOMs, a line of sophisticated ISDN routers for SoHo applications. Since ELSA folded in May 2002, I am now doing the same work for LANCOM Systems My current focus are software components for wireless LANs based on the IEEE 802.11 standard. But since it's a small company now, I also have many other tasks, like the SSL/TLS stack of the LANCOMs.
Personally, I'm a somewhat late entry into the league of computer freaks: My first contact with computers took place when I was 16, but it didn't take half a year until I had my first own computer, an Apple II clone. At that point of time, electronics was already one of my hobbies, so it was only natural that I soonly started to make my own hardware extensions for the Apple (being almost completely built out of socketed TTL chips, the Apple II was the ideal platform for homebrewn extensions...). The link between hardware and software has always been my main interest since then, leading to topics like device drivers or embedded processors. The probably best-known output of this is AS, a portable macro cross-assembler for a wide variety of microprocessors and -controllers. AS has its own section on this server, and you may jump to the AS archive by clicking here.
Since I was almost exclusively working with Unix systems in Jülich, I am
strongly biased to Unix-based systems, and especially to the free ones. My
computers at home are entirely M$-Window$-free (if you don't count the
Windows emulation of OS/2...). Particularly, I specialized on collecting
old Unix systems. My collection contains so far:
My Computer Collection
Another sort of computers I collect are Microchannel-based systems, i.e. the PS/2 line of computers made by IBM and few other brands. The nice thing is that there are no new models, so I have a chance of getting my collection complete one day (but that's still a long way to go...):
Of course I still have my Apple II clone - you don't give away your first computer
I bought a digital camera a few months ago, so there's a good chance there will be some photos of all my computers on this site as soon as time permits....
