Often people reproach informatics enigeers to think too theoretically.
Other ones are persuming
Amiga owner to be unwordly.
Some others are just curious about the captain's knowledge.
Well, here comes a list of historic computers,
operating systems, programming languages and processors
i had or have to do with.
The list is more or less ordered by date and there are some annotations.
There are of course no informations about technologies
from the 21th or 22th century ...
- Commodore PET 2001
- On such a machine i made my first steps with BASIC.
"Moon landing" is one of my then created programms.
- Texas Instruments 99/4A
- Sinclair ZX81 and ZX spectrum
- Commodore CBM 3032 and C64
- Informatics course at school (gymnasium).
I programmed a bigger work for my course in physics
with BASIC and Assembler (6502).
The created program did Fourier analysis and -synthesis
with a simple graphical user interface to manipulate forms of waves.
- Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80
- I wrote a program on this computer using PASCAL.
It should find combinations of moves for the "Rubik's cube"
solving certain problems with the 4×4×4 model.
Too bad the computer was too slow for that.
- Siemens mainframe (VM/SP, CMS)
- A handful of programs in PASCAL and MODULA-2.
One was a little animal quiz:
The player thinks about a specie
and the computer asks questions to find it.
The special thing was:
The program is learning new species while playing.
- TU-München PAX (Unix System V Release 2.0)
- A special computer, constructed by people of the TU-München.
I programmed it in an Assembler language named
MI (machine for the informatic's training) and MODULA-2.
The language MI has much in common with the VAX assembler.
- SUN SPARCstation (SunOS)
- Database applications in C and SQL,
using the relational database system "Transbase".
- Some different computers for hardware development
from Hewlett Packard, Intel and Motorola.
- A lot of little applications for micro controllers:
digital volt meter, pingpong-game, serial data link with handshake, ...
Assembler:
- 4096, 40196
- Motorola 68xx, 68xxx
- Siemens 8051 (also from AMD, Philips/Valvo, Intel, Matra Harris, Oki)
- Intel 8085
- Commodore Amiga 2000 (AmigaOS 1.2, 1.3, 2.0)
- My first own historical computer!
Some little programs in BASIC and Modula-2.
- IBM compatible PCs (MS-DOS, MS-Windows 3.1)
- Database clients in SQL, C and a CASE tool for screen masks.
Concret: Oracle SQL*plus, SQL*forms and Pro*C with Microsoft C.
- DEC microVAX (VMS)
- Different little exercises in FORTRAN, PASCAL and Assembler.
- Commodore Amiga 4000 (AmigaOS 3.0)
- My second historical rarity.
Different things in C, C++, MODULA-2 and Prolog.
For example a simple graphical user interface for an Amiga related CD-Rom,
graphic routines for a paint program,
shell scripts in AmigaOS and Rexx
and the porting of a Unix tool, using lex, yacc, C and C++.
Some of the tools i am using:
- GNU-CC, GNU-C++, flex, bison, make, ...
- M2Amiga (A+L AG, suisse)
- Maple V (mathematics software)
- PicoPainter (EGS 24-bit paint program)
- Real3D (Raytracing)
- TeX (plain TeX, Metafont)
- TSMorph
- TurboCalc (Spreadsheet)
- Vim
- Wordworth (text processing)
- XiPaint (24-bit paint program)
- many, many other tools
- IBM compatible PC (MS-DOS, MS-Windows 3.11)
- Parts of the graphical user interface for a big calculation tool in C++.
We used Borland C++ there.
- DEC alpha (OSF/1, Ultrix, Unix)
- Some programs for graphical data proccesing in PASCAL and C.
- Sun SPARCstation 1+
- My third historical computer. It runs with NetBSD 1.2.
- Amiga (AmigaOS 3.0)
- These HTML pages you are looking at.
- Amiga, SPARCstation
- Building a network using Thin Wire Ethernet;
installed a ftp-server and a http-proxy-server on the Amiga.
- IBM compatible PC (MS-Windows 3.11)
- Developing some programs with Borland Delphi (PASCAL).
- Macintosh II (MacOS 7.5.5)
- A Java applet using JDK 1.0.2 from sun.
- SGI Indigo², O² and Onyx (IRIX 6.2, 6.3)
- My "Diplom-Arbeit" (see below)
- IBM compatible PC (MS-Windows NT 4.0)
- Client development with Sybase PowerBuilder and Oracle PL/SQL.
- Sun SPARCstation 10
- Has replaced my SPARCstation 1+ and runs with Solaris 7.
Diplom-Arbeit:
Developing a system for
stereoskopic presentation of flight symbology
Abstract
In this dissertation, submitted for a diploma,
i designed and implemented a system
to present flight symbology stereoscopically.
The company "Eurocopter" runs as a producer of helicopters
a special cockpit laboratory.
The developed and used flight simulation systems
are for developing, testing an integrating
cockpits and flight symbologies.
While working on this dissertation
the personal of that laboratory was working on
a cockpit for the support helicopter Tiger
and on a cockpit for an all weather usable rescue helicopter (AWRH).
The realized system for this dissertation
should be used in the cockpit laboratory
to test the useability of stereoskopy for flight symbologies.
The developed system displays two and three dimensional flight symbologies
stereoscopically and combined with a landscape picture.
Its parts are a stereoskopic "Virtual Reality Helmet" (VR-Helmet),
a class hierarchy and a computer program.
The class hierarchy allows to manage and use
stereoscopically displayed flight symbologies;
it is implemented using C++.
Using that classes some flight symbologies are implemented as classes
using C++ and OpenGL.
They are used by the computer program "StereoSymbolik"
which creates the stereoscopic presentation
and shows it, using the X Window system,
on the VR-Helmet and a computer screen.
The program StereoSymbolik is highly parameterised
and has a graphical user interface,
which is realized using OSF/Motif.
With this interface some parameters are changeable at runtime.
The whole parameterisation allows an easy combination of the system
with different display hardware.
The program StereoSymbolik uses TCP/IP to establish a connection
to one of the existing flight simulator system in the laboratory.
Therefore it is able to display realistic values.
In the development of the system great effort was made
to make it easy portable and easy upgradeable:
the VR-helmet is not bound to a single computer modell;
C++, OpenGL, OSF/Motif, TCP/IP and the X Window System
are open standards.
Monopolist's systems were avoided.
The stereoscopic view is perspectivic
and all graphical calculations are done relatively to the viewer's position.
Additionaly to the description of the system
this work also offers an introduction to the theory of stereoskopic viewing.
I did the writing on my Amiga.
I used a self developed TeX macro package
which extends D.E. Knuth's "plain TeX".
