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Meet Markus

Who writes this stuff?

Issue: 13.1 (January/February 2015)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 14,474
Starting Page Number: 73
Article Number: 13108
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.applelinks.com/rbu/
http://www.3exware.com/online/REALbasic.University.pdf
http://veronikawinter.de/Indien/

Excerpt of article text...

Sometimes a holiday can make you forget which day of the week it is. When you go from a grey November day in Germany to a sunny and warm "summer" day in Malta to snorkel with the fishes, you can even forget what time of the year it is. Not bad—except in this case a week in Malta made me completely forget about the xDev deadline so I didn't follow up on the potential contributions to this issue's column... and I just realized it is due tomorrow. There's not enough time to chase up on it...

Deep breath then. No need to panic. Just step in and tell your own story. And answer everyone's question: "How did you of all people come to write for xDev???"

Dr. Markus Winter, age 51, Heidelberg, Germany, Molecular Biologist

My first experience with programming was towards the end of my years in school. A teacher offered an "Introduction to BASIC programming" course as an extra activity that I was curious enough to take. Never mind that I didn't have a computer. Or knew anyone who did. Or that the school didn't have one. But that's the kind of teachers we had, and if all they could offer was a theoretical course, then that's what they did. Even if it was a very theoretical course. It somewhat helped when one of the others got a Spektrum ZX81 with a massive 1 kB of RAM for his birthday—though he then dropped out of the course as he was not too happy about having to share his computer all the time with us for us to see if the programs we wrote ran as expected. Without him—or more accurately, without his computer—the course fizzled out as one after the other dropped it.

The next opportunity to get into programming was at University where they actually had a computer lab. After a few weeks and maybe three lessons, I went with a female friend of mine to one of these new computer shops to have a look at what was there. Eager to impress my friend, I entered my program into the computer on display:

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