BrockerHoff.net Finely crafted software for the Macintosh

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Rainer Brockerhoff :: Home Page

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I was born in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 1951. In 1953 my family emigrated to Belo Horizonte (Brazil), where I still live today. A bilingual upbringing proved handy in acquiring other languages - we had 4 years of French in school, and 1 year of English. At 15 I started to collect science fiction in English, which prompted me to continue studying the language on my own. Today, I still can read some French (as well as a little Spanish and Italian), but I read English even faster than German and Portuguese - and my SF collection has grown to over 10,000 volumes. Oddly enough, I only learned to speak English over a decade later, when I began travelling to the USA.

At 17 I entered the local university to study Electrical Engineering. My first choice - Electronic Engineering- wasn't easily available, and the EE school was the only one to have a computer, a 16K IBM1130 mainframe. (Indeed, at the time only 3 other computers were installed in town!) I soon neglected my official studies to spend all time at the computing center, writing ever more complex FORTRAN programs, mostly 3-D hidden-edge algorithms. I took a 9-month systems analysis course at IBM, which was followed by an internship at the university administration. This soon became a full-time job for several years, programming for the IBM1401, IBM/360 and Burroughs B6700 mainframes in assembly language, RPG, PL/I, Algol and Espol.

After some time writing administrative software began to pall, and soon after getting my BSEE I formed a consulting company with some colleagues, and entered the university's new Computer Science program. Academic stuff was too slow for me, so I left the program short of getting my Master's, and got involved with the upcoming microcomputer scene. After buying and learning to program an Apple II, I found a job with Quartzil, a startup microcomputer manufacturer. I soon learned the basics of hardware design fiddling with the QI800 and ended up helping to design the main board for the company's flagship product, the QI900. I also wrote the whole operating system; despite being CP/M compatible and using a humble 4MHz Z80A CPU, it featured preemptive multitasking, overlapping windows, drop-down menus and a built-in live debugger. It was also entirely in ROM.