Today is the day Niklaus Wirth died
I just came back from a quite difficult afternoon business meeting just to learn via Hacker News that one of my great heroes Niklaus Wirth died today1.
As a teenager, I invested all my time (lots of it) and money into all things around computers. I owned a VIC 20, then a C64, and then a Amiga 500. I believe it was when I owned the Amiga when I stumbled on some weird Article about the Oberon programming language and OS. I lived in a very rural town, dial-up networking was unreachable for me. I lived of things I got hold by “swapping” software and shareware. That article mentioned that you could mail-order the Oberon System for free from the ETH Zurich, which I did. One day – I believe months later – I got two 3 1/2” discs mailed. I tried it, did not understand, dumped it. I believe I still have the disks.
Later, on the PC, I used Turbo Pascal to program, mostly computer graphics and short programs where I tried to implement ideas from the Computer Kurzweil series of the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft, originally a series of the Scientific American. Never again in my life I was so fluent and felt so connected to the machine using an IDE. I still have the discs and printed documentation of Turbo Pascal 7.0.
Later I would get to study computer science – I wanted to study at the ETH Zurich, but we couldn’t afford it. I ended up studying in Germany, which was fine, too.
Since that time I always fantasied about visiting the ETH Zurich and actually meet Niklaus Wirth.
Well, now the only thing I will be able to meet is his ideas.
RIP Niklaus Wirth.
I learned just now that Niklaus Wirth actually died 2024-01-01. I kept the original post above intact. ↩