Born Jan. 24 1948 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany.
Currently living there, too.
Studied Physics and earned a Ph.D. in natural sciences.
Have been working as a systems programmer and systems analyst afterwards.
My first contact with the Smalltalk language was through the well-known issue of Byte magazine devoted to Smalltalk-80. Took the opportunity to play around with Smalltalk/V while working as a group leader in a small departmental software development shop (mainly still FORTRAN) in the late eighties and convinced myself of the language's power and productivity advantages, but had no luck in convincing anyone else.
Have now found Squeak and have now (Nov 2003) become modestly familiar with it.