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.

Some of this functionality had been inspired by Apple's Lisa and Macintosh 128 computers, which had come out during the QI900's development cycle. I had bought one of the first Macs in Brazil, in May '84, and had used it to write the product manuals and do engineering drawings. Soon, the first IBM PC clones began to be sold in Brazil, and quickly killed our product. Around this time, a company in São Paulo (Unitron) started designing a Macintosh clone, and asked me to join their group as a consultant.

The clone used chips co-developed with National Semiconductor. The ROM was 128K - double the Mac's ROM size, as it was nearly entirely rewritten in Manx Aztec C. I wrote most of the Toolbox Managers. Later on, Apple's lawyers pressured the Brazilian government to kill the project. In a last-ditch effort, we went to a "New World"-like approach, where the ROM would be loaded from floppy disk on startup, but in the end Apple prevailed.

In the meantime, I had joined a medical equipment manufacturer as partner and CTO, where I stayed for nearly 15 years. At its peak, the cardiac monitor I designed had 40% of the Brazilian market. I designed most of the hardware, which had a Mac-inspired 68K architecture, and also the embedded operating system with a graphical user interface. When the company closed due to general mismanagement <long rant about my ex-partners deleted due to legal advice>, I had already jumped ship to found MetaLink, one of Brazil's first city-wide BBS and Internet Service Providers.

When the ISP market was overrun by huge media companies I shifted my focus to consulting and custom programming for the Mac. A two-year project, writing the Mac version of "Aurélio Século XXI", Brazil's most traditional dictionary, was quite interesting and successful (unfortunately not financially). When Mac OS X came out, I decided to dedicate myself to learning Objective-C/Cocoa and writing cool shareware. I've also started a weblog called Solipsism Gradient and, to improve it, have started learning PHP.

In my copious spare time I dabble in juggling, collect Jazz and New Age music, write for MAC+, Brazil's largest (and only) Macintosh magazine, work as an expert in intellectual property cases, and help Dorinha, my wife, operate a swimming&health club.