About Kroll-Software

How everything started

Age of seven, I saw my first computer in the window of a coffee roaster chain. I had to have it. And I was convinced that if this thing can add numbers, then it can certainly do more.

The most interesting of such devices was always, when you finally took it apart to see what's inside. With microelectronics, unfortunately, we do not recognize at first glance. Later I learned in school and from many books, how that works with electronics and the Boolean algebra.

As teenagers, we sat together with one of the first programmable pocket calculators and played a game of dice. The interesting thing was that we needed no dice because this did the borrowed and outrageously expensive programmable calculator. Few lines of program code and the calculator was a cube!

Some years later, you could type in a few thousand lines of code in a Commodore VIC 16 and walk across a road as a frog, without being run over by the cars as possible. This could be done until switching the machine off, then everything was gone. I lacked the appropriate storage device.

My Sharp MZ 700 finally had a datasette and this matter began to be seriously. It was worth put in some work there, and when you had once programmed to calculate a binomial formula, you eventually never again need to calculate a binomial formula by yourself. This was of great practical value.

Besides such calculations I also saw my first Mandelbrot set in ASCII graphics. It looked not so great, but it was still impressive. A party planner algorithm could calculate how people moved at a party. Everyone wanted the buffet, but certain sympathies or dislikes emerged this system into some kind of self-organizing swarm behavior.

When I sat before my first IBM XT, I did not let the matter go. A good friend showed me a Pascal compiler and I learned that with object-oriented programming you can go much further than with spaghetti code.

I studied Nicolaus Wirth and his algorithms and data structures and built from linked lists and binary trees a shareware database INFOBASE that I distributed over the Fido Net .

After employment at the company Luratech in Berlin-Adlershof, I started my career as an independent professional software developer in 1995. Since then, I develop software with the aim that it is useful to you.

Detlef Kroll

Programmable Pocket-Calculator
Sharp MZ 700
IBM PC

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