Michael Schweitzer

Born in Schramberg, Black Forest, Germany, Michael Schweitzer studied mathematics, logic and the theory of science from 1976 to 1979 in Munich. From 1979 to 1981 he studied mathematics and astronomy at the university of Goettingen, collaborating with a department of the faculty of medicine (Goettingen Chrono-biometer) for which he did the mathematical analysis and computer programming. He obtained his diploma in mathematics in 1982 and started to work on his PhD thesis in mathematics.

In 1984 he decided to leave the university and created his company, SwisSoft, with his friend and co-worker Lambert Strether. Their first product was a word processor called Pegasus, which had to run on CP/M with at most 64Kb of memory. It was initially written in Z80 assembly language, later re-written in C; they then switched to MS-DOS.

From 1987 to 1989 the company worked on various projects, including a booking system for sailing boats which included communication through modems between remote agencies (in Turkey) and a central database (in Denmark). It also developed Hermes, an editor for programmers, programmable in "pure" C through an interpreter.

1989 was a historic date. In Michael's words:

"We were stuck with C and looked for something else. C++ turned out to be C + a lot more trouble, so we tried Eiffel and had our first personal contact with the people at ISE (Jean-Marc Nerson in Santa Barbara).

From 1989 to 1995, together with Frieder Monninger and his company SiG Computer, SwisSoft developed the first Eiffel compiler for MS-DOS: Eiffel/S. The product was (is) also available for many Unix platforms."