I come from Älvängen, a small town close to Gothenburg in the
southern part of Sweden. At the age of twelve, having learned
that I couldn't become a fighter pilot due to my poor eyesight,
I decided to become a programmer
instead.
After college I joined a Master of Science program in Computer Science and Technical Engineering at Chalmers Technical High School. One motivating factor was that I felt a strong need to learn more about hardware, since I had started working for Contal, where most of the specifications were hardware descriptions. During the final year of my Masters degree, I studied artificial intelligence at Imperial College in London. It was very interesting, mostly due to the lecturers, many who were acknowledged experts in their fields. I found the courses fairly easy, probably thanks to my previous experience with computers.
I also did my thesis, "A Generic Window System", in England. It was
an overview of the three leading window systems at the time (Microsoft
Windows, X Windows with Motif and Macintosh System 7) and the development
of a cross platform library which made it possible to write a program
once and compile it on all three platforms without any modifications.
For portability reasons, I wrote the library in plain ANSI C, something
I probably shouldn't have done. Since I wanted to use object oriented
features, I ended up inventing inheritance with vtables and
runtime type information from scratch. It was fun, but far from trivial.
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