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[Chalmers] 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.

[Imperial College] At college (or whatever the correct English term is), I selected a general science program, "Naturvetenskaplig linje", focusing on computer science. Though the more general subjects were good, the teachers were pretty bad around computers and knew less about programming than we did. Oh well. During this time I learned and eventually taught C programming.

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.


Copyright © 1999, Erik Bergersjö
erik@bergersjo.com