I was born in Karlsruhe in 1947, and I live in Stutensee, a suburb of
Karlsruhe.
I have been a collector of data and photos of ships since 1965 which is a
rather strange hobby for some one living inland.
I have been interested in archiving such data long before PC’s came
into use. Since 1990 I have been collecting them in a data bank. At that time
storage capacity was small and precious, and pure data bank systems like dBase
or MS Access were not efficient enough to enable the desired searching,
processing and evaluation options I had to busy myself not only with structuring
data bank systems but also with developing applications. I used to work with
Clipper for my early applications whereas the recent ones have been made with
Visual basic.
I use the experience gained by my hobby also in my profession as a
state-employed architect. It is a special challenge to develop programs also for
networks with the purpose to simplify internal procedures, to avoid data
redundancy and to archive photos, drawings, brochures in a comfortable and easy
manner.
Please understand that for me neither the design of this website nor the
perfect programming of the data program have priority. The focus of my work is
collecting, updating and archiving data, photos etc.. Please make allowances for
small deficiencies on the sites and in the program of SHIP-DB, I am not a
professional programmer. Your hints and advice are always welcome.