I learned programming 1968 on the PERM (Programmierbare elektronische Rechenanlage München), a monster one room wide and high, filled with electronic tubes (PERM was used by a number of Munich professors to develop ALGOL 60).
As an assistant professor, I developed a 68000 based 30 processor system used for image processing and analysis of nuclear physics data.
As a full professor at the Universities of Mannheim and Heidelberg, I developed together with Siemens/Munich the Synapse neuro computer, and many special purpose computers with applications in high energy physics and medicine, among them a systolic trigger processor with 28.600 processor elements. The ATLAS experiment at CERN used 1.700 of our special purpose computers to read out data, and eventually found the Higgs particle.
Together with my PhD students, I cofounded a number of spinoff companies, among them Medical Communications GmbH, Volume Graphics GmbH, Silicon Software GmbH, Tesa Scribos GmbH and VRmagic GmbH.
After retirement, I do iOS programming just for fun, and I am very interested in basic Physics problems like the foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Gravity.