About Me

My name is Frank Abelbeck and I made first contact with computers in the 1980s, playing with a Commodore C16. As I had only two games, interest faded after having played through “Cave Fighter” (“Molecule Man” was unplayable).

In 1991 my parents bought a Personal Computer (Highscreen 386 SX 25, 5.25 + 3.5 inch FDD, 40 MB HDD, dot matrix printer, only internal speaker sound), and that machine introduced me to the wonderful world of informatics.

Ok, first via computer games like Fate of Atlantis, Wing Commander or Aces of the Pacific. But the more I played the more I wanted to create such great games, too.

So in 1995 my parents gave me Turbo Pascal 7.0 as birthday present. Armed with the really good TURBO PASCAL TUTOR (version 2.6, from the Pegasus 3.0 shareware CD), written by Gordon Dodrill and printed on an Epson Stylus 800, I tought myself Pascal during the summer holidays.

And since then I constantly learned new languages; first x86 assembler (to speed up my Pascal int 0x10 graphics code), then C (to speed up my code even further). With C came C++, of course.

While studing mechanical engineering at Leibniz University Hannover from 1999 to 2005 I worked with Matlab/SIMULINK, PEARL90, Java and – for my diploma thesis – linux kernel modules. Not to mention the state-of-the-art scientific typesetting system (La)TeX, being a language and system on its own.

During my short post-graduate engagement from 2005 to 2009 I also needed to deal with XML/XSLT. At that time I picked up Python, making it my primary choice of language in all the years to come. ThunderSync required some Javascript, though. And I took some steps in Rust.

From time to time I exchange the keyboard with saw, plane and chisel and do some woodworking.

Since 2003 I am a Gentoo Linux user and quickly dumped Windows. Well, that reduced gaming time, although Wine enabled me to play at least Vice City and San Andreas.

About this Site

This is a collection of my work over more than two decades.