His love of VAXen
My longtime friend and acquaintance, Dr. Bernd Ulmann, Once had so little space in his home that he had to sleep on top of the machinery he had rescued. Dubbed, "The VAXMAN" by a visiting friend of his, the name stuck, and to this day we have an awful lot of history that would otherwise not exist - but at great personal sacrifice and expense I might add.
Here's but a taste of the vagaries that cometh your way when you indulge yourself in a (worthwhile) labor of love, one that is now shared with people worldwide, but nevertheless not without great, unforseen difficulties:
Since the warehouse was quite filled with computers I asked the company to place the tiles into the cellar and decided to bring them up into the first floor when I began to glue the supports to the floor. I never thought that 5 tons of floor tiles would be so heavy! One tile weights about 13 kg and at the beginning I carried two tiles at once (by the way - to bring something up from the cellar one has to walk around the warehouse - there is no direct in-house connection) - after some time I carried one tile at a time and after two days I could barely walk with a floor tile in my hands. By the way - the special glue to fixate the support stands to the floor is a fantastic glue - it glues shoes as well to the floor as gloves, hands to gloves, everything to everything.
We won't even go into the precarious rebuild of the roof or subsequent repairs, or the catastrophe that resulted in a hockey rink in and around dozens of vintage computer systems when a water main broke whilst he was away attending a conference in the United States (Ouch!).
You can indulge yourself in the magic that resulted in his Computer Museum HERE
There's got to be one of those laws that goes something like, "Everything always runs just fine until you close and lock the door behind you for the weekend getaway"
If there's truly an attribution for that phenomena (that everyone of us knows all too well) then do let me know!
Needles to say, he know longer sleeps atop PDP-11 systems, and I think his wife Rikka had something to do with being the motivational force in the commissioning of the wonderful computing museum, effectively putting an end to his bachelor life sleeping with VAXen.
Today, Prof Ulmann is a Professor of Business Informatics at FOM University in Frankfurt, Germany (FOM Hochschule für Oekonomie und Management). His computer museum is located in Heidenrod-Kemel, in the state of Hesse, and I believe it is still welcoming visitors by appointment.
In 2023, Dr. Ulmann founded anabrid GmbH in Berlin, continuing the pursuit of his decades long passion that predates his undergraduate years - analog computing, and even its place in the application of future AI, as demonstrated in his most recent published paper HERE. As a semiconductor company, One of the obvious missions of anabrid is the manufacturing of analog computers on a chip - beyond the bleeding edge, actually.
You can browse his Analog computer collection online HERE - it's a truly amazing accomplishment, even for the lay-person to behold. Truly.
Bernd Ulmann, a remarkable steward of computing history and visionary pioneer in the applied sciences of analog computing.
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