MICHAEL RUEGER BIO

Mike first heard of Smalltalk shortly after the now famous articles in the 1981 August Byte magazine. Though he didn't understand Smalltalk at the time, later as a Computer Science student at Dortmund Germany, Mike joined a student group implementing a Smalltalk VM in Modula-2 where he became very familiar with the object oriented language developed by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and others at Xerox Parc. After graduating in Computer Science at the University of Dortmund, Germany, Mike developed a simulation development environment which was subsequently used to build simulation systems for manufacturing and logistical systems. Through an ongoing cooperation with the University of Magdeburg in former East Germany he had the opportunity to take some of the real world problems he encountered during this project and work them into a PhD thesis. While working on his PhD he became interested in Squeak and persuaded his friend Andreas Raab to port Squeak to Windows In 1999 Mike joined the Squeak Central team working on Squeak related projects within the Disney Online engineering group. The main project goal was to develop a multi-player online game in Squeak. One result was a game called "Oceanic Panic" which was installed (and to our knowledge is still running) at Epcot in DisneyWorld. The online version was integrated with existing lobby and highscore servers, proving that Squeak can do it. Also during that time things like the Squeak web browser plugin and other web related technologies came into existence. Now at Viewpoints, while working on core Squeak issues like the networking code, XML parsing and instant messaging, his main focus still is on supporting the work at the Open Charter school and the Squeakland web site and community.