Peter Eichhorst

Peter Eichhorst (born June 25, 1943 in Mühlberg / Elbe ; † March 28, 2008 in Borrego Springs , California ) was a German-American software pioneer and visionary, lecturer, author and entrepreneur.

childhood and education

Peter Eichhorst grew up in Mühlberg / Elbe and moved with his parents to West Germany at the age of 17 before the Wall was built. He first completed an apprenticeship as a radio and television technician in Lübeck . After training as an engineer, Eichhorst studied physics and computer science at the University of Hamburg. From 1973 he received a foreign scholarship for the USA, which he completed with a Master of Science (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Santa Barbara in California. He then did his doctorate at the Universities of Berkeley and San Diego in California on “Stochastic Lindenmayer Systems” - modeling of primitive organisms using stochastic grammars - forDoctor of Philosophy ( Ph.D. ).

Research and Teaching

Dr. Eichhorst researched and taught as a professor at universities in São José dos Campos and Rio de Janeiro , Brazil and San Diego, USA.

Outstanding performance

He is considered the father of OPEN ACCESS , the first integrated program package under a uniform MS-DOS interface, which contained the components database, graphics program, spreadsheet, word processing, scheduling and remote data transfer. It became a model for a large number of similar applications ( Lotus Symphony and MS Works ). In addition, he is known for the object-oriented development environment ENFIN / 3 based on Smalltalk , which he developed and was ahead of its time in the early 1990s.

Entrepreneur

As a professor at San Diego State University, he developed the relational database system QUEST (later LOGIQUEST) on the basis of the new UCSD Pascal programming system , which for the first time formed a common platform for the various microcomputer architectures. The success of this database and the LOGICALC spreadsheet system led to the foundation of a commercial software company. Dr. Eichhorst founded and managed several software companies. With Software Products International Inc. (SPI), San Diego, California and OPEN ACCESS, he temporarily rose to become the world market leader in office applications in the 1980s. Most recently, in 2005, he founded SOCON Inc., based in San Diego and Dresden, and dedicated himself to the development of service-oriented business applications . He acted as a consultant for companies and as a speaker at events and congresses to pass on his expert knowledge.

Works

• Frank Schwarz: SOA with composite applications . developer press, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-939084-33-4 .

Web links

• The long road to SOA , article
• Service-Oriented Composite Applications , Article