amiga-news.de - Advent Calendar: Door 13

13.Dec.2022 Advent Calendar: Door 13 - Richard Körber
ust in time for lunch break, the 13th door of our Advent calendar opens. We may introduce: Richard 'Shred' Körber.

This could be a record so far: Already on 04 May 1999 we reported (in German) about Richard Körber's newly established website "Palmiga", which was aimed at Amiga users who wanted to connect their computer to a PalmOS PDA. In mid-2001 he was kindly asked by Palm Inc. to rename his site because "Palmiga" and "PalmLink" would infringe trademark rights. So Amiga-PDA was born, which was originally part of his homepage which already existed since 1998. For all those who are still interested today, please refer to his PdaLink library and the corresponding GitHub project.

The developer is probably best known for his identify library, which recognises Zorro cards by their manufacturer and product ID, provides information about the system (CPU, FPU, memory, clock frequency, etc.) and decodes Guru codes and function offsets. Originally, in early 2003, he announced (in German) on our site that he had to stop development due to lack of time and published the source codes of the project on Sourceforge. More than a year ago, however, he not only published the source codes on GitHub, but also resumed development and made the current version 40.2 available for download in mid-October.

He also wrote his own driver for the internal sound card Maestro Professional, developed YAMI, a mouse interface that makes it possible to use serial PC mice on Amiga or ATARI ST computers, and resumed work on his debugging tool PatchWork.

His articles in the Retro Blog of his site are definitely worth reading, for example about the restoration of an Amiga 1000 or the problem of the right mouse button on the Amiga 1200. Many thanks for your development work, Richard! He remembered the following anecdote for us:

"It was in 1998, at a time when the Internet was massively growing. As a young professional, I was working in the web department of a startup in Cologne and felt like a pioneer in a new country.

After weeks of work, our team had completed a new website. The design template had been created by an external advertising agency via Photoshop. We manually converted the designs into individual web pages, which was common practice at that time. In the late afternoon, everything was finally finished, the launch was imminent and the press had already been informed. The other colleagues had already called it a day, and I was just about to pack my bag, too, when an email from my boss popped up in my inbox.

'The agency has asked us to make one last small change to the layout', was his comment. Below that I found a forwarded email with the details. I looked at the request and groaned. I would have to change all one hundred pages by hand for that. Those are the tasks you love. I could forget my plans to leave in time. It would probably even take until late at night.

With an Amiga, yeah, this would have been a piece of cake. I would have opened the web pages in GoldEd, and would have let it do the changes automatically, remote controlled by a quickly crafted ARexx script. With my Windows computer at work this was unthinkable. There was no possibility to control programs with a script language.

Oh, if only I had my Amiga here now, I thought to myself and sighed.

Then I remembered that I had installed an Amiga emulator on my work PC a few weeks earlier because I wanted to try it out. But that was just for fun. Now I have a job to do. Is that professional? Is it even possible to do that?

Why not! I transferred the web pages to the virtual Amiga hard disk, programmed an ARexx script and let GoldEd apply the changes. The plan worked. After less than an hour the change was completed.

So the Amiga saved the launch date. And I made it home in time." (dr)

[News message: 13. Dec. 2022, 13:46] [Comments: 0]
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