Günter Born

At a glance

Author, translator, Web designer
Topics: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Linux, the Internet, intranets

Here a few other insights into his character:

Günter was born in 1955 in Germany and grew up in a neighborhood adjacent to a U.S. Air Force base. During this time, he developed his English language skills in interchanges with the servicemen: "Hey, man, gimme some chocolate.” “Hello. Do you have bubble gum?"

Günter Born holds an engineering degree in physics and has studied information science and electrical engineering. He began working as a software developer and project engineer in the German spacecraft and chemical industries in 1979, managing software development groups and consulting on several international projects with Japan, Thailand, and various European countries. Since 1993, he has worked as an independent writer and translator for Microsoft Press, Pearson Education, and other publishers.

Born started working with computers as a student in 1976, when one of his professors encouraged him to work through a series of equations for mechanical systems. Too poor to buy a pocket calculator and too lazy to do the calculation by hand, Born turned to an IBM 370 computer, which had to be fed punched cards. An incorrect FORTRAN statement resulted in a long listing and wasted time, but after the program was finally running, the computer saved Born a lot of time and provided a lot of free paper, which he used for classroom notes.

His publishing career began as the result of some mistakes. In 1987, he failed to publish an article he wrote about an 8085/Z80 disassembler implemented in BASIC - nobody wanted to read about BASIC. So he decided to learn Pascal. He borrowed an old IBM PC/XT with a Borland Pascal compiler, spent a weekend porting his disassembler to Pascal, exchanged the BASIC listings with Pascal source code, and succeeded at last, publishing his article in a computer magazine. Born wrote his first book to get the money to buy a PC. (The royalties, as it turned out, funded only the PC, and not the printer.)

Since then, Born has published many articles and around a hundred books and CD-ROMs about computers, ranging from computer books for children to books about application software for end users to high-end programming titles. He wrote books about the Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 Registry for Microsoft Press, and he contributed a chapter on the Registry to the Microsoft Windows 98 Resource Kit. Born has also written, translated, and served as the technical editor on many books about Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications programming, Microsoft Office, and other Microsoft products in conjunction with Microsoft Press Germany, Markt & Technik Publishing, Addison Wesley Germany and others.