Personal Archeology: My Diploma Thesis

When tidying up my room today I stumbled upon an unmarked, self-burnt CD. By the looks of it, it had to be a very old one, from the time I still roamed the university in Linz. Without much hope that it still works – which CD-R is still readable after 15 to 20 years? – I put it into my drive; and voilá, the listing of its content appeared. It is a backup of my diploma thesis from 1998.

Writing this was no easy task for me. The company that contracted the university and offered the thesis work wanted to go into Java, but there was no clear target to fulfil; so I was unsure where I could bring any scientific aspect into the paper. Anyway, the work itself was very interesting. When I have first seen that it is work with the then very new programming language Java I doubted its usefulness, but I got positive about its potential fast. Additionally, the people I worked with in the company were a fine staff and I had a great time. Of course I enjoyed the work was the one and only reason that it took me nearly a year till the first draft of the thesis was ready to present in the seminar. In 1998 I had to attend military service, and despite my best intentions didn't work for even at least one hour on my thesis.
After leaving the army I joined Servo Data (the aforementioned company), and soon had a full-time job. The company offered me a consultant job and I was to be sent to Germany. So I had to gain some momentum to finish my thesis. There were only some minor troubles to solve, my professor was not satisfied with the language (I decided to write in English), and also the structure had to be reworked. But in November 1998 it was finished at last.

Here it is. The company decided to shut it away for five years, not sure why. But this span of time is definitely past.

The formatting is not the best. I have been forced to write it using Word for Windows 6. Boy, that really was a pain. But LibreOffice did a good job now, opening and creating a PDF out of it. A few pages are missing, because I had some diagrams in landscape, and rotating graphics was simple a maddening work with WinWord. I recall working the whole night through with my wife (girlfriend then), printing versions and versions of the thesis and diagrams, and glueing the diagrams; and finally making the master copy for printing and binding.

Regarding the content. It is no prize-winning thesis for sure, but looking back I am contended with what I did then. Of course a lot of stuff written down is now the very basic stuff, but then it was fresh. And creating my little framework for accessing remote objects abstract from the communication mechanisms was not a dumb thing.