Hello, I'm Uwe S. Schwarzwaelder, the founder of PHI.NET (formerly known as PHI-Germany)
I was born in Wolfsburg, Germany, in the early morning hours of the 25th of November 1965 (shiver... ;-)
After the usual four years in primary school in middle Germany I went to a grammar school of fine arts and music in lower Bavaria. There I started learning to play the piano, but during the following six years I recognized that I'm more talented in the fields of "mathematix," "physix" and "technix" ;-) so, I decided to change school and learn more about computer science and qualify for university entrance. A few years later, I started studying computer science at a technical college called "Hochschule für Technik, Wirtschaft und Sozialwesen" in Regensburg.
During my study I worked for an international software distributor. At first supporting programming languages and standard applications running under DOS, later for XENIX and UNIX operating systems as well as for database systems like Informix and Oracle (that was 1988, the same time I founded PHI-Germany, now known as PHI.NET)
Of course that lead me to the interesting world of connectivity and networking which is my specialty.From the beginning of 1990 on I was running my own UNIX server at home (besides NT and Windows 2000.) Whereas at first I was using UUCP via modems to let me send and receive international mail and usenet news, I'm today using ISDN technology and TCP/IP router to connect my client systems to the Internet from home.
A bit of history about "PHI.NET"
(or "PHI-Germany", which was the first name I've chosen to run my business activities under)
When I started my job at a big software distributor in Regensburg in 1988, I had to found an own little business to let me invoice the time I was working for them. So I thought about a name I could give to my one-man-company and finally ended up with "PHI", a three letter abbreviation for "Programs, Hardware and Information." Since I was looking into the future I thought that would be a perfect choice to let me extend my activities into any direction I would ever want to (besides that, "phi" is a Greek letter, too, which could be perfectly used to design a nice and good looking 3D letter head ;-)
By that time I already knew about e-mail and domain name stuff from my study and it happened that somehow I got knowledge about a computer community called "sub-Netz-Verein." Their ideas about free and inexpensive data communication truly were very idealistic and futuristic at that time and of course I liked it. So I signed up for a membership and got my first own e-mail address and access to international usenet news. A few years later (early 1993) I registered my first own domain "phiger.com."
Pardon? Oh, the domain name... Well, of course I wanted to register "phi.com," but unfortunately that name already had been assigned a few months earlier to another company in the US. So I had to think of another name and that took me to "phiger.com" for the domain name and "PHI-Germany" for my business activities.
When things got easier and cheaper to register and connect a domain round 1997, I registered "phi.net" and "renamed" my business to "PHI.NET" (speak: P-H-I-dot-Net), too. Well, today I'm running a couple of domains for private and business use.
During the following years my business activities got very successful and far more time consuming to let me handle things alone (especially the participation in the Microsoft Partner Program.) So I teamed up with a few good friends to raise and assure a high quality standard for our projects. Like me, every one of them has a long practical experience in and a deep knowledge of the IT business.