IBM's Webmeister in der Schweiz

Whenever we are going to squeeze money out of every request to our server, whenever we are going to design a page for use with one particular browser implementation only, and whenever we consider any kind of censorship we should appreciate the fact that, had such thoughts prevailed from the beginning, the Web wouldn't exist at all.

Michael Niksch is a techie's techie and webmaster for IBM Research in Switzerland. He has strong opinions about the World Wide Web, but they have been earned from long experience.

A physicist by education and a member of the Information Systems team at IBM Research in Switzerland, Mike got his first e-mail access to the Internet in 1988, when he was still working for IBM Research as a physicist. Around December, 1993, he heard the first rumors about the World Wide Web. By April 1994, before there was a www.ibm.com, he had installed an internal WWW server, then, an external server, making IBM Research's lab in Switzerland one of the first IBM sites on the Web.

His full-time job now is to provide easy access to the Web for all IBM Research employees in Switzerland and help them get familiar with it. He also helps them provide their own information. And he and his colleagues have migrated all the lab's internal information tools to Web technology. Today, most of his users can do all their work on a workstation and never need to log into a mainframe.

Besides his Web-related work, Mike is responsible for e-mail exchange within the lab, as well as with other IBM sites and with the Internet. And he works in basic system support, the bare existence of which is never recognized by users unless something breaks: with hardware and software of AFS fileservers, with backup, and with IP domain name service.

Mike has his Ph.D. in physics from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

The www.ibm.com interview