Every once in a while, he and the debugger (named DDT.COM in CP/M) would get into an "argument" about what Bertel's code should be doing. He would crash his fist down into the keyboard, (which always confused the debugger), shook his fist and screamed "You stupid little 8-bit toy!!!". Imagine him with a perfect Hogan's Heroes German accent.....
Well, Bertel has gone back to the Fatherland, and is probably a big executive somewhere. I can hear him today, still screaming, "It is now safe to turn off your computer!!"
I went to a DECUS meeting in the middle 80's and part of a program was a taped speech that Admiral Grace Hopper made to accept an award.
This tiny little woman came to the podium and out of her mouth came a great deal of wisdom. She was involved with so much about computers. Her best stories were about the young naval officers who smuggled PC's onto their ships so they could do their jobs better and faster. She was instrumental in getting this "wisdom of youth" hammered into the heads of the Navy brass...
Her most memorable comment was about the loyalty built into the chain of command. You are trusted by your superiors to pass them good, timely information. You are trusted by your subordinates to always support them, particularly when they gave you good information that made the brass look bad!!!
In the early 80's Academic Computing was using NorthStar Horizon computers before the IBM 8088 PC came out. We got a copy of dBASE 2.2 and I was given the job of testing it. The ACC librarian, Jean MacIntyre, had a list of documents that she cataloged and I was given the job of putting that into a dBASE database and writing a menu program that could add, delete, edit and report the contents.
I still have a dBASE 2 manual in my office at home.
After I had worked for Bertel for a while, I started reading in BYTE Magazine about Jerry Pournelle and his amazing CompuPro computer. Jerry has been plugging hardware and software for almost 20 years.
I drove to Bethesda, Maryland and paid a ton of money for a dual processor CPU board (Z80 and 8086), 64K of RAM, a 512K RAM disk and two 8" disk drives.