Ode to the PST

1992! Internet in Germany was in its infancy, object oriented programming wasn’t well-known yet, and even the European Union, which has funded so many of our research efforts lately, had not been formed.

Computing was certainly not mainstream when Martin Wirsing took the post of full professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in that year. The chair for Programming & Software Engineering (

Lehrstuhl für Programmierung und Softwaretechnik, PST

) was created along with his appointment. Indeed, the first

Diplom

course of studies in Computer Science (

Informatik

) at LMU had been created only the year before. The institute was still situated in the Leopoldstraße in Schwabing, only moving to the

Institute am Englischen Garten

in the Oettingenstraße in 1996 (Figure 1) — a beautiful location set right in the English Garden in Munich, five minutes away from one of the main tourist spots, the

Biergarten am Chinesischen Turm

. And with a history — the building was the site of the former

Radio Free Europe

[28], a radio station funded by the U.S. Government with its own history (including a bomb attack in 1981 on the very building where PST is now located).