The inventor
The life of Joachim Feierabend is all about electrical engineering
“I founded the first private company here on this site.” He did so on the day of the German monetary union. On 1st July 1990, Joachim Feierabend quit his job at the Central Institute for Optics and Spectroscopy to become an independent contractor for computer technology with an office in Adlershof: “I remember the lease, all very complicated.” He survived life as a contractor for eight years. It had soon lost its creative appeal and developed into an ordinary shop for computers. As somebody with a keen interest in “everything remotely to do with technology”, Feierabend did not want his career to end as a “discounter” or a “cratepusher”: “I am the type of guy who sits around in his laboratory and looks for solutions.”
Born in 1954, the native Berliner always found his way back to his life mission against all odds. It started in the GDR, where he didn’t get into university for the highly sought-after subject of electrical technology and ended up in the department for technical cybernetics in Leipzig instead. This education qualified him to plan factory equipment in the chemical industry. His father told him not to worry and said: “You never actually end up doing what you learned at the start.”
Before he went to university, Feierabend had completed an apprenticeship in a factory for television electronics in Schöneweide. The place was legendary for working on light-emitting diodes and liquid crystal displays as soon as the 1960s. Later on, the young engineer contributed to deciphering the secrets of an American-built series of circuits for the Berlin Institute for Telecommunications. His research also contributed to developing the groundwork for the GDR’s very own computer production.
In 1988, he worked on measuring procedures to check the flatness of optical surfaces, for example, mirrors. The academy and the TV studios on the site were home to 5,500 employees. Feierabend is old enough to remember a time in the mid-90s, when that number had sunk to 3,000. What is happening today “is something I value very highly.”
Feierabend welcomes visitors in Volmerstraße at the headquarters of the company GFal (Society for the Promotion of Applied Computer Science), where he has been working since 2003. He worked in sales for a long time and is now a project manager: “I am back to working on development tasks.” Currently on an acoustic direction sensor. He is head of the working group on acoustics, vibrations, and sound insulation of the VDI Association of German Engineers. How can somebody called Feierabend (the German word for the time after work) have such an active life? Naturally, there is a funny family anecdote to his. His great grandfather worked in a machine factory. One day, his boss wanted to speak to him, stepped out of his glass office and shouted “Feierabend!”, whereupon everyone immediately left the factory in! “From that time on, whenever he wanted to speak to my great-grandfather, he would go see him personally.”
By Winfried Dolderer for Adlershof Journal