Private website of Achim Baqué

First name:
For most people outside Germany, Achim does not sound particularly German, but it is the German short form of Joachim. Many native English speakers assume an Arabic origin because of the pronunciation, and many pronounce it 'Akeem' (yes, like the main character in the movie Prince of Zamunda). The “ch” sounds very harsh to them and is at least as difficult to pronounce as the English “th” is for many Germans. To German ears, it sounds soft.
Wikipedia has an article about Achim.
There is even a city in northern Germany called Achim.

Last name:
Baqué does not sound German either? Well, it is a French name. My ancestors left France in 1789 in a hurry, eventually escaped the revolution on a raft, and settled in Germany. For more than 200 years, this family branch has lived in Germany. The other half of my ancestors can be traced back to living in Germany for at least 900 years. According to my genetic ancestry results, I am 99.9% European, mostly German; the rest is British and broadly Northwestern European.

After that, chemistry became a serious hobby. I had a huge collection of laboratory equipment and chemicals that one could only dream of. Rockets and explosives were a big thing for a boy, and today, you could not do this without getting into real trouble. At school, my chemistry teacher allowed me to work in the laboratory during regular school hours. I did not have to attend the normal lessons, but during the last five minutes of each class I had to give a chemistry demonstration with something 'entertaining' (colourful, burning or exploding). Today, it would be impossible for a private person to have the chemicals I had.

Many members of my family worked at the German Parliament. During my childhood, I spent some time at the parliament building in Bonn, the former German capital. Today, the capital is Berlin.
For two years, I was in the nursery of the German Parliament. That was the time of terrorism in Germany (RAF). Security forces and federal police armed with machine guns stood in front of the primary school and the parliament. Nearly all children in my school had parents in the government. Terrorists had threatened to kidnap children. Between school and the parliament's nursery, we were driven in an armoured Mercedes 600 and, for half a year, even in an armoured personnel carrier (Fuchs). It was great fun for us because we did not see the threat.
After school, I would usually sit at Ossi's Bar in the parliament. Every day, I saw members of parliament, including some famous ministers and the chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. I sat next to both chancellors while having lunch. One time, a convoy came to a halt with Ronald Reagan on the road B9 in Bonn, next to the car my mother and I were in. It was a convertible, and we played loud music. Reagan laughed and waved. Usually, the convoy never stops, and getting so close was very unusual.
My paternal grandmother, together with a scientist, founded the company ORBIT and Helatronik after her time in parliament. They sold rocket technology, telemetry, and other equipment, especially to ESA and NASA. Some of it was even used in the Space Shuttle. I wish I had been older at that time. At least I was able to see the latest satellites, rockets, and helicopters at Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm in Ottobrunn near Munich. They showed me the final assembly of a three-axis stabilized satellite. I think it was EXOSAT. Because my grandmother played an important role in parliament's history, she gave many interviews to German magazines like 'Stern' and 'Spiegel', and many times she was a guest on the famous TV political magazine 'Monitor'. She used to do business with Israel and Saudi Arabia (and both knew about it at the time). She was invited to the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin as a guest of honour.
My maternal grandmother did something remarkable. During Nazi rule, she hid a Jewish man in her basement, and he survived. One life saved. Over the following decades, my mother and I visited him many times. For many years, I thought he was my uncle, until my family told me the truth when I was an adult.
As a teenager, I was lucky to work at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (mm laboratories).

But my main focus shifted to programming when I was 17. I used to work with hex-display computers, Apple II+, Apple IIe, Basis 108, and later the IBM PCs, starting with the IBM 5150. The world of IBM PCs in the late 1980s was incredible, and I did not use Apple computers after that. It was only after 2015 that I came back into contact with vintage Apple computers from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. My very first computer of my own was an IBM 5160 in 1986, with a gigantic 20 MB hard drive. Today, a single image from my SLR would not fit onto this hard disk. But in the early days, I thought this hard disk would be big enough for the next 20 years. I had and have zero interest in computer games and only used computers for programming.

During my first year of contact with computers, computer magazines published some of my software and some articles. The "Markt und Technik Verlag" offered me a contract for the distribution of one of my programs, which competed with Norton Utilities (according to the publisher of the computer magazine, it was not only much better but unbelievably faster). At the age of 17, too young and inexperienced to recognise the opportunity, I had little interest in it. I simply wanted to continue working on it for myself. Years later, I realised that it had been a multi-million-dollar opportunity.

A friend and I founded a software company when I was 18, for which I left my university studies.

Since the 1980s, I have developed software for court bailiffs / the foreclosure/judicial office in Germany. This software became the market leader and, since the 2010s, its market share has exceeded 50%.

During the early 1990s, software for food delivery came into focus. I developed software called foodserv that could display menu lists with pictures, in the DOS era, and it was even possible to add a BBS for online orders. Companies could also place aggregated orders. The timing was not right, however. The software was sold to only about 100 restaurants. This type of software, with a smaller range of features, became a major business only in the 2010s with smartphones.

Jumping to the 2020s: I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Germany was divided, and the Iron Curtain separated the West from Eastern Europe and Russia. Then everything changed in the 1990s, and I visited the whole of Eastern Europe and Russia. Everything seemed to be getting better and better. But too many people are not interested in history, and so it repeats itself. Too many people are easily influenced and manipulated. Nationalism has been flourishing almost worldwide for years. Many countries are moving backward, and quite a few countries are worse than they were 40 years ago. Above all, a lack of education is the breeding ground for this development. Added to this is easy access to manipulative sources of information. It is disturbing to see how easily so many people can be manipulated. This is very regrettable, and we can only hope that this trend will be reversed.

My vintage computer collection started with computer parts and large hard disks in the late 1980s. In the 2000s, collecting vintage computers became a serious hobby. It is now a large collection that I preserve for the future. Since 2018, I have been the curator of the Apple-1 Registry and have stayed in contact with many Apple-1 owners.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I operated one of the largest BBS in the FidoNet, the nibbelbox (the spelling of nibble is different in German). It was a BBS with 25 lines and more than 20 GB of data, at a time when even 40 MB hard disks were considered large. Even the full file list was bigger than an average hard disk. The system used Novell, and I programmed my own FOSSIL driver and the BBS software with an enhanced file browser and a graphical interface. If users requested files to download, my software would automatically switch servers and provide the files. The interface of this BBS was capable of showing graphical characters on DOS PCs thanks to its own terminal program. The file list browser also allowed users to move backwards, which was very unusual at the time. The BBS had thousands of registered users, long before the internet was popular.

In 2006, I started to produce time-lapse videos with self-developed circuits and SLR cameras. After the first ten years, I had built a collection of several thousand time-lapse videos and millions of pictures on more than 100 TB. Including backup drives stored in a bank vault, I use more than 100 high-capacity hard disks.
Some time-lapse videos and pictures are available through microstock agencies (for example footage at Pond5, Shutterstock, Fotolia). Several thousand time-lapse videos and pictures were sold in the first years and were used on numerous websites, for press, television, and movies, mostly in the USA.

The stock market is another hobby of mine since the early 2000s.

With the rise of drones, aerial photography became another hobby. I have used several modified ready-to-fly drones and a self-built hexacopter, and I had some unique opportunities to fly over very special places. For example, while sailing to South Georgia Island and Antarctica, I received the first permission ever granted from the Commissioner of South Georgia and an Admiral of the British Navy to fly several drones I carried with me. The result is very unique footage, including some from over 1,200 metres (4,000 feet) high (at that time it was legal). On this expedition, we even helped the administration to spot and count rare seals.