Sándor Bárány

He studied programming with László Kalmár as a high school student. He started out as a mathematician, but studied under an individual computer science curriculum; his areas of interest were programming languages, compilers, and portability.

He conducted research and development of programming methods and system software at the Information Processing Laboratory (Infelor) from 1975 to 1983. He became closely associated with the CDL (Compiler Description Language) group led by Professor CHA Koster; this resulted in the innovative “CDL2 interactive, integrated language system”. In the 1980s, he led the development of the ANSWER operating system file system.

From 1984, he and several colleagues moved to the Computer Coordination Institute (SZKI), where he was responsible for the "porting" of the MProlog system and the product's lifecycle management.
During this period, he became a committed believer in the free software philosophy.

In 1989, he moved to Austria with his family. He first developed expert systems (based on MProlog). Later, for ten years, he participated in the exploration of new developments important for banking IT: networks, interactive systems, intranet, cryptography, videoconferencing, etc.
In his free time, he participated in promoting the use of the GNU/Linux operating system and other "alternative" systems (PGP).

In 1999, he had the opportunity to contribute to the writing of an IBM technical book. He spent six weeks at an IBM site in the US; here he was introduced to IBM's mainframe Linux, which he also participated in developing for a year in Germany.

He has been an employee of IBM Austria since 2001. His work focused on the consolidation and virtualization of Linux servers. He actively sought opportunities for knowledge preservation and sharing within a large organization; he became a member of IBM's largest employee community - the free software group of more than five thousand people - and later its European co-chair. For years he was the moderator of IBM's own social network.

From 2009 until his retirement, he was involved in the planning, pricing, and sales of large corporate outsourcing projects.

Since 2018, he has been actively participating in the work of the Data Archive built by the NJSZT Informatics History Forum (iTF).