Reto Ambühler celebrates 20th anniversary at ETH
My relationship with the ETH Zurich started about four years before my first day on the job, at the edge of the Grand Canyon. A chance meeting on our honeymoon with a German couple living in Switzerland led to a job at ETH.
Switch to ETH Zurich
In March 1994 I began working as a system administrator in the IT Services at ETH. My job included migrating clients from VMS to Unix. I was also involved from the beginning in the „EZINFO“ project, managed by Franz Kuster, which would allow interested students access to email and other services. In April 1994 I participated in an event which can be called the Big Bang of the „World Wide Web“, the first WWW conference in history! Those three days changed my professional life more than any other event (see www94.web.cern.ch/WWW94/).
From System Administrator to Webmaster
On October 1 1997 I became the first full-time webmaster of ETH Zurich.
One very interesting facet of my work was the web conferences which took place annually. Up until 2012 I attended each one of them, initially in Europe and the U.S., later as far as Australia and Asia. Thus, in the past 20 years I have visited four different continents. In December 1995 while in Boston I was witness to the beginning of Web commercialization. From here on, the Web continuosly became an integral part of daily life. Meanwhile, as we know, the Web is largely established and „traditional web hosting“ is taken for granted. However, this does not mean that my job has become routine. There are always new, Web-based services being added and existing ones expanded. This includes SharePoint, a tool which although available for many years, has only recently grown in popularity at ETH. Maintenance of the new ETH search engine is also one of my newer tasks.
In my free time I enjoy hitting the road with my wife in our 30 -year-old VW bus, preferably in more northern regions. See more on our trips on our private website (www.ambuehler.ch).
I wish to take this opportunity to thank all those who have contributed to my wonderful, interesting and fulfilling years at ETH up to now, especially Jürgen, Peter and Roland, and of course Markus, who always uncomplainingly fills in for me during my absences.
The above is a transliterated and abridged version of the German post.
More details on our German blog.
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