Peter M. Schnell (* 10 June 1938 in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

) is a German computer scientist, founder of

Software AG Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, and the seventh largest in Europe. Software AG is traded on t ...

and long-time chairman of the ''

Vorstand In German corporate governance, a ''Vorstand'' is the executive board of a corporation (public limited company). It is hierarchically subordinate to the supervisory board (''Aufsichtsrat''), as German company law imposes a two-tier board of dir ...

'',

executive board A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organiz ...

Life

He grew up in Alsbach-Hähnlein near Darmstadt. Schnell was impressed by the IBM 650, the first commercial mainframe computer that

Alwin Walther Alwin Oswald Walther (born 6 May 1898 in Reick; died 4 January 1967 in Darmstadt) was a German mathematician, engineer and professor. He is one of the pioneers of mechanical computing technology in Germany. Life Alwin Walther was born in May ...

had procured for

Technische Universität Darmstadt The Technische Universität Darmstadt (official English name Technical University of Darmstadt, sometimes also referred to as Darmstadt University of Technology), commonly known as TU Darmstadt, is a research university in the city of Darmstadt ...

(TU Darmstadt). He then studied physics and mathematics at TU Darmstadt. In 1965 he graduated with a diplom in mathematics under Walther. Already as a student he gave courses in programming languages and worked as a freelance programmer for Euratom and at the German Computer Center in Darmstadt. He was one of the best Go players in Europe.

Software AG

In 1969, together with five other colleagues from the Institute for Applied Information Processing (AIV), Schnell founded Software AG in Darmstadt out of a garage with a starting capital of 6.000 German Mark and several patents. Among the colleagues was Peter Pagé, who left the company in 1992 after differences with Schnell. In the company, Schnell designed and developed the

Adabas Adabas, a contraction of “adaptable database system," is a database package that was developed by Software AG to run on IBM mainframes. It was launched in 1971 as a non-relational database. As of 2019, Adabas is marketed for use on a wider ran ...

(Adaptable Database System) database management system. The mathematician based his concept on the NF² database model (NF² stands for NFNF = non first normal form). In 1971, the high-performance system was put into operation for the first time at Westdeutsche Landesbank. Schnell was responsible for the maintenance and further development of Adabas for mainframe systems of IBM and

Siemens AG Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', ''E ...

. The system was later used by numerous customers on the operating system platforms VMS from DEC, various

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

systems,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

. Adabas is the fastest commercially available database management system in the world. In 1996, the sole shareholder retired from the ''

'' of Software AG and did not move to the

supervisory board In corporate governance, a governance board also known as council of delegates are chosen by the stockholders of a company to promote their interests through the governance of the company and to hire and fire the board of directors. In civil s ...

. At that time, Software AG had 28 subsidiaries in 80 countries, more than 3,300 employees were employed and sales revenues at that time amounted to approximately 800 million German Mark. Schnell then became a founder of the Software AG Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in Germany with headquarters in Darmstadt. The foundation holds 29 percent of the shares of Software AG. Soon after leaving his company, he devoted himself entirely to the foundation's work. He is an

anthroposophist Anthroposophy is a spiritualist movement founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Followers ...

, and the foundation supports projects in the field of youth, elderly and disabled work as well as in science, research, education and nature conservation, including the University of Witten-Herdecke and the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ru ...

. Schnells work was strongly influenced by the teaching of

Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 or 25 February 1861 – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as ...

. One motive for Schnells social commitment was that he himself has two sons with

intellectual disabilities Intellectual disability (ID), also known as general learning disability in the United Kingdom and formerly mental retardation, Rosa's Law, Pub. L. 111-256124 Stat. 2643(2010). is a generalized neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by signif ...

Awards

In 2002 he was awarded the Medal for Services to the Foundation System of the Federal Association of German Foundations for his foundation work by the

President of Germany The president of Germany, officially the Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany (german: link=no, Bundespräsident der Bundesrepublik Deutschland),The official title within Germany is ', with ' being added in international corres ...

Johannes Rau Johannes Rau (; 16 January 193127 January 2006) was a German politician ( SPD). He was the president of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and the minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In th ...

. On 7 May 2009, Schnell was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class. He received an honorary doctorate from the

Witten/Herdecke University Witten/Herdecke University is a private, state-recognized, nonprofit university in Witten, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was the first German private institution of higher education to receive accreditation as a "Universität", a status r ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schnell, Peter 1938 births Officers Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Anthroposophists Businesspeople from Darmstadt Businesspeople in information technology Living people German computer scientists Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni