I introduce myself : André Reinald, born in April 1969.

I came to computers by passion when I was 14, and was very soon interested in anything related with the third dimension. My interest for this field is mostly explained by the fact that both my parents are architects and that I have always admired their perspective drawings.

I wrote my first modelers by 1986, in Basic, then in C, and finally in Pascal. ALEPH is written 99,9% in Pascal and 0,1% in C.

The name ALEPH has many meanings. It's the first letter on the hebrew alphabet (and the initial of Adam, the first man) and it has a really pretty shape. It is, also, in maths, a symbol that designates the cardinal (number of elements) of infinite sets (integers, decimals, fractions, reals...). Finally, as I recently learned, it is an esoterical sign, but I ignore its meaning.

In spite of my source of inspiration, ALEPH is not dedicated to architects (even if it could have been more profitable). I wanted to be able to model anything around me, and which is often composed of irregular surfaces (at the contrary of architecture projects).

From the feature viewpoint, ALEPH has always been keeping up with the main modelers from the personal computer world, but today, it has important leading features over any competitor. Some would say I should have marketed it before, but I was certainly too young.

ALEPH means many years of work, but few programming hours in proportion. It could stay compact because I have been the only one to develop it, I didn't have constraints, and I could afford undoing for better doing, even introducing incompatibilities which are impossible in a commercial context.

Besides ALEPH, in my free-time hours, I've been developping a few games and utilities of the same level as those found in shareware. If they are not yet distributed as such, it is because I have doubts about users' loyalty (a typically french experience, I admit).

I am presently employed half time in a company called Alsoft which makes a GIS called GeoConcept. I develop so called complex algorithms related to topology and huge raster map morphing... I program on Macintosh, but all my sources are integrated in the "scuttle" version. Meanwhile I am waiting for my author activity to be more financially rewarding...

Among my next big projects, I can cite something one could put in the database manager category. What ? You still think it is too late to launch this kind of product ? Wait and see, everything is still to be invented !