Klaus Burkert
Workplace at Village Tronic around 1998

Klaus Burkert (* March 2, 1967 in Rotenburg/Wümme, Lower Saxony; † April 4, 2001 in Hannover) was a very friendly and helpful person throughout his life. Computer hardware and software were his passion which later became his profession and calling.

In 1981, he started with a Commodore VIC-20 for which he also developed games. This was followed by C64 and SX64. He was particularly fond of Amiga computers.

In 1991, he published test reports on Amiga products in the computer magazine c't. In 1992, he wrote an article in the Amiga magazine about tuning and expanding PC cards.

After an unsuccessful attempt at studying at the University of Passau am Inn, he started working as a permanent developer at Village Tronic Computer at the end of 1992, designing Amiga expansions.

He was significantly involved in the development of the following products, especially in logic and driver programming:

• Domino (before being employed at VT)
• PicassoII (Amiga)
• Pablo (Video-Encoder for PicassoII)
• Ariadne (Amiga)
• NuBus↔PCI-Bridge for MP3xx (Mac)
• PicassoII+ (redesign of PicassoII, Amiga)
• PicassoIV (Amiga)
• Paloma (TV/Video-In, for PicassoIV and Mac)
• 3D Overdrive (Mac)
• PabloII (Video-Encoder for PicassoIV and Mac)
• AriadneII (Amiga)
• ParaGlide (3D Add-On for PicassoIV)

From 1998 onwards, he mainly worked on the development of drivers for Macintosh PCI graphics cards.

In May 2000, he joined Metabox AG in Hildesheim, where he was initially entrusted, together with Thomas Rudloff (formerly of Phase5), with the development of Macintosh PowerPC processor cards, but quickly switched to the Metabox 1000 development.

On the morning of April 2, 2001, he suffered a heart attack, the symptoms of which only became apparent during a meeting later that day. He was transferred to the Hannover Medical School for further surgical treatment on Wednesday, April 4, 2001, where he suffered another heart attack during the operation and passed away.

He was buried the following week in the presence of his family, many friends, colleagues, and companions at the cemetery in his hometown of Ahausen.