How the Early 1980s Micro- and Power-Electronics Innovation in Germany Revolutionised Wind Energy Systems - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 468

glass-window showing the chip, erasable by UV light. The memory
packages were then mounted on processor-boards in 19

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racks of
all lab-made cards, probably worth several thousands of euros
in combined hardware and software, computing power today
entirely found in single chips for less than a euro. Code had to be
put into operation and tested with simple seven segment displays
and numeric keypads, watching transients analog output and

oscilloscope. It was the time, when the first Apple computers
had just appeared and the sensation was in the air, that IBM would
bring something like a small “personal” computer on the market,
not a playing-machine but something to be taken seriously.

via

20.2 Putting Technology to Work for Integrated

Systems

With the wind-converter damping prototype running, I continued
as one of the first PhD candidates starting at the recently founded
university of Kassel with its free-minded founding president
Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker, going beyond established university
structures, not having faculties, but something called interdisci-
plinary centres. Renewable Energies, Ecological Agriculture,
Fringe Groups, this was the place to work on such exotic topics,
at that time much under suspicion of the scientific establishment.
Soon a follow-up project was drafted for the BMFT in cooperation
with Professor Leonhard and Kleinkauf, one of his first PhDs and
now at the University of Kassel, and we also participated in the
first European demonstration of a stand-alone island supply with
wind power, balanced by a battery unit for the Irish island of Cape
Clear. The scope was generally enlarging towards wind-power
systems for island grids. My Greek colleague Fotios Raptis, who
soon became a friend, infected me with his enthusiasm about
islands—Greece has more than 3000 of them.
Once more, microprocessor control together with power
electronics turned out to be the key to high-quality power supply,
basically coping with the need for rapid balance of wind fluctuations
in order to avoid intolerable frequency deviations. In parallel to
the demonstration projects in Ireland, Jordan, Brasil and Greece,
my PhD work focused on the advanced microprocessor control, a