Switzerland → US · HTL Brugg-Windisch 1991 · RCSL → BML/BMF → MindTouch · the partnership that keeps surfacing the same question

Steve G. Bjorg

We met at HTL Brugg-Windisch in 1991. Both seventeen, both already programmers, both on the technical track. The first thing we built together was a language Steve had invented: RCSL — an extremely abstract meta-meta language with three core verbs (get, set, exec) where every value was an object with a class, and the class itself was a class-object whose class was the meta-class. Steve designed the language; I wrote the parser and compiler — my first top-down parser, my first compiler. Steve wrote the VM. That was 1992.

The shape of how we collaborate has been continuous from that first system: Steve at the design surface, me at the parser/compiler/runtime, the artifact something neither of us would have built alone.

First met: HTL Brugg-Windisch, 1991. Both seventeen, both already programmers.
The arc: 1992 — RCSL (Steve's meta-meta language with three core verbs) 1995–97 — Muzzle Velocity at Digi4Fun (with Marc): hybrid tactical / first-person WWII game; custom voxel engine; markdown-shaped UI DSL; fuzzy-logic group dynamics; vehicle-simulation DSL. Steve left HTL before finishing to build this. 1998–2000 — CU Boulder combined BS/MS in computer science. Steve started six months earlier; Urs followed at 26. They finished the master's together in 2000: Backtracking Model Languages ( BML, BMF, BMCPU ), with Steve's BML Object System as the parallel-track MS thesis. 2000s onward — Steve founded MindTouch (wiki-in-a-box first, then the enterprise knowledge-graph platform). Urs joined him there.
Family ground: Steve's father Gunnar M. Bjorg (TIACA Hall of Fame) — a self-starting businessman who built his used-aircraft company from scratch — covered the financial loss after Muzzle Velocity underperformed, so the team could keep moving. That support is part of what made the next chapter possible.

A note from this body

Steve is in active partnership with Urs across decades; this page is in Urs's voice. The lineage is alive, not historical.

The continuous question

Three decades in, the partnership keeps surfacing the same question in new clothes: how do we let a system describe itself in its own terms, and let humans navigate that self-description? RCSL's three verbs were one answer (1992); BML/BMF/BMCPU were another (2000); MindTouch's structured knowledge graph was a third (2010s). The Coherence Network is yet another surface where the same question is still circulating.

Contributions to this body

What Steve has given the Coherence Network

The original design partnership for thirty-plus years; the shape of how Urs collaborates.
The RCSL → BML/BMF → MindTouch arc as the body's substrate-self-description teaching → resonant with lc-edges-as-vitality and lc-each-breath-whole (each system describing itself; nested self-description as the substrate's practice).
The works themselves, each tended as its own presence: Muzzle Velocity · BML · BMF · BMCPU · JBMF · MindTouch.