SpeedCommander's father is Sven Ritter. He initially saw his challenge in reproducing the possibilities of the original NC file manager. Once this goal was met, he began to expand the dual window model with useful new features. It did not take long for the student to surpass the teacher. Eventually the veteran role model went into early retirement; it lives on in SC's settings dialog as "NC Mode".
Sven Ritter was a neverending graduate student who never got around to complete his degree in Information Systems at the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany. This was mainly due to the tremendous work needed to develop SpeedCommander and additional applications. Over the years, he has used just about every compiler there is – with one notable exception: the programming language which starts with B and ends in ASIC. No Visual prefix or .NET sweetening will make it more palatable for him. One should never say never, but at this point SpeedCommander is not being developed in Basic, nor has it been touched by .net values. One thing remains certain: It's never certain what the future might bring.
As early as 1993, Jens Driese (JDS Software) took charge of the distribution of SpeedCommander – at a time when the application was still in its infancy. He has been taking care of sales and distribution ever since.
Until November 2004, Rainer Nausedat was also part of the team – he, too a college student who never reached graduation. Originally an engineer, he later found an affinity to compression algorithms. He is to thank for the fact that SpeedCommander and Squeez support so many archive formats. To integrate them into SpeedProject's products, all algorithms were recreated in-house in C and C++. After a short and painful illness, Rainer died in November 2004 (in memoriam).