Thomas Pytel (a.k.a Tran) is an American demoscene legend. Having formed famous demogroup Reneissance in 1992, Thomas has been active in the demoscene until 1997. Most famous for writing one of the first true protected mode kernels for demo programmers named PMODE back in 1993, Thomas has indeed brought protected mode, flat memory model programming to the masses. Further development on this project has brought forth the evolution of the first reasonable replacement to famous DOS extender for the Watcom C/C++ compiler named DOS4G/W (used in many demo- and non-demo-scene productions including legends such as Doom, which was one of the first games to truly utilize protected mode) called PMODE/W, which is even today still used in many demoscene productions. PMODE/W has even been used by several games, including the first version of Baryon.

Among his demoscene accomplishments, Thomas is one of the many demo coders to have switched to game programming, the first commercial success of which was the popular shooter Zone 66 for Epic Megagames and onwards to Xixit. Tran was last seen working on Prey over at 3D Realms.

After leaving the gaming industry, Thomas became one of the lead developers of the engine behind PayPal (an online payment service now owned by eBay).

(contributed by Tomer Gabel)