He was full professor in the computer science department at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH Zurich) until April 2014.
Then he studied mathematics at the ETH and worked in parallel at International Business Machines (IBM) as a student employee.
He joined Niklaus Wirth's research team in 1981, working on the Lilith computer and Modula-2.
[1] With Peter Schweri, he developed the system Sakkara for the purpose of writing partiturs of typical constructive Peter-Schweri-art compositions for presentation on computer and internet.
In 2013, Gutknecht released another Oberon-style programming language, named Zonnon.