5 ms·

How did you become acquainted?

jacquesm 5y ago
That's a very long story, the in-a-nutshell version: walking at night in Amsterdam I spotted two guys hauling an Apple II, disk drives, a monitor and a bunch of expansion cards out of the back of a car, I asked what they were doing and they said that they were making some kind of computer vision device (this was in 1984, I was 19 at the time, what they were building was an eye tracker), I asked if I could tag along and they said ok, after an hour or so it was clear they had no clue what they were doing (trying to write some basic program to talk to their frame grabber) so I coded the whole thing up without an assembler by poking the machine code into some free RAM. This led to a longer term relationship, the one guy was an optics genius called Michiel Kassies, the other a guy that knew a lot about hardware, Karl Jungbauer who worked for NikHef (the dutch institute for Nuclear Physics) in their hardware department and who moonlighted in the tech scene in Amsterdam in his free time. Michiel knew Hugo, and when Hugo got the proposal to invest in Jan Sloots' fake video compressor he asked me to look it over for him, which I did. Hugo ended up investing in DadaData, a company founded by Jungbauer, a guy called Peter Domela-Nieuwenhuis and myself, after three weeks I realized these guys were more interested in their drugs than in running a business so I bailed out and founded MCS, which still continues today (though it has been renamed). Over the years Hugo would come up with all kinds of weird ideas and occasionally he'd call. We lost touch prior to Greenmix, by which time his drug use became so bad that there we no more normal times. It's pretty weird to see someone you respect initially slide off like that, I have always hated drugs and it made it pretty hard for me to be exposed to it without commenting on it and getting into arguments. Hugo really was a nice guy that lost it, his addiction to his dope and lifestyle eroded every sense of what was right and what wasn't. The path of destruction he left behind is a mile wide and even though he spent 12 months in jail I'm pretty sure there are lots of people around here that would happily piss on his grave. Of course I'm sorry for all the investors that lost their money in his harebrained schemes, but I mostly pity his kid who saw his father slide down like that. One of the funnier stories about Hugo: he was very much overweight and the doctor told him to get some exercise or that he'd die of a heart attack in short order. So he went bike shopping and picked out a very fancy racing bike. After 6 months of dutifully disappearing each day for two hours on his bike he complained that he didn't lose any weight. So I offered to ride with him to see what was going on. Hugo lived in Loosdrecht at the time, and from his house made a beeline to a pancake restaurant in Vreeland (a couple of km away from his house), where he ate two enormous pancakes, consumed copious amounts of expensive alcohol and then cycled leisurely back. So at least I understood why the weight loss program was a failure :), but he swore me to secrecy (which I am now breaking, but I don't think he'd mind).
- mstef 5y ago
  fascinating details, happy to have stirred up these memories!
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I've been reading for a couple of hours on all of the stuff you guys have dug up on the pocket telex (and other interesting bits and pieces), very impressive. So much detail, this must have been a lot of work, and other than a couple of typos I can't find anything that doesn't match what I already knew about the device. It would be interesting to know who formed the software team from those days, I wished I recalled more names. Above the offices in Amsterdam Zuidoost (Hogehilweg) they had this insanely extravagant bar. Looking back I think that the armed bodyguard must have been either coke-induced paranoia shining through or a sign that there was already more afoot that could not stand the light of day.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    By the way, doesn't this page need an update now? https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/index.htm https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/index.htm "The Philips version with encryption (PX-1000Cr) contained a much improved cryptographic algorithm."
    - cryptopaul 5y ago
      Hi, Paul from Crypto Museum here. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I missed that one when updating the stories.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        You're welcome, if you want I can proofread the whole website, I noticed a few more typos as I was reading quite a lot there today.
        cryptopaul 5y ago
        The whole website would probably take a bit too long ;-) But please report any typos you find whilst reading to info@cryptomuseum.com That will land directly on my desk. Thanks, Paul

That's a very long story, the in-a-nutshell version: walking at night in Amsterdam I spotted two guys hauling an Apple II, disk drives, a monitor and a bunch of expansion cards out of the back of a car, I asked what they were doing and they said that they were making some kind of computer vision device (this was in 1984, I was 19 at the time, what they were building was an eye tracker), I asked if I could tag along and they said ok, after an hour or so it was clear they had no clue what they were doing (trying to write some basic program to talk to their frame grabber) so I coded the whole thing up without an assembler by poking the machine code into some free RAM. This led to a longer term relationship, the one guy was an optics genius called Michiel Kassies, the other a guy that knew a lot about hardware, Karl Jungbauer who worked for NikHef (the dutch institute for Nuclear Physics) in their hardware department and who moonlighted in the tech scene in Amsterdam in his free time. Michiel knew Hugo, and when Hugo got the proposal to invest in Jan Sloots' fake video compressor he asked me to look it over for him, which I did. Hugo ended up investing in DadaData, a company founded by Jungbauer, a guy called Peter Domela-Nieuwenhuis and myself, after three weeks I realized these guys were more interested in their drugs than in running a business so I bailed out and founded MCS, which still continues today (though it has been renamed). Over the years Hugo would come up with all kinds of weird ideas and occasionally he'd call. We lost touch prior to Greenmix, by which time his drug use became so bad that there we no more normal times. It's pretty weird to see someone you respect initially slide off like that, I have always hated drugs and it made it pretty hard for me to be exposed to it without commenting on it and getting into arguments. Hugo really was a nice guy that lost it, his addiction to his dope and lifestyle eroded every sense of what was right and what wasn't. The path of destruction he left behind is a mile wide and even though he spent 12 months in jail I'm pretty sure there are lots of people around here that would happily piss on his grave. Of course I'm sorry for all the investors that lost their money in his harebrained schemes, but I mostly pity his kid who saw his father slide down like that. One of the funnier stories about Hugo: he was very much overweight and the doctor told him to get some exercise or that he'd die of a heart attack in short order. So he went bike shopping and picked out a very fancy racing bike. After 6 months of dutifully disappearing each day for two hours on his bike he complained that he didn't lose any weight. So I offered to ride with him to see what was going on. Hugo lived in Loosdrecht at the time, and from his house made a beeline to a pancake restaurant in Vreeland (a couple of km away from his house), where he ate two enormous pancakes, consumed copious amounts of expensive alcohol and then cycled leisurely back. So at least I understood why the weight loss program was a failure :), but he swore me to secrecy (which I am now breaking, but I don't think he'd mind).

mstef 5y ago
fascinating details, happy to have stirred up these memories!
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I've been reading for a couple of hours on all of the stuff you guys have dug up on the pocket telex (and other interesting bits and pieces), very impressive. So much detail, this must have been a lot of work, and other than a couple of typos I can't find anything that doesn't match what I already knew about the device. It would be interesting to know who formed the software team from those days, I wished I recalled more names. Above the offices in Amsterdam Zuidoost (Hogehilweg) they had this insanely extravagant bar. Looking back I think that the armed bodyguard must have been either coke-induced paranoia shining through or a sign that there was already more afoot that could not stand the light of day.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  By the way, doesn't this page need an update now? https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/index.htm https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/index.htm "The Philips version with encryption (PX-1000Cr) contained a much improved cryptographic algorithm."
  - cryptopaul 5y ago
    Hi, Paul from Crypto Museum here. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I missed that one when updating the stories.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      You're welcome, if you want I can proofread the whole website, I noticed a few more typos as I was reading quite a lot there today.
      - cryptopaul 5y ago
        The whole website would probably take a bit too long ;-) But please report any typos you find whilst reading to info@cryptomuseum.com That will land directly on my desk. Thanks, Paul