I was born in 1957 in a city called Hoensbroek. Hoensbroek is in the southern part of the province "Limburg"
which is the most southern province of Holland (The Netherlands).

At young age, I started to take old televion sets apart.
Later I built my first radio. It was a kit from Philips, and it worked with three OC13 transistors.
After that project, I got an electronic experimenters box from Philips for my birthday.

I passed the Radio Amateur Dutch State exam and obtained my ham license in 1975.
My call sign is PE1CKF, errrrr ... was.
In December 2003 I passed the last held morse code exam. My callsign now is PA8PDP.

In 1980, I graduated from the Technical High School and obtained a Bachelor's degree in electronics.
After one year in the military service, I started with Océ Technologies, R&D department, as an embedded systems software engineer. During 1985-1990, I worked for the Computer Centre (CCN) of DSM, a Dutch big chemical plant. At CCN, I worked with the 1163 and 1172 SPERRY/UNISYS mainframes. In those days I was able to read the dump (11" paper, stack height at least 2") and could explain why EXEC, the operating system, had died. The joke we always said when we got such a pile on our desk was: "let's try to find an eight". I never found one in the octal dump.... The knowledge on EXEC has vapourised.

In 1990, I returned to Océ, again the R&D department. At this moment I work in the International Training department. The last 3 years I developed training and teached Océ technicians how to connect a printer in any common environment, Windows (any flavor), Macintosh, Novell NetWare and UNIX (BSD and System V).
Currently, I develop and write technical documentation in XML.

In 1999, I finished my studies on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. Now, I am an MCSE and MCT on Windows NT 4.0.
Last January, I passed on both A+ exams and I passed the Network+ exam in May. Now I am working on Windows 2000.
Passed the Windows 2000 Professional exam and the Windows 2000 Server exam, but the MCSE track will keep me busy for an other year,   if   I will ever finish it!
Update: I stopped, never finished the next module "Active Directory". I spent too much time, where there is so much more fun out there in other stuff!