The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,862 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

My first computer, which I bought way after my first programming contest

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/15

1988: my first computer

Earlier this year, I found back the ad on the right of the first computer it bought including monitor: at JWC Computers in The Hague¹ where after the the warranty period was over I found out the 16 Mhz 286 processor was a 12 Mhz configured with zero wait state. Luckily I could exchange the VGA card which wasn’t really compatible with a more compatible one.

The machine really boosted my software career and made me start my own company in august 1989 at age 20.

The start of the career however was about a year after attending this programming contest:

Using the computers at university, I showed off some more Turbo Pascal things I created (including a graphical mouse cursor in text-mode²) right after the CP/M and CP/M-86 support was dropped in favour of DOS at the end of the combined Turbo Pascal CP/M and DOS versions. Hello Turbo Pascal 4 with units³, .EXE support, new IDE and new-style manuals, Turbo Pascal 5.0 with integrated debugger, Turbo Pascal 5.5 with objects, Turbo Pascal 6.0 with Turbo Vision and MDI, and Turbo Pascal version 7.0 with DPMI and Windows support (the last two in Borland Pascal; and Windows support also separately available in the OWL based Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.0 and 1.5) sharing the same DLL and DOS Extender support system, syntax highlighting.

1986: my first and only programming contest

I found back JWC computers a few days after finding back my first ever computer programming contest in 1986 [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@bert_hubert @ionica Jullie …” – Mastodon

Bij Micro Masters Holland in 1986 ging het dus al om de UI en niet om de inhoud (:
In educatieve software bleek toen al nauwelijks brood te verdienen.
Misschien als ik toen @WGAvanDijk gekend had…

Followed by [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “@bert_hubert @ionica @WGAvanDi…” – Mastodon

Oh kijk: het andere interview van Nico Baaijens (Paul van der Bijl van het vorige interview teruggevonden op Twitter: @paulvdb)

Wat wist ik toen al veel en weinig tegelijk.

Dat is niet heel veel veranderd (:

That contest was a result of The calculators that got me into programming (via: calculators : Algorithms for the masses – julian m bucknall).

I was quite good at Turbo Pascal programming, which landed my first freelance gigs and led me – after FORTRAN and x86 assembly language side-steps – to Delphi, C# and many scripting languages on many platforms. Of course DOS, Windows and OS/2, but also VAX/VMS, BSD (including MacOS, SunOS and the migration of the latter from BSD to SVR4), HP UX, AS/400, AIX, and of course Linux including embedded varieties of some.

There is remarkably little information about Micro Masters Holland via Google Search, but other searches have more results. From those, my conclusion is that the contest ran at least 3 times. Below some articles grouped by the years it ran.

Micro Masters Holland 1984

Micro Masters Holland 1985

Micro Masters Holland 1986

Micro Masters Holland 1987

Micro Masters Holland generic

Interviews with me about Micro Masters Holland

The full article by Paul van der Bijl from [Wayback/Archive] Leidse Courant | 21 mei 1986 | pagina 13 – Historische Kranten, Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken

Did you spot the image behind the lamp. Yup: Karateka – a game I loved and still do. Thanks Jordan Mechner for creating that!

The full article by Nico Baaijens (also interviewing Jos de Klerk who now works at Settels Savenije) from [Wayback/Archive] Algemeen Dagblad » 17 mei 1986 – Art. 227 | Delpher

The insert on the top right is about addiction. Even back then I thought that wording was too strong: it is an addiction when things run out of hand. Looking back, it never really did. The time spent programming was a combination of passion and avoiding my mom. Only much – at age 50 – I found out the cause for that: she had been narcissistic since her youth and kept pushing me beyond my limits to compensate for the shortcomings of my mentally retarded brother. That was the real problem and combined with my autism and skills the reason I ended up in IT: a kind of mental safe space.

--jeroen

Footnotes

¹ [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers: “… Thuis dus niet aan de orde: mijn eerste PC was een bij elkaar verdiende 286 van JWC op de LvM in Den Haag. Dat waren afzetters, dan die 16 Mhz was een 12 Mhz op zero wait-state. De advertentie net terggevonden op aan de p…” – Mastodon

JWC computers advertisement picture from:

Way more of their ads: [Wayback/Archive] Resultaten | Delpher: jwc computers

A tiny bit of history on them in the replies of a blog post describing a very similar store: [Wayback/Archive] Weans, Den Haag – blafhert

Weans & sunshine zijn een en de zelfde, op een gegeven moment (bijna tegen het einde) kwam er nog een filiaal & kantoor bij in de Pasadena in den haag. Dit was de “groothandel” hier kochten bedrijven zoals DES en King computers (wie kent die nog) hun spullen.

…

Owja Weans staat idd voor we are not stupid.

…

Die ene Marc, heeft in een veel later stadium in onze organisatie gewerkt, dat was bij EURO P.C. met vestingen op de segbroeklaan en 2 in de fahranheitstraat,het klopt wel dat ook dit een vestiging was van Sunshine N.V.
Onze holding is begonnen met computerverkoop in 1983 !!!, onder de naam EPC ,JWC computers , Necom en RE-Paco. met 5 vestigingen in den haag en 1 in Rotterdam, spectaculaur was onze vestiging in de weimarstraat te den haag waar een omzet
op zaterdag gerealiseerd werd van 1 MLN, het einde van deze vestiging is geweest een overtreding van BUMA er werden namelijk firenzo DOS bij een systeem geleverd welke uitstluitend geleverd mocht worden bij FIRENZO systemen.

…

Dat weans geen belasting betaalde is niet juist het bedrijf is ten onder gegaan door het opstarten van een memory fabriek in nederland en zoedoende alleen grondstoffen te hoeven importeren om zodoende de anti dumpheffing te ontlopen, die in die tijd 60% was, wij kregen een navordering van 150 MLN voor in ogen van overheid ontdoken invoerrecht, uit eindelijk heb ik de bete afgekocht voor 32 mln.

…

Ik blijf de verhalen van Jan hier boven hilarisch vinden. 90% een leugen. Heb er bijna 3 jaar gewerkt tot aan het bezoek van de FIOD. Bleek bij het GAK dat er voor het personeel nooit iets was afgedragen, terwijl wij dachten van wel. Jan was een briljant zakenman, kon iedereen oplichten waar je bij zat, draaide vele BTW carrousels en verdiende zich scheel. Maar ieder woord uit zijn mond was meestal onzin om zijn handel te verkopen.
Toch kijk ik met veel plezier terug op de tijd dat ik daar gewerkt heb.

…

² It was cool to see a similar solution mentioned at [Wayback/Archive] mouse – Graphics Cursor in Assembly – Stack Overflow.

³ A unit like modules concept was already in the beta version of the never Borland released Turbo Modula-2 later released as

Images

Queries

Posted in About, Development, Pascal, Personal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »

Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50 – Ars Technica

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/02

It first I thought “I didn’t know they had birthday on my birthday”, but then found out the article [Wayback/Archive] Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50 – Ars Technica got published on my birthday.

In fact Monty Python and the Holy Grail got released on 19730403 in London, and towards the end of April in the USA.

Dutch audio fragment of mid april about the anniversary: [Wayback] mp3 on [Wayback/Archive] Erik van Muiswinkel over 50 jaar Monty Python and the Holy Grail | NPO Radio 1 is great.

--jeroen

Posted in About, History, Personal | Leave a Comment »

File scoped namespaces – C# 10.0 draft specifications | Microsoft Learn

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/01

Oops, I thought this had been published a long time ago, but oh well: it is never too late to publish reflections on a C# programming language improvement.

After recovering from my rectum cancer treatments and finally upgrading most of my projects to recent enough C# versions, it was time to catch up on useful little C# language features released during my treatments.

This one is really nice: [Wayback/Archive] File scoped namespaces – C# 10.0 draft specifications | Microsoft Learn.

I wish it had been released much earlier, as it so much reminds me of the unit keyword in Delphi which influenced C# a lot. Well, actually the unit actually started in UCSD Pascal and Turbo Pascal; UCSD Pascal ran on the UCSD p-Machine (more on that in a future blog post), which influenced the Java Virtual Machine, which was based on Java bytecode and a Just-in-time compiler in turn influenced the .NET Common Language Runtime.

There are many examples from other languages, paradigms and frameworks: I love how C# and .NET bring so much programming history together.

In Delphi  it is easy: a source file can contain at maximum one unit (and apart from files included in that source file, no other source files can contribute to that unit) and the filename needs to match the unitname, so the unit is a self contained namespace.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, About, C#, C# 10, Cancer, Delphi, Development, Java, Java Platform, Jon Skeet, Pascal, Personal, Rectum cancer, Rider from JetBrains, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

My first mobile phone was not a Nokia but a Motorola which I still have just like the first Nokia banana

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/11

A while ago someone asked on Twitter if people had mobile phones in the early 1990’s.

I bought my first GSM phone in 1995. Unlike my other mobile non-smart phones that were from Nokia, this one was from Motorola.

It was the international GSM version of the Motorola MicroTAC series (see picture below) which by then was way more affordable and smaller than the Nokia devices (see Nokia 2010 – Wikipedia and Nokia 2110 – Wikipedia).

This was in the age that world wide there were various competing mobile phone network standards.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Cellular telephony, GSM, History, Personal, Power User, Telephony | Leave a Comment »

(Digital) photography, F-stops and polarisers

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/24

My filter removal tool broke, so while I had new ones on order, I had to figure out how many F-stops I would need to compensate for especially because I would be shooting during the evening.

Here are some links that gave me an impression:

Don’t you love the accessibility (a11y) awareness of people that put tables as images on their web-pages? The last link above did (see the image on the right below), I don’t: I love plain HTML with plain old rules and left-alignment content when it makes things more readable, so I converted it into a plain HTML table (: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, LifeHacker, Personal, Photography, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Wat zou de status zijn nadat ICTU 2,5 jaar terug een slechte Mijn PGB Portaal en migratie opleverde?

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/21

Ergens zomer 2022 werd het nieuwe Mijn PGB Portaal verplicht. Voorheen verliepen declaraties en dergelijke via een portaal van het SVB. Die was niet snel, had soms nukken, maar voldeed aan meer NORA richtlijnen dan het nieuwe portaal.

ICTU is een speler die exclusief op de overheidsmarkt functioneert, dus daarvan zou je verwachten dat die snappen wat NORA inhoudt en een goed product neer zetten.

Het tegendeel is waar: ik schreef in september 2022 een Twitter draad met veel screenshots over mijn eerste ervaring met het nieuwe portaal en de migratie van de onderliggende data waaruit het tegendeel bleek.

Ik ben benieuwd hoe de status nu is.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Care/Zorg, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Ethics in Bricks on X: “What happens when organizations measure and reward performance of professionals? Employees change their behavior “by avoiding tasks that do not yield quantifiable results.” Link: …” (research paper by Berend van der Kolk and Wesley Kaufmann)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/13

[WaybackSave/Archive] Ethics in Bricks on X: “What happens when organizations measure and reward performance of professionals? Employees change their behavior “by avoiding tasks that do not yield quantifiable results.” Link: …”

This is not limited to organisations having a lot of non-measurable goals: all organisations have those, including the ones in IT.

Research paper (published 7 years ago today, still very relevant) at [Wayback/Archive] Performance measurement, cognitive dissonance and coping strategies: exploring individual responses to NPM-inspired output control | Journal of Management Control

Abstract

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Awareness, Development, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some more links on HEARN/EARN and BITNET relay (which chat and precedes IRC)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/24

Triggered by [Wayback/Archive] Hillel on Twitter: “Gen-Z programmers are always chasing the new shiny thing like Tailwind and Svelte instead of learning CS fundamentals, like React”, below some links on HEARN, EARN and BITNET Relay: conference system before IRC.

I might amend it later with more information, but for now the list is so that I do not have to re-do the search queries.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, BITNET Relay, Chat, History, Personal, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

Notities Warmink / Wuba staande klok met drie melodieëen en wijzers voor minuten+uren, seconden, weekdag, maand, maanstand

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/10

Inn de basis een door mijn opa gebouwde opwindbare (3 gewichten) Warmink Wuba triple chime – Westminster, St. Michael, Whittington clock.

Die liep nauwelijks meer, en sloeg zowel geen melodie meer, maar ook geen uursignaal meer.

Hieronder links die me hielpen met uitzoeken wat er van dit merk nog bestond en kennis aanwezig is.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Development, DIY, Encoding, LifeHacker, Mojibake, Personal, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

“United by Unique”, the new World Cancer Day theme 2025-2027 | World Cancer Day – #WorldCancerDay #UnitedByUnique

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/04

[Wayback/Archive] “United by Unique”, the new World Cancer Day theme 2025-2027 | World Cancer Day.

Most of my cancer story is in reverse chronological order on the pinned Tweet of my Twitter profile twitter.com/jpluimers.

I learned quite a few things of which I mention 2:

  • Cancer is more than a disease
  • Getting cancer is a misfortune; surviving cancer is about luck

Read more at my pinned blog post and [Wayback/Archive] Official website of World Cancer Day by UICC | 4 February.

Image on the right image from [Wayback/Archive] licensed-image (2048×2048) via [Wayback/Archive] world cancer day – Google Search.

Related: World Cancer Day – Wikipedia

--jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Awareness, Cancer, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Rectum cancer | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »