I’m Michiel and I live in the Netherlands in a harbor town called IJmuiden, 20 kilometers West of Amsterdam. After working for 40 years with a large telecom company I got the opportunity to retire early. At first I started to do maintenance in mechanical public exchanges. After a few years computers systems were introduced and I started working with what we now see as ancient computer systems. Some of these were special developed for telecoms, but we also used some generic systems like the DEC PDP-11 running RSX. We also used HP-UX, Digital Ultrix and Solaris as Unix variants. Sometimes for some projects we had to use Windows systems as servers, but most of the time I was lucky and didn’t need to work with them. The last years I have been working on the 4TEL system which is an advanced networked test system for the copper network.
At home my first computer was a kind of self made OSI superboard, made on Eurocard boards. That system was later expanded with CP/M (actually ZCPR2). The next systems I had were several PC’s. As soon as the 386 came I started to use Linux Slackware.
When I started using PC’s I also started a BBS with a friend. The BBS was mostly targeted for radio amateurs and was available via dialup modems. At a certain time I started to write my own BBS called MBSE BBS that runs on Linux. Today the BBS still exists, but is only connected to the Internet. There are now almost no download files anymore just because everyone now uses the Internet.
Having said that I once build a computer, I still do electronics, mostly analogue, tubes and solid state. Some of these projects have found a place on this site.
I also do sound engineering. Long, long ago I owned a small sound studio with a friend. When cheap home recording came available we stopped our studio and I begun to do more live mixing which I still do.
As a side effect of this music hobby in 1979 I started a small pop festival called beeckestijnpop with a few friends. This small festival now has 10 to 15 thousand visitors each year with bands playing at three stages. After 10 years doing the technical organization (today we call this project management) and contracting bands I gave this job to the younger generation. Now I’m just a visitor.