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Timeline and Career
I was born in The Hague, the Netherlands, see old picture of 1907. I learned chess from my father at the age of 6 and was able to defeat him one year later, during High School I on several occasions became the best chess player of the School. After high school I joined the Dutch Military for Officers from which I resigned 18 months later, the Military wasn't something for me.
In 1970 (at the age of 20) I made my first contact with computers, the NCR CRAM (Card Random Access Memory), the first mainframe computer in the Netherlands with random access storage using magnetic cards, a forerunner of the hard disk. After a few years serving as shift leader I promoted to programmer, senior programmer, system analyst, project leader.
In 1974 I married my wife Lies, we got 3 children and we have one foster child, today 2002 I feel proud being the grandfather of 2 beautiful granddaughters, age 3 and 1.
In 1980 I became interested again in chess when the first personal computers entered the market. I felt it was a challenge to write a program that could play chess just for a hobby, I gave it the name REBEL. It was developed on a poor TRS-80 computer of 1,77 Mhz. With REBEL I entered the Dutch Computer Championship of 1982 and it became the sensation of the tournament, a third place. Later during the 80's REBEL became Dutch Champion 4 times.
In 1984 I received an attractive offer from the world's biggest Computer Chess Manufacturer at that time Hegener & Glaser, Munich, Germany to write chess programs for their dedicated product line. I accepted their offer and in the period of 1985-1995 about 12-15 models of the so called dedicated chess computers (picture) have been sold worldwide with my signature, roughly estimated at 350,000 copies.
During time chess programs for the PC became more and more popular, I adopted and moved REBEL to the PC platform, in 1993 the first version hit the shelves. Early 2002 I have sold the business to Lokasoft and I am with early retirement, after 22 years of chess programming enough is enough. The Old Website is still avaible but one day might disappear.
REBEL became 2 times world champion computer chess, first in 1991 in Vancouver, Canada and one year later in Madrid, Spain. The last title was valid for 3 years, so REBEL (and I) have been world champion for the period of 1991-1995. For more highlights of REBEL's career read the Chess Page.
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