Software etc.

[ This is a part of " The Software That I Love ", a series of posts about Software that I created or had a small part in ] 1997 - Plotter As my dad worked at HP he saw all kinds of equipment in the office. At some point he brought home a couple of broken inkjet printers. He took out a lot of parts, ordered a microcontroller from the US and created a simple plotter for A4 paper with the stepper motors. Back then microcontrollers were expensive and difficult to program, there was no Arduino IDE or anything like it. If you weren't careful you could blow out your parallel port. Dad built all the hardware, connected the microcontroller, and hooked up a driver and a small library so we could control it from Delphi. My job was to program the code to move the head around and up and down. Up means the marker is not touching the paper, down means you're drawing. This was great, as you could program something and see the results in the real world right away! I still enjoy try to...

[ This is a part of " The Software That I Love ", a series of posts about Software that I created or had a small part in ] 1999 - Reverse engineering the binary format of HP ChemStation At this time of my life I did not program for fun, I did it because my dad asked me to. I did a lot of other things with computers though, mostly games and drawing (CorelDraw). But in the summer of '99, my dad was struggling with the software that Agilent used for their mass spectrometers, ChemStation. It was a pretty big software suite and development was done in California. He could not influence it. He was often frustrated with how it worked, and like a true hacker, wanted to read and manipulate the data files with his custom software. He still does that to this day, now mostly with ChemStation's successor MassHunter. The ChemStation data format was super optimized for storage space and thus hard to understand. It stored the raw data from the spectrometers and some data that was ann...

[ This is a part of " The Software That I Love ", a series of posts about Software that I created or had a small part in ] 1996 - JTJ Rekenen Niels, my dad, had a 13-year career at HP (later Agilent). He started servicing mass spectrometers and ended up as a programmer. He always loved computers. He was pushing me to get into software from about age 8 or 9. We started developing a small program together that taught kids how to do maths. My dad did most of the work, and we created this together with my friend Joscha. We called it JTJ Rekenen. JTJ stood for "Jouke-Thiemo Joscha", Rekenen is Arithmatic. We contemplated calling it JJT but JTJ sounded cooler. The program did simple addition, multiplication etc. In hindsight, I believe the logic for division was full of problems. The UI let you practice +, -, * and /, and turned the screen green if the answer was good and red if bad. I sold this little program to my school for about 50 guilders. I was pretty proud, but in...