Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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I knew the director of Textlite, Hugo Krop. He was active as an investor as well, a coke junk and went around with a body guard with a gun at all times driving a black armored (so he claimed) Mercedes.

Textlite was the brand used for the LED light bars which they designed and manufactured, and which were a runaway success.

The PX-1000 was his brainchild too, but it never got the market adoption that they were hoping for.

More information [1], [2].

Weird but interesting character. Hugo had a bit of a lifestyle problem (to put it mildly) and when Textlite cratered he went into all kinds of really shady deals, one of which was a fund that ostensibly grew trees in Latin America.

Eventually he went to jail [3] because it turned out that those forests of trees didn't exist. He died recently (in 2018).

I have a lot of funny and some not so funny stories about Hugo, he wasn't the nicest man due to his habit but when sober and clean was smart and interesting to talk to and tuned in to trends that others only saw much later. You can think of the PX-1000 as an early version of what today would be called a cryptophone, a mobile way for people to communicate securely.

What is interesting is that in this particular context instead of the main use case highlighted being criminals the case of Nelson Mandela and his army of supporters is used to exemplify the power of such a device.

This was in the age when all information traveled in plaintext and to suddenly have someone sell a device that afforded 'pretty good privacy' was a thing that the intelligence services found hard to deal with.

[1] https://www.groene.nl/artikel/versleuteld-maar-niet-voor-ame...

[2] https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/cryptoleaks/2020/...

[3] https://www.blikopdewereld.nl/economie/beleggersinfo/de-bele...

How did you become acquainted?

That's a very long story, the in-a-nutshell version: walking at night in Amsterdam I spotted two guys hauling an Apple II, disk drives, a monitor and a bunch of expansion cards out of the back of a car, I asked what they were doing and they said that they were making some kind of computer vision device (this was in 1984, I was 19 at the time, what they were building was an eye tracker), I asked if I could tag along and they said ok, after an hour or so it was clear they had no clue what they were doing (trying to write some basic program to talk to their frame grabber) so I coded the whole thing up without an assembler by poking the machine code into some free RAM. This led to a longer term relationship, the one guy was an optics genius called Michiel Kassies, the other a guy that knew a lot about hardware, Karl Jungbauer who worked for NikHef (the dutch institute for Nuclear Physics) in their hardware department and who moonlighted in the tech scene in Amsterdam in his free time. Michiel knew Hugo, and when Hugo got the proposal to invest in Jan Sloots' fake video compressor he asked me to look it over for him, which I did.

Hugo ended up investing in DadaData, a company founded by Jungbauer, a guy called Peter Domela-Nieuwenhuis and myself, after three weeks I realized these guys were more interested in their drugs than in running a business so I bailed out and founded MCS, which still continues today (though it has been renamed).

Over the years Hugo would come up with all kinds of weird ideas and occasionally he'd call. We lost touch prior to Greenmix, by which time his drug use became so bad that there we no more normal times.

It's pretty weird to see someone you respect initially slide off like that, I have always hated drugs and it made it pretty hard for me to be exposed to it without commenting on it and getting into arguments. Hugo really was a nice guy that lost it, his addiction to his dope and lifestyle eroded every sense of what was right and what wasn't. The path of destruction he left behind is a mile wide and even though he spent 12 months in jail I'm pretty sure there are lots of people around here that would happily piss on his grave.

Of course I'm sorry for all the investors that lost their money in his harebrained schemes, but I mostly pity his kid who saw his father slide down like that.

One of the funnier stories about Hugo: he was very much overweight and the doctor told him to get some exercise or that he'd die of a heart attack in short order. So he went bike shopping and picked out a very fancy racing bike. After 6 months of dutifully disappearing each day for two hours on his bike he complained that he didn't lose any weight. So I offered to ride with him to see what was going on. Hugo lived in Loosdrecht at the time, and from his house made a beeline to a pancake restaurant in Vreeland (a couple of km away from his house), where he ate two enormous pancakes, consumed copious amounts of expensive alcohol and then cycled leisurely back. So at least I understood why the weight loss program was a failure :), but he swore me to secrecy (which I am now breaking, but I don't think he'd mind).

Wow, very interesting - thanks for sharing. There are so many moments like these and they get lost in history...

What really bothers me - even after all those years - is that if not for the drugs these guys would have gone so much further than they did. They had every opportunity, the tools, the brains, the timing and they fucked it all up.

Kind of reminds me of Phil Katz. Brilliant guy, but a raging drunk. When he died, Wired or somebody interviewed the strippers at the strip club he used to go to, who said that he was very lonely and looking for someone to talk to.

Possibly. For some, substance abuse is one escape—one way of dealing with inner demons. There are other destructive, occupying things than substances that can stop talent and productive potential from yielding much at all

fascinating details, happy to have stirred up these memories!

I've been reading for a couple of hours on all of the stuff you guys have dug up on the pocket telex (and other interesting bits and pieces), very impressive. So much detail, this must have been a lot of work, and other than a couple of typos I can't find anything that doesn't match what I already knew about the device. It would be interesting to know who formed the software team from those days, I wished I recalled more names.

Above the offices in Amsterdam Zuidoost (Hogehilweg) they had this insanely extravagant bar. Looking back I think that the armed bodyguard must have been either coke-induced paranoia shining through or a sign that there was already more afoot that could not stand the light of day.

By the way, doesn't this page need an update now?

https://cryptomuseum.com/crypto/philips/index.htm

"The Philips version with encryption (PX-1000Cr) contained a much improved cryptographic algorithm."

Hi, Paul from Crypto Museum here. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I missed that one when updating the stories.

You're welcome, if you want I can proofread the whole website, I noticed a few more typos as I was reading quite a lot there today.

The whole website would probably take a bit too long ;-) But please report any typos you find whilst reading to info@cryptomuseum.com That will land directly on my desk. Thanks, Paul

will do!

This story made my day. Thank you!

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