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).