My father worked for Philips almost his entire working life. Back then (in the 1970’s) Philips was a super-large company (in Dutch terms) with factories and offices around the country, but concentrated around Eindhoven. We lived in a village next to the city, and “everyone” worked at Philips. It was subtle, but the parents of my primary school friends treated each other according to their position in the Philips hierarchy.
My father had various jobs at Philips, always working hard — this was the time when life-time employment was still A Thing. When I was (very) young he traveled all over Europe to help save money on energy costs, saving Philips 250 million guilders (278 million euros in today’s money!). At one time they sent him to factories in Germany, and he lived part-time in an apartment in Germany. And then, early in the 1990’s, Philips started a big reorg, and he was laid off. There is a photo of him arriving at Eindhoven station with the last things from his (now former) apartment, having traveled by train because he also had to leave his lease car behind too. It deeply affected him: he felt discarded, which he basically was. At almost 50, he had to start a whole new career.
After that, he started his own management consultancy company. But he also managed to secure the rights to an experimental piece of PC equipment that never really got marketed by Philips: the Speye006 video digitiser.
Philips did a test production run of a video digitiser as part of a program on how people would work with computers and together — kind of visionary as they predicted video calling and remote meetings. They designed some hardware that would support that kind of thing, and after a test production run, the whole project was canned, leaving Philips with a whole stack of things they were never going to sell. My father got wind of this through a contact (if you work all over the place, you end up with a wide network!) and he acquired the rights to market and sell this thing. Later, he would buy their whole stock.
The Speye006 (kind of a joke name) had three composite video inputs and used the CPU to create images from the video feed in greyscale with 64 different hues. With a 386 CPU, you’d get about 20 fps. And they had also made a control to use the card with Visual Basic.
I started working for his company, building solutions in Visual Basic with the card. I paid my way through university with programming, especially when we got into contact with the Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst (“RVD”, the Netherlands Government Information Office).
The RVD provides spokespersons for the government and the royal family, but also provided generic government advice about things like insulating your house and “your car can go without you for a day”. (More of these here.) These subjects were usually accompanied by a pamphlet which you could get sent to you by writing to “Postbus 51” (P.O. Box 51). (Yes, there was a time when people did not have internet at home and you’d have to do these kinds of things through postal mail.)
The RVD ran the “winkel van postbus 51” (“the store of P.O. Box 51”) in The Hague, a few doors down from the royal palace. Being the spokespeople for the royal family, they also owned and managed an extensive collection of photographs of the royals. As they retained the copyright to these photos, they could control who got to use an official portrait in their publications, an important part of the royals’ public relations. And the fees for the publication rights were what kept the whole operation going.
But while the royals’ portraits were the main business, it was not the only business they had. They had gotten a collection of glass plate negatives from Willem van de Poll who had worked with the royal family for quite some time in the 1950’s. The thing with glass plate negatives is twofold: you can’t really handle them without the acid from your fingerprints ruining the silver emulsion on the plate; and it’s hard to see what a photo is about just by looking at the negative. With the legacy came some money to preserve the collection and to keep it intact — the publication fees would have to cover the rest. But that would only work if the RVD would be able to make the photos available for searching and inspection. So they needed a solution to show a positive of the negative, describe what was on the photo, and put that in a database for queries.
That’s what we built. I re-created the paper ‘description card’ that was used for describing photos with things like ‘geographical descriptions’ if the location was known, but also names of the people photographed (if any) and a free-text description of the photo. The negative was put on a light box with a video camera on a holder above it. That camera fed into the Speye006 and the (Windows 3.11) application showed the semi-live video feed. When the documentalist was satisfied with the position, they’d press a button, the feed would be frozen and the image turned positive (we used an external component for this). And then they’d go through the card (I got many detailed instructions on tab order so they didn’t have to switch from keyboard to mouse and back again!) and described the photo. At the end: press a button, and the image and the description would be saved on a removable harddisk. The Centrale Archief Selectiedienst (“CAS”, “Central Archive Selection Service”) did this work for the RVD.
When the harddisk was full, it was sent to my father’s office. He would process the images and put the data in an MS Access database — once I had found a way to make it possible to query a read-only database, we were able to give every CD-ROM it’s own query interface. The data also went into the large RVD photo archive database for queries, but that was managed by themselves.
My father had (one of) the first CD-ROM writers, a Plextor if I’m not mistaken. Single speed, SCSI interface (at a time when PCs all had IDE) and the discs themselves were expensive — especially because they needed to be ‘archive quality’. He’d defragment the disk, set everything ready, reboot, make sure that nothing else was running, start the process and basically leave the room — the thing didn’t have a buffer memory so if anything happened (bumping into the table on which the burner sat, for instance) the burning process would fail. We treated it as if it was some kind of unknowable religious instrument, and we were the priests that deferentially administered the rites. After 74 minutes we’d come back, and if the tray was open, the burning was a success! These discs were then mailed to the RVD and the harddisks were sent back to the CAS to be re-used for another batch.
I think this really kept him going. He felt busy and needed again, he was making deals and doing things that only he could. He was very proud of the result, and I think that pride was justified. Working with him was not always easy, but we managed well enough. And it was fun to play around with a video digitiser at a time when making a digital photo meant taking a photo on film, getting that processed and printed, and then finding a scanner and scanning it.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was decided that there would be an “event” to show to the world what the system was — and to make others aware that this photo collection was available! The event was held at the store of P.O. Box 51, and I recall someone remarking that they didn’t want it on a Friday — on Fridays there’s the council of ministers, and it would mean the event would have to be catered by the same caterer as attended to the cabinet ministers, to save money. Apparently, they were not a fan of that particular caterer, so it was held on a different day so they could select their own preferred caterer! June 9th 1995 was the day. We went there by car, because we had computers to take with us. We had to park behind the store, and I remember seeing a marechaussee (military police) standing guard at a gate at the end of the alley, because that gave access to the palace gardens.
We found these photos, going through my father’s papers:
These were different times: people in suits, wearing ties. I do not know who these people were: probably RVD people who were happy to have some time away from their desks?
That’s me, looking over my father’s shoulder while he is giving a demo of the system. Note the massive CRT monitor. You can also see the lightbox with the camera above it on the left. I can’t believe how much my outfit clashed with that of the others, and that my father let me get away with it (though at the time I didn’t own a suit, so there was no real alternative…)
In Dutch, you’d say you “baptise” something when you use it for the first time. For this event, they took it literally and poured champagne over a CD-ROM — we had enough failed ones to use for this anyway! This is the director of the RVD that commissioned the project, I think.
My father got to do the thing too. I love this photo of him: his smirk shows that he was really enjoying himself. All his work culminated into this public celebration of the result. He was wearing one of his ties with Heer Bommel embroidered on it — he was a big fan.
This must have been the reception afterwards. You see my father on the back. Different times: smoking indoors during an event was completely accepted.
Afterwards, there was a fancy dinner, I think my father arranged and paid for it. I remember him ordering a fancy wine and asking the owner to taste it — they agreed that the wine was good, but not as good as you’d expect from the wine and the price. He got a stiff discount on it.
This photo was taken when dessert was served. I think the people from the RVD arranged for a special ‘grand dessert’ to be served with a sparkler and a CD-ROM (again, so many failed discs…)
Here’s the letter the RVD sent to my father along with these photos. (Click on these to get full-size versions!)
And here is the letter and the press release they sent to these publications:
I think this might have been my father’s “finest hour”. Discarded by the employer he worked for almost all his life, but able to make a success of something all by himself, with the result (and him!) being celebrated.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or
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