Cellar

It seems like when I was hanging around the Vrije Universiteit back in the 1980s, there were a lot fewer gates, fences, barriers and passes to be allowed in somewhere than there are today. I seem to remember that back then there were lots of places, like a major university at the edge of a vibrant city, where you could just walk in and look around without immediately being scanned or searched. You could even board a tram without a personal OV-chipkaart, although according to my son that’s mainly because there were no OV-chipkaarts back then. Duh. To which my daughter adds that we should be happy that we had steam trams back then instead of being pulled along by a horse. So you can understand that it’s difficult to share my memories with my family. That’s why I’m sharing them here instead.

‘He became interested in all of the things that are as incomprehensible to me as a balanced ledger sheet is to Henk Krol’

When my three years-older brother was still in high school, in the period when he managed to elevate the concept of ‘by the skin of your teeth’ to an art form, he became interested in what would later become known as automation, and eventually the Internet. Computers, fast computers, programming languages, computing models, zeroes and ones; in fact, all of the things that are as incomprehensible to me as a balanced ledger sheet is to Henk Krol. You know that it exists, and that it’s necessary, but you don’t actually know anything about it. But Jack, he does. In fact, when he was 14 or so, he would cycle out to Buitenveldert after school to sit in the cellar of the Vrije Universiteit to use computers and connections that few even knew about, and that certainly weren’t meant for a kid from Amsterdam-Oost with unkempt black hair and glasses that were kept together by putty and tape. But he did it anyway. And he kept it up for years. There, in that cellar. And when he got home, he would sit at the table with stacks of paper from a primitive kind of printer until deep in the night, making comments with a little pen, to turn what he had programmed into what he had actually wanted to program. In retrospect, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the concept of hacking hadn’t yet been invented in 1977.

He would just walk into the Vrije Universiteit, take the lift to the cellar where the Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam was located (SARA – I’ll never forget that name) – and just do his thing. Nobody stopped him, and nobody asked for his ID. Things might be safer now, but back then things were more relaxed. And even my brother could find a career that he still excels at today. At least, I think he does.

> Comedian Dolf Jansen writes a quarterly column for VU Magazine.