Robert den Hartog

Robert became involved with KC in early 1990 when he and Paul Kendall set up KC's first dial up uucp connection to mercury.gen.nz. He installed KC's first usenet news manager software and in the following years as KC moved from SCO Xenix to Ezix and then BSD, he developed news software systems for KC. His most famous effort was KRANT which with various enhancements kept running until late 1994 when KC news server changed to INN.

The weekly visit to KC from Robert and Paul was when most of the major experiments and enhancements were carried out. In the early days of BSD when daily operating system crashes were reasonably common these visits tended to become major debugging sessions often accompanied by complete hardware rebuilds and much arguing and general frenetic behaviour. As things settled down over the months and news software became more reliable these visits developed into a regular hot chocolate cake and custard eating session.

For almost all of 1991 through to 1993 KC's news server was a EISA PC system, no case, just a collection of parts spread over a table wth a full size SCSI drive that was constantly trying to walk over the edge of the table. This was replaced by a Sun IPC in late 1993 and KRANT was successfully ported from PC BSD to Sun BSD. Robert moved to Singapore in early 1994 after working in Australia for the latter half of 1993. In late 1995 he was married and the above pic shows him with his wife and new baby. Robert is the one wearing the glasses :-)

He still occasionally logs into KC and sometimes leaves a local message or two.