About Nick Kusters
Nick Kusters
Hi there, my name is Nick Kusters. Born and raised in Maastricht, the Capital City of the most southern province of The Netherlands. I'm currently 29 years old, and a programmer by heart.
History
When I was younger (I must have been about 8 years of age), we received our first 386 machine at home. Back then, I had my own 3.5" Floppy. My mom showed me how to do a few basic MS-DOS commands and how WordPerfect worked. One of the things I was taught was how to remove files from my personal Floppy Disk. Too bad I had forgot my Floppy disk's driveletter was A:, not C:, so you can imagine what happened when I entered the magic 'Format C:' commando. Back then, no one knew how to reinstall the PC's operating system, so the computer was placed on the attic, never to be seen again.
Compaq Pressario 5060
When I was around twelve years of age, my dad had the opportunity to get a PC via a government subsidised "PC in your Home" project, which means you can get a PC to use at home and you pay it with your gross salary (before taxes), giving you a nice benefit. As you can imagine, the first reaction was to keep "the kid that killed our last pc" away from this new and expencive device.
The Internet
For a while, all was well. I hooked the PC up to a phone line and started downloading music (1 hour and 10 minutes to download an mp3 on a 56k6 modem) and when I wasn't allowed to browse the web (phone bills!), I played Leisure Suit Larry 6 and Duke Nukem' 3D (SIERRA and EIDOS became my best friends in the early 90's).
QBasic
In a Dutch computer magazine called Computer Idee I found an article talking about the QBasic compiler that was added as a power tool on the Windows 95 and 98 CD. This was the beginning of my adventures as a programmer and it was the best thing that could happen to me. After downloading many tutorials (I still have the hundreds of pages I printed out to read offline), and began messing about a bit. The first program that I 'released' was a simple scrolling text application which randomly used one of 256 colors for each new letter, complaining about school and a teacher I disliked. The program would keep looping until a (secret) three-key combo was pressed and since I added it to the Autoexec.bat of the machine, a few more computers were never used again after I touched them...
