Geert Rolf

Home:
I live in a small village called Winssen near the city of Nijmegen in the east of The Netherlands. Nearest civilian airport is Airport Weeze/Niederrhein (EDLV) in Germany. Second in distance is Eindhoven (EHEH), but most used is good old Schiphol Amsterdam (EHAM). I grew up in Amsterdam, so I still remember the noise a DC-8 makes when going-around over Amsterdam causing a small break in school-class.

Age:
The first half of the 50s. This profile will expire on my 60th birthday.

Occupation:
IT consultant with special interest in Unix, TCP/IP networking, Internet.

Personal:
Married with Ria. We have two cats *). One of which will become 20 and one will be 13 years old next summer.

Flying in real life:
Last time I went to Oslo by MD-80, B737 and B739 back to Amsterdam. My very first flight was back in 1968 in a Boeing 707-320C, and later in the 80s I went to Minneapolis, Copenhagen, Manchester, Lisbon, London by DC-10, DC-9, B747, BAC 1-11, and B737s. Almost forgot I went from Enschede to Amsterdam in a Fokker F27. Since that very first flight I'm interested in everything that flies, except flies. I've collected articles about aviation and spacetravel from the newspapers since Apollo 10.

The 737-200 is my favourite aircraft. I like it's shape very much. Memories go back to the early 70s. Once spotting planes on Schiphol, I saw a Lufthansa CityJet (737). They unfolded the frontdoor stairs unpatiently waiting for the gate to be connected. It must have been a model -100: very short, but full-width body (note we are talking about early 70s!).

Flight Simming:
I sim since FS95 after a simulator session in Paris tech-museum (Cité de la Science). Upgraded to FS98 (40th birthday present by family) and wrote the Brussel-Amsterdam story for collegues. Went on to 2000 but the enthousiasm dropped a bit. Got back when painting the B732 cn22025 history in 4 liveries. FS Aircraft look very good since current century FSims!

I do not fly that much different a/c: Fokker 70 and 100, KLM 737-300. Tried an A320 lately. Now moving to PMDG 737NG.

Other hobbies:
I collect/preserve old computers. My collection starts with very old DEC PDP-11s (early 70) and ends with SUN and IBM workstations (early 90). One example: there is a PDP11/10, which originates from 1972, that has a 2.5 Mbyte harddrive, punched papertape and 32 Kbyte of core memory. You cannot run flightsimulator on such a small noisy giant, but it still works.

Can barely run a Flight Simulator on a PDP-11, that's what I believed until late 2007, when I met a Norwegian Flightsimmer. It's all about a Return To Flight of a DC-10 Flight Simulator, I got involved in.

Read more about this at www.bejaardecomputers.nl (See "News" section).

*) You read that well; "cats" is *not* Dutch for kids