Rik's mug 1995 Riccardo Ettore Rik's mug 2001

Hello everyone, thank you for visiting my site!

Since you linked to this page, I guess you were either curious to see my face or learn a little bit more about me or both.

The picture on the left above was taken in February 1995 in my old office in Brussels, Belgium.

Since then, my family and I moved to London, England, where I started a new job on May 1, 1995, after nearly 19 years in Belgium. The picture on the right was taken at the end of 2001 in my new office in London.

I'm Italian, but I was born in Egypt, Africa and I spent some 33 of my 49 years of age abroad.

My passion for computers dates back to January 1978 when I bought my first computer. It was a case of love at first sight and I never regretted paying a huge sum for it (part of the reason for the high cost was the fact that I bought the model with 16K (yes, that's K not M) of RAM instead of just 4K. At that time, a set of 16K RAM chips cost a little over $1,000!).

I soon found myself learning my first computer language, BASIC, all the while learning my fourth human language, Dutch. Over the years, I taught myself 6502 & 68000 assembler, C, a bit of Forth and a smattering of Pascal better to converse with the many silicon creatures I've had the pleasure to get to know, while Portuguese and a tad of Spanish, German and Swedish somehow also made their way into my brain.

But enough about me, let's go back to my software...