About the programmer...
This web application was written by Rinus Callenbach. Rinus was born in Holland on a beautiful day in the summer of 67. He had the fortune to grow up at a time when the first home computers were just becoming affordable. Rinus learned to program in Basic by reading the program listings that appeared in popular computer magazines. He then taught himself z80 machine code from a book because it was exciting and MUCH faster. Some of the projects he wrote were a compiler (z80 assembly excercise), a chess program (recursion and tree-cutting excercise) and computer games (just for fun).
Now that Rinus has somewhat grown up he still plays with computers. He writes database application software and transact SQL code which is more interesting than it sounds. Sometimes it's nice to think back about how this programming journey began...
The first game he ever wrote was a version of the arcade hit 'Donkey Kong' on a borrowed Sinclair ZX81 with 1KB or memory. (Yes, those are bytes. 1024 wonderful bytes of free memory - hooray!). The game worked but it did NOT look like the arcade original. It is probably a good thing that no screen shots of the game exist today
The first computer he could call his own was a ZX Spectrum which had an amazing 48KB of memory. In those days, software was distributed on cassete tapes. Loading a game into the computer meant attaching the computer to a cassete player, playing the tape and praying that you would not get the dreaded 'Tape loading error' after waiting 3 minutes with just a few seconds to go - good times!
Rinus owned a copy of the original Inca Curse text adventure and remembers having had a great time playing the game together with his mother (2 adventurers know more than 1), drawing a map and getting deeper and deeper into the magic of the Inca Temple.
Rinus lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands with Becky (a dog), Ingrid and one of his three kids (not in order of preference)