22.5 years of Fontys ICT through the eyes of alumnus and lecturer Martin Ederveen ('81)

Last week, I realised that I’ve now worked at Fontys for a total of 22.5 years. Ten of those years were spent at what was then still known as Eindhoven University of Applied Sciences, and I’ve now been teaching at Fontys ICT for 12.5 years. Moments like that make you pause for a moment. Not because there’s necessarily anything major to celebrate, but because you realise just how much has changed along the way...

When I started, Fontys was still called Eindhoven University of Applied Sciences and the institution had a Computing Centre. The course was called HIO or HTS Computer Science. I’d started there myself as a student five years earlier, so my former lecturers suddenly became my colleagues. We were still in the same temporary building, R2 on Rachelsmolen. It was 1987. The mainframe computers were Prime systems and, like almost everyone there, I became a system administrator for those Prime computers.

With the introduction of the PC and the construction of the new R1 building on Rachelsmolen, I naturally also took on support for this new phenomenon. Various staff members in the R1 building had PCs. I didn’t. There was no budget for that. In fact, I was the helpdesk and was allowed to expand my knowledge on other people’s machines. It usually involved printer problems, issues with floppy disks and settings for programmes such as WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3 and FrameWork. That’s how you learnt back then. By doing it, by solving problems, by understanding what was happening behind the scenes.

After a few years, I started working on projects. One fine day, a colleague walked into the office and sighed that he no longer wanted to go to Utrecht. They were working on something there called SURFnet, but according to him, it would never amount to anything. Nothing but meetings that led nowhere. That ‘Internet’ they were talking about would never get off the ground anyway. Nevertheless, our Director of Services wanted someone to keep abreast of such developments. I was willing to do so.

A few years later, that Internet became a reality. It became my project to build it. At the same time, a merger was taking place between Eindhoven University of Applied Sciences and a number of other institutions. I was then a member of the Staff Council on behalf of the central services. After that, it became Fontys.

I even suggested claiming both fontys.nl and fontys.com, but they didn’t think that was necessary. The principle of voorletter.achternaam@fontys.nl stems from my email project. So does the fact that everyone was given a public IP address.

The Computing Centre became the Educational Facilities Department. That became Fabion. That is now the IT Department. In 1997, I started working for IBM. That was after my first ten years at Fontys.

In 2013, I bumped into a former colleague who told me that Fontys ICT was looking for lecturers. Among other things, I’d been a trainer at IBM and I’d had more than enough of all the travelling. I was still living in Eindhoven, a ten-minute cycle from Rachelsmolen R1. Always stuck in traffic, waiting at airports, projects at banks and other large companies: it was all getting a bit tedious.

I applied to both the ICT Management & Security team and the Cyber Security team. At the time, we were still an independently operating team providing teaching in subjects such as Databases, Systems, IMS and Cyber. First-semester students knew how a database worked and what the Internet entailed. Students in later semesters could optimise databases and set up secure connections. There was also an evening course in IMS and a part-time option. I was always involved in those too.

As I had lived and worked in the UK between 2005 and 2009, I also really enjoyed teaching with the English-speaking team. I am not a specialist confined to a single niche, but someone who makes connections between infrastructure, security, databases, systems, education, practical experience and students. And I’ve been doing that for 22.5 years now!

Martin Ederveen