About me ...

My name is Frans Eggermont. I was born in 1942, during World War II, on October, 25 th in Tiegem, a small place in the south of West Flanders near the Schelde river, Belgium. My motherlanguage is Flemish, the Dutch spoken language in Belgium, but at home we speek our south 'Westvlaams dialect'. Tiegem is also the birth place of Saint Arnold, the well known bishop of Soissons(France) during the middle ages, and patron of the beer brewers. I was the 3. child of the family. The name of my father was Maurits Gustaaf Eggermont, he died in 1984. My mother's name was Alice Alida Leontina Decock, she died in 1960, when I was 17. I have four brothers Alex, Marc, Gerard, Luc, and also two sisters, Rosa and Annie, so a total of 7 children. I followed the primary school at Tiegem. In 1959, we moved with our family to Waregem, a small town 10 km north of Tiegem. I learned textile technics at the V.T.I. in Waregem. I started my proffessional career in 1958 at Bekaert Mattress Ticking in Waregem, as a textile technician. Because I was also interested in radio, television and other electronics, I studied electronics at the P.T.I. eveningschool in Kortrijk for another 4 years. In 1964, I moved from Bekaert to Cobar Electronics in Kortrijk, now the Barco group, in their industrial department as an electronic engineer. This department named Cobartex, later named Barco Automation, and now BarcoVision, was one of the first labs in Belgium which uses transistors in their designs. My job in this lab was the design of electronic sensors and detectors for the textile industry. In 1971, I started using mini-computers in one of our textile automation projects. It was a PDP 8-E/4K mini-computer from Digital Equipment now part of Hewlett Packard / Compaq, used as main controller in an electronic jacquardcard cutting system named Elatex. This project was a co-operation with Grosse Webereimaschinen GmbH, a well known german textilemachine builder, now part of Eltex from Sweden. I married with Mieke in 1973. We have two daughters Katleen and Hilde. I started learning microprocessors in 1977 with a Motorola M6800 kit with a MIKBUG rom. My first project with this M6800 microprocessor was an automatic colorselector for rapierlooms, named Weftprocessor. Later I developed a simular unit for looms equiped with a dobby, the so called Dobbyprocessor. In the mid 70's, I was also co-developper of the first generation of electronic controllers for Picanol looms. I was familar with 6800/09 assembly code and operating systems such as FLEX09 from TSC, OS9/68k from Microware, and MSDOS / Windows from Microsoft. Now, I'm in pension since the end of februari 2000 after a carrier of 5 years at Bekaert Mattress Ticking and 35 years as a design engineer at Barco. My hobbies are : Photography, Multimedia technics such as Audio and Video, and Computers. I'm a radioham since 1967 as ON5LM. Here you can listen to an audio recording of a two way amateur TV QSQ with G6NOX/T, Jeremy Royle, from Essex - England. This QSO occurs on April, 8, 1969. Unfortunately these days, I'm only active as a listener because the poor antenne conditions at my current location.

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