Founder PC-Active Wammes Witkop passed away

Wammes Witkop was a striking personality in many ways. He entered the world of computer magazines in the mid-80s and has been making a name for himself for many years since. Wammes started in 1985 at MSX Computer Magazine (MCM) where he became editor-in-chief after two years. He was the face of MCM what later came to be called MCCM and a welcome guest at the many MSX meetings that took place at the time. In 1989 Wammes founded the title PC-Active, which arose from ‘The computer magazine for the Amstrad/Schneider world’ and later PC-Amstrad. Both titles were part of Aktu Publishing Group, the Wammes publishing house that also published titles such as Compukids.

PC-Active
For years he was editor-in-chief and publisher of this title, which appeared until 2005 at his own publishing house. In that year, Wammes partly sold PC-Active to HUB Publishers, but he still remained co-owner, advisor and columnist of PC-Active. In 2013, HCC took over PC-Active from the bankrupt estate of HUB Publishers and it has been HCC’s association magazine ever since.
PC-Active regularly made the news: research by the editors of PC-Active proved that CD-Rs were not nearly as reliable as was assumed. The data that was put on these recordable CDs turned out to be unreadable over time. Freelance editor Brenno de Winter worked together with the editors of PC-Active to ‘crack’ the fraud-sensitive public transport chip card.
Wammes himself did not shy away from publicity, especially when the interests of the consumer were at stake. For example, he campaigned against CheapTickets and Stichting de Thuiskopie.

I have had the opportunity to work with Wammes for many years and will remember him as a beautiful personality. Rest in peace Wames.

Also Henk van de Kamerinextricably linked to PC-Active since time immemorial, reminisces below.

At the beginning of May I had extensive contact with Wammes. While cleaning up for an upcoming move, I once again found the complete paper collection of PC-Active. Includes the first eleven songs with a different name. Before Covid, the plan was to scan it once for a digital archive of a piece of computer history. The whole was sent to Wammes in the middle of May and I now know that it concerns more than 90 kilos of paper!

While packing the necessary reminders. Three quarters of the issues contain at least one article of my hand. Which almost never happened and that is a nice anecdote to remember Wammes with.

I suspect – the papers are currently in storage – that I subscribed to Compuserve in 1994. Their service had just been launched in the Netherlands and offered an alternative to Usenet which I used through the Department of Plant Physiology at the UvA. Now the investigation was not going well and it started to become a political game. Of course I vented this to a group of new friends, after which I received a personal message from one Wammes Witkop to come and talk.

That name could come from Suske en Wiske. Since not everyone used their real name, I initially thought it was a joke. After visiting the local bookstore, I knew better. In other words, the conversations led to a first article about Delphi and soon after to a job as a CD-ROM coordinator to replace the monthly diskette with a CD-ROM. The rest is history…

At the beginning of June it became clear that Wammes would no longer carry out the job. Since I have already created an archive with all floppy disks – published on CD-ROM – and all CD and DVD-ROMs in 2018, I will try to scan all songs in the fall. Because the digital legacy of Wammes should not be lost as far as I’m concerned!

Henk van de Kamer