Yes, the largest collection of boxed PC
games in the world. Hi, my name is Marc, and welcome
to Four Decades of ASML. In this first episode, we're going to
go back to the '80s when ASML was founded. We're going to talk to Jos Vreeker,
who was one of the very first employees. And we're also talking to Ale Sytsma,
who in fact installed the very first system at the customer. And our external guest is Anne Bras,
who is an avid game collector and who has the largest collection of boxed
PC games in the world. Jos, welcome to our podcast. It's a podcast that spans 40 years
of ASML. And today with you, we're going to
talk about the first ten years, roughly. So tell us something about yourself, who
you are, when you joined and where you came from. Well, I started in this industry on
January 1, 1980, with the then market leader Perkin-Elmer, which later
became SVG Lithography. And later it became ASML, and
everything was joined. And I started with ASML on November
1, 1984. So a little bit after ASML
was started, I was already on the list, but they simply didn't have time
to call me. So that was a little bit later,
then I came here from Perkin-Elmer. Okay, and what did you do at
Perkin-Elmer? I was a field service engineer over
there, which was quite something in the early '80s because there was nothing
really in Europe. And they were the market leader, right? They were market leader, yes. So why did you decide to go
to this new company, ASML? Well, the stories they told me about
ASML and what they were planning were absolutely magnificent, so I decided to
join ASML. That the stories turned out to
not be true, well okay, that was later, but then
it was too late anyway. Because when you were hired,
what were you hired for? What was your function? I was hired here as technical support
engineer, which is a function that if field service engineers couldn't find a
problem, tech support came along. The only problem was we did not
have machines in the field, so there was nothing to tech support, in fact,
because there was nothing. Okay, and what was the spirit like? So a few dozens of people, I
can imagine. And yes, they really had the spirit
we're going to make something of this company. And the thing was that very quickly,
the people that came from Philips, only a few went back to Philips, by
the way, the vast majority stayed at ASML. They took over that spirit because they
saw that this company was different from Philips, it was a different spirit, et
cetera. So they really got on board and
you didn't see the difference anymore. It was really. The spirit was phenomenal. Like a team spirit, you
mean? There was an enormous team spirit, also
between the management and us and the personnel. Everybody did what was necessary, went the
extra mile. I don't know how many hours we
stayed. We stayed on the weekends and I
lived near Utrecht at that time, so I had a sleeping bag in
the car. And when it went too late, well,
we had a house here that you could stay or we stayed in the
office. It was always... Yeah, the team spirit. That was the thing that was enormous
in those days, which something you needed also between the management and the
personnel. Yeah, because it was a really small
group, right. It's a very small group because in
1984 we were about 60, 65 people or something. And that group, it was a very
small, very small group. The first year you could still shake
everybody's hands on New Year's Day. So when we came back after the
holidays. Now try that these days. You can still do it. You can still do it. It takes you a week. And did it meet your expectation? You had an idea, I guess, when
you came here? No, it didn't quite meet the expectations. No, the company itself did. But the technology was not. We only had the PAS 2000, which
was the thing that worked with oil That's the machine that we have at the reception. That's the last survivor that we managed
to save. From those days. Nobody wanted that thing except Philips. So there were a couple of them
installed in Hamburg and in Nijmegen, and there's one at IBM, by the way,
in Burlington and nobody else wanted that. And in those days, Gjalt Smit, who
was the CEO of the company, he did a tour of customers and found
out that the product offering that we had was not quite what customers wanted. Philips, in fact thought that they knew
what customers wanted. But Gjalt Smit was in fact the
first one who went to the customers and asked them what they really needed. And that was something quite different. So very early on, and I was
here a couple of days, I was hurled in a room and there was
a famous project leader, which is now a Chief Technical Officer of this company. And he said, well, gentlemen, we're going
to build a new machine and this is what are we going to make. And that in the
end became the PAS 2500. The development went very, very quickly. Within two years there was a whole
new, different machine which worked. It was an enormous achievement. And you helped to develop that machine,
or were you... No, that is too much to say. I wasn't development. I worked and did a lot of
things in development. I made documentation and did everything
that was needed. I'm not a developer, so you can't
say that, but there were a lot of things to be done on these
machines. And what were the typical problems that
you guys would have? Was it constant firefighting or was it... It was constant firefighting. We... the parts, where did we get the
parts from... In those days, we realized already that we couldn't do
one on our own. We needed suppliers and we couldn't
develop everything on our own. So we were already with Philips. Natlab CFT was a centre for manufacturing
technology, which was a very good development, was also part of Philips. ZEISS. ZEISS came later. They came a little bit later. Okay, yeah. They didn't quite believe in ASML. And I talked to some people from
ZEISS lately and they said, well, when they came to ASML, they were very
reluctant. The major stepper company in the 1980s,
you have to realize, if you look at early in the 1980s, there was
nothing in Europe. There were no fabs or fabs, but
they worked with old proximity aligners, very old fashioned. The only two modern fabs that were,
were from IBM, which was the biggest chip company in the world in those
days, and they were in Germany and France. The rest was nothing. And then we started with Perkin-Elmer. When I came there on 1980, January
1, there were about five people there. And in the years after that, there
were enormous amount of projection aligners, which was the standard in the
industry, were installed. And then the really European semiconductor
industry took off. Later it became everything is gone. Philips in the '80s had more than
six factories in Europe. So it was a different, really different.... And the market leader in steppers was
GCA. Okay. They had ZEISS lenses... So that my neighbor understands, right? Perkin-Elmer have projection aligners,
right? Yes. And what is the difference between a
projection aligner and a stepper? Well, a projection aligner is you take,
you have the mask, the reticle, and on the other side you have
a wafer where you want to project that image on. And that went through a set of
mirrors. You projected that whole reticle onto the
wafer. So it's one to one lithography. That was the thing you could do,
line widths below 1 micron. But it was quite difficult. But it was very fast and relatively
simple machine. But it was one to one lithography
without the reticle and the wafer making contact with each other, which before that
was the normal method. So it was a huge step forward. There were limits to the technology, and
that's where steppers came in, because they take the mask, the thing that
you want to project on the wafer, reduce that image five times and then
you project it on the wafer so you could make smaller line widths. Besides, it worked with a lens. Yeah. And that worked very well. ZEISS was already involved in the
lithography with the lenses. Yeah. And they supplied the lenses to GCA
later. Our competitors, Nikon, they took one of
those machines and improved on it. And GCA is already long gone and
Nikon is still there. We had a very different concept of
our machine, and there were some unique features in our machine which the
customers really liked. And what were those features then, for
instance? Well, the modularity of the system was
very good, so you could easily upgrade a machine. One of the biggest things was they
used stepper motors for the wafer stage. So that's the stage where the wafer
is on and it moves in x, y and z direction and theta direction
rotation. What the GCA, and also the Nikon
machines did, they use stepper motors and there's a minimum step you can make. So that also, it's not really very
nice if you want to make exposures. We had an H-shaped motor with
linear electromotors, and so you could move very easily in all directions without
any friction. So it was a unique system and... Yeah. What we use in the machines now
is basically derived from that early development. Yeah. And funny, you also mentioned modularity. Modularity, that's still... And the alignment system was unique. Customers said, you don't need that kind
of accurate alignment. Two years later they said, 'we're glad
we have it.' So that was already ahead of its
time, was a fantastic development from Philips, that alignment system. Okay. And if you compare the cleanroom
back then, the production facilities at ASML, and nowadays. Right. I can imagine it was a lot
less clean, professional. Yeah. It's incomparable. If you go into a cleanroom,
you had, you put a kind of a lab coat on and that was
it. And you put a hair net on,
what you see in operating rooms, a hair net and a lab coat, and
that was it. Nobody knew anything about cleanrooms. It was a relatively new thing and
people didn't know how to behave in cleanrooms and all that kind of
stuff. I do remember and I saw that
it was quite fantastic. In Scotland in those days, there was
a lot of unemployment and wages were very low, so there were a lot
of chip factories. And I was at a customer in
Scotland. It was still Perkin-Elmer by the way,
and all of a sudden I see a mouse running through the clean room. So that was very surprising. Also, here in our factory, strange things
happened as well, because at one time there was a guy from security was
doing his rounds and he had to go into the cleanroom to inspect. So he put a lab coat on
and the thing. But he took his dog because he
did a round with the dog. So he took his dog into the,
into the cleanroom. So they had to explain to him
that was not quite the idea of doing. So. Yeah, it was new, nobody knew. And the protocols were not that strict
either. So strange things happened. And what were the biggest problems you
had when you, you, ASML started developing the 2500. Right? With the new motor concept. So what were the fundamental problems that
were in there? Well, fundamental problems. We didn't have money. Customers didn't, suppliers didn't believe
we would pay the bills. So that took some... We didn't have too many suppliers. We used a lot of parts from
Philips. Yeah, we got them from everywhere, these
parts. So that was the problem. We also didn't quite know about the
technology. There was a lot of technology we
got from the Natlab and sometimes we didn't even know what it did. And I remember that when I was
writing some documentation and I said, well, this circuit board, what is it
for? Well, we don't know, but without it,
it doesn't work. Okay. And later we learned, of course, what
it all was. But yeah, we came from far because
Nikon already had quite a lot ahead, so we had to
work very, very quickly. And so all these details. Well, okay, as long as it works. That was the main thing. Okay. What was the, let's say, differentiating
factor? Why did we get closer to the
competition? Was it superior stages, lenses, any? Well, one of the things is that
we always put an enormous effort in new developments. Up until today. It's one of the major points of
ASML is always the pushing for technology. It's now part of ASML we cannot
live without. But people like Martin, for example,
Martin van den Brink, or also others, there were several others, but Martin was
one of them. They always... And he does that up to this
day. He pushes for technology and quality. There are two things that is fundamental
to ASML, that is technology and quality. We always did that and customers recognize
that in the end. But it's very hard to get into
this industry because the point is that once you board certain steppers in
those days, or scanners, it's not easy to change supplier. So customers, well, they don't know if
you're still around next year, they don't buy your machines. So that was very, very, very hard. We had to prove ourselves continuously. But once you get over that hurdle,
then, okay, it makes it a little bit easier. And if you then have technology that
is superior to others, and we had several of those things, yes, then it
works. So who were the early champions amongst
the customers? Well, people that really helped us
actually to develop the machine and gave us the chance to. Well, there are a couple of things
that happened that were our customers in those days. TSMC, Micron Technology, imec, they were
very important for, they were very important for ASML because people often
ask, why is ASML successful? Well, there's a lot of reasons you
could say, but one of the reasons which you don't hear very often is
that Perkin-Elmer basically had one customer. That was first IBM and later
Intel. So they had to please that customer,
and all the other customers felt second-rate. So they had to please that customer. It was their biggest customer, 60-70%
of their revenue. So that was very, very important. ASML didn't have such a thing. We worked with startups like Micron
Technology was a startup, TSMC a startup. So we were all fighting for our
place in this industry. And the effect that had on it
is that, well, IBM and Intel, they make chips in a different way than,
for example, Micron, who makes memory. So that's the difference. So what we did, we worked with
these startups and we worked together. So what do you need and what
do you need? And we develop it. And so together we developed the
technology for the future and it did work because Micron, TSMC and ASML are
all at the top of the game. So that is also one of the
reasons why ASML is successful. We didn't have one company, one big
customer, but we had many startups and we could grow up together, you could
say. And there were beautiful examples of
discussions we had with customers. What are we going to do next
year, in the next two or three years? What do you want us to develop? What can we develop? It was a fascinating discussion. Which is still happening today, I guess, right? It's still happening today. And it worked. Yeah. And do you remember sort of a
decisive moment where there was like, okay, now we've achieved this, or we
did this customer gave us trust, or we got this big order, or was
there like where the initial, let's say, entrepreneurial chaos or whatever matured
and you figured, okay, now we really have a chance to maybe eventually become
a market leader. Yeah, well, market leader, we came later
because late in the '90s we became technology leader, and in the 2000s we became also financially a market leader. But there are some decisive moments. There are some customers who trusted us,
like Cypress, they took the gamble, Micron took the gamble and they worked
with us. So that was very important. We got a big order from AMD,
which helped us the mid '90s. ASML became for customers the serious option. We were with Nikon, Canon and ASML, the three of us, and, okay, now that's what it was. And then customers took us seriously. And most importantly, that was already
early '90s. We were here to stay. On the other hand, the market was
always going up and down. You hear the stories that they
had to ask Philips for money. And so that's the other side. Right? Not once, but many times. Many times. But that could also have an effect
on the spirit, I can imagine. Right? Or were you guys always optimistic and
"we'll get through this"? And how did that work? If you look back on it, that's
weird. There were several times, at least five
times, we were bankrupt, basically. Yeah. And then we survived by things that
our CEO did. Our financial, what is it? CFO, Chief Financial Officer did, all these
things. They took care of it and took
care of the finances and we took care of the customers and the technology
and that's basically what it was. And the strange thing was, is that
we never believed we were going bankrupt. It just didn't cross our mind for
one reason or the other. If you look back on it, it
was quite weird. In fact, in 1992, when I was
living with my family in Phoenix in the United States, and we were basically
bankrupt and we were put into a room in the morning, which was possible
back then, the room wasn't even that big. And they said, well, guys, we don't
know if we can pay the salaries this week. And, oh yeah, by the way, you
expat over there, if that happens, you're on your own. Good luck with it. So that's then, well, that's a nice message to go
home with. But I never believed that it would
really happen. We just, we couldn't do anything about
it. So we just went on and that's
what we did. We just went on and "no, this
is not going to happen." Strangely as it may sound. By the way, they never kept you
awake. I mean, you had two kids and
a wife and you were living in the US, but... And we just went on as a,
well, "it will be alright." "They will figure out a way", which
happened, by the way. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah. But if you look back on it,
it was kind of weird that we always kept the belief that this was
going to be a success. We never believed it would grow as
big as it is right now after 40 years. No, no, no. We could have never, there's no way we could imagine that. But you never lost faith. Did you ever consider moving to another
company? Or as strange as it may sound,
no, I never considered going to another company. I never even considered it. And if you look in hindsight, that's
quite weird because it was going very bad, but I never considered it. And with me, most of my colleagues
and people also didn't leave, by the way. They stayed, they stayed on and we
just worked even harder. And you were born in the west,
northwest of Holland, right? From Alkmaar. Okay. A cheesehead. A cheesehead. Okay. And this is Eindhoven, Veldhoven. Right. Did you fit in mentality wise? Did you like it here? Did your family like it when you
moved here? Yeah, we liked it here. In the west, it's different from here. The mentality here in this part of
the Netherlands is more laid back. You do something for each other. It's more laid back than in the
west. I firmly believe that if ASML would
have been somewhere in the west, it wouldn't have grown so big as it
is right now. I think part of that Brabant mentality
that we work together, that cooperation model that we do with our suppliers
VDL and Prodrive, you name it. We have a very good cooperation with
these people. And there's trust, of course, we're not
naive, of course, but there is trust. We work together. And I'm convinced that if you... It would have much, been much harder,
if not impossible, if this company would have been in the west of Holland. So part of the success of ASML
is also being here and being, working together with the way we do with
our supplier. What other functions did you do throughout
these 40 years? Oh, I did many things. I did many things. In chronological order, maybe. Technical support, I did, not very long. I did sales, which was very interesting. In the United States, we started with
account support. Later we did Special Applications that
used existing technology for niche markets, which is now also the secondhand
market. We did that as well, that sort
of things. Later, the community program with the
sponsoring and the technology promotion for schools, which was a lot of
fun to do. And what are you most proud of? Well, there's a lot to be proud
of in ASML as what we achieved and what we did and where we
are right now. But personally, what I'm most proud of
is what I just said, that I was able to set up or contribute
to setting up things which are now absolutely normal within the
company. But in those days, it was new
and I was able to set it up. And then later people took over and
built it into something, something bigger. And so I... Yeah, and that is something that... I'm still doing that up to this day by the way... Because your latest
endeavor, that's the... What is it? The archive. The archive. And let's explain it for the people. So have you retired officially yet or... Officially, yes, but I still work here. It was two and a half years
ago. I retired. We couldn't get rid of you. They couldn't get rid of me. So the last years you've been collecting a lot of... Yeah, we have been collecting a lot
of material over the years, and we collected that in a lot of boxes. And, okay, we had it stored in
a lot of boxes, but an archive in boxes is no archive. And then also we talked to Peter
Wennink and he said, well, an archive. And he said that literally that
an archive in boxes is useless. "Think of something." That's typical ASML, by the way,
that happened to me many times. Well, "think of something." Okay, then we think of something, and
that's what we did. So we have a small team, and
we are working on setting up the archive, the infrastructure, and we're not
going to finish because there's more generated each day that we can process. But we concentrate on the old stuff
because we still know what it is. All analog. And that is what we will make
available very shortly so people can look at it. So it's like an online collection
of information, and you can access on your... You can browse, you can put names
in, events, departments, years, dates, whatever. There's a lot of metadata in it,
so you can find it. And it's from everything. It's from official portraits of the
management to events that we organized to parties of the factory, which are quite
something, by the way. Different day and age, different times. So we collect everything. We don't make a choice because that's
not up to us, that's up to other people. Okay. Do you still need material? Yes, we still need material. Can people send material? Yes they can send material. They can send it or they can
drop it off at the experience center. That's very easy. Okay. And when can we expect
something to be available, or is that... Within a couple of weeks. We want to make what we have
already available, which is about in the database, thousands of pictures and also
thousands of news items and things that will become available very shortly. Okay. Preparation time has been quite long
because there was a lot of digitizing and, well, we are not archivists, so
we had to learn a lot. I think we're nearing the end of
the podcast. Do you have any advice for new
colleagues that enter here and think, "What am I getting into?" "What is this?" And as a seasoned person, any... Well, as I said, ASML is a
good company to work for. Absolutely. The technology is, of course, fascinating. It remains fascinating, and it's a good
company to work for. But there are so many possibilities in
this company. But if there is one thing that
people should know:: you have to do it yourself. Learn new things, be curious, and that's
the most important thing. Be curious about the new technologies,
what else you can do. I have done things in this company
I never imagined I could do them. I could do them. I learned it and had fun in
the process. So develop yourself, keep on developing
yourself, learning, and look for other things that you might enjoy, and then
you can have a beautiful career as I had. Yeah, it looks like you're going to
miss it once you retire. Yes, I'm definitely going to miss it. I'm going to miss especially the people. It's a young company. It's still a very young, average age. I'm a little bit older than that,
but it's wonderful to work with all these young people with their ideas, and
they look things differently. And I said, "that's a good idea." Jos, thank you very much for joining
us in the studio as the first guest. We enjoyed it very much. You're welcome. Yeah, I'm sure we'll see each other
around. And for the last few weeks that
you're still here... I will be here a couple of months more, at least
a couple of months more. Okay. But thanks for being here and see
you around. Thank you for having me. Yes. Hi, Ale Sytsma. Welcome to this podcast. How do Americans pronounce your name? Oh, that's a good one. It's quite different because sometimes
they call me Ale and like the english beer, but I like the most
that they call me LA. Okay. That is also, and some can really
pronounce my name, like Ale... Ale Sytsma. Okay, good. That's a Frisian name, I guess, from... That's right. Yeah, we are in Brabant. That's the other side of the Netherlands. So what did your life look like? How did you end up in Brabant? I had an education in Leeuwarden, at
the HTS, technical high school, in electronics. And yeah, a big electronics company was
here in Eindhoven. And I found it okay, that I
started working there in 1980. And what was your first job then
with Philips? Our first job was a service engineer
for an electron beam pattern generator. That was a product that writes on
chips with an electron beam, but also used for producing
reticles that contain the image to produce wafers. So that was before ASML, right? That's early eighties. That is in 1980. 1980. So they already had a semiconductor
machine that could write stuff? Yeah, right. Yeah. And did they also already have the
first photo lithography system, the first PAS system, or did that come later? No, pretty soon. Later for me, lucky me, they decided
to make a stepper. The thing that we still know as
PAS 2000A. A copy of that is here in
the hallways of Building 7, at the reception. That machine there is full of my
fingerprints. I assembled it, I serviced it. So that is, let's say 'my machine'. Philips was asking me to become the
service engineer for the PAS system. I said immediately, yes, because I
thought, okay, a service engineer for something that is not yet there is
a good job. So I was able to learn
hands-on how the machine worked and did a lot of testing and solving
errors. And that was the way I was
trained to become the first service engineer of the PAS 2000A. And in fact, you physically installed the
very first system. The very first PAS 2000, you installed
it at a customer, correct? Yes. Yes. Can you take us back to that
process? How did it look and what did
the customer look like? And what was the vibe like? Yeah. Okay. Well, we were building in my memory
about four or five PAS 2000A systems in the
cleanroom at the building TQ in Eindhoven. And the story was, we will ship
the first one to the Philips factory in Nijmegen, a chip factory there. There was kind of logic behind it,
because close by. So if we need to repair it
and something goes wrong, the whole crew was available to go to Nijmegen and
solve problems. But for a reason that I still
don't know. The decision was made to ship the
first one to IBM in Burlington, Vermont. So that's in Fiskill that we all know
but in Burlington, Vermont. And there was a big memory plant,
memory factory of IBM, not in Silicon Valley, because they told me "we don't
like to be there because of the job hopping." People work a couple of months or
years and then they join another company, and well, Vermont is far away from where
the real semiconductor business exploded in those years. And there I ended up. Vermont is a beautiful country and they
had the factory of IBM, and there we had to compete in an evaluation
with a Japanese customer. So they had our system and a
Japanese one. Yes. And I think that's the main reason
to ship the system to IBM at that date. And if you look at the system
at the reception, right, it's like an American fridge, it's 1 meter by,
I don't know, 1 meter 80 or whatever. So was it shipped as a box
and did you just have to plug it in or did you have to
basically completely build it over there? What did it look like? It looked like a few crates, because
what you see in the hallways is only the exposure unit. And another cabinet belongs to it,
with a computer and all kind of electronics. But the largest thing was the oil
pump. Imagine a large container, very large,
filled with. We had to fill that with oil
to the rim and that produced, in the end, a pressure of
80 bars to move the hydraulic motors in the system. So that was placed somewhere where you
couldn't hear it. And then with long hoses, it was
connected to the exposure. And how long did that installation take? Is it days, weeks, months? No, it was a couple of weeks. I think even in 2 weeks we
had all the things installed and the system up and running. That was not that much work. And then would it be comparable to
these days where in the end you run qualification tests, you expose
wafers, you measure the features, and then you show it to the customer. And customer agrees. Yeah, nothing changed. Nothing changed in all the years. No, we exposed the wafers and were
able to read them out by means of an optical microscope
because the lines were not that thin as we have them now. And I can still remember that we
produced the first overlay wafers. Looking through the microscope, I thought,
well, it's a little bit worse than what I've seen in Eindhoven before the
shipment, but I remember so well that my customer, Pete, he looked through the
microscope and he started, "wow, this is not possible." And he was getting his colleagues from
out of the offices to look through the microscope to see what the overlay
was that our system was able to produce. So for me it was kind of,
well, not so good. But for them, compared to the kind
of equipment they were used to, it was really a step forward. So we got the order? Well, you would say so. Now afterwards we got several problems
with the focus system and I can tell you all kinds of stories about
that, but I think the main reason that IBM not decided for us at
that day, later they did, was that the oil in the system to move
the hydraulic motors and having oil in a cleanroom with chips was not
such a good idea. Although the stage performance was
incredible. And I think also a kind of
lack of future view on what kind of systems we would make and develop
to also support the development of chips at IBM. Like we now all know, we have
our roadmap systems and our plants and we will support customers with this
machine and that variant, et cetera. I think there was also some lack
of that vision for the future, but to be honest I wasn't so
aware of that. I was only 23 and what would
I know about business and about business plans? So for me it was just getting
the machine to work and going back to IBM at the moment that it
failed. So how would you, if you ran
into a problem... So nowadays we have all kinds of
telecommunications, Internet, spare parts, logistics. So back in those days that was
not the case. That was certainly not the
case. So if you, you need to order
a part... Yeah, I had to do a phone
call to Eindhoven and yeah, "send me this part." And now one story that illustrates it
is that I needed a focus motor, a small thing, electro motor, because I
diagnosed that the motor was not performing well and we had focus problems
on the system. So I said, well, "I need a
focus motor." "Okay, we'll ship one." No, it was done with FedEx, I
believe, but we didn't have any tracking and visibility on where the part was. So it took days and days and
days and I didn't have a part. So yeah, what to do? I every day went back to the
customer instead of doing some sightseeing. But yeah, I was the service engineer,
so I need to be there and checked and double-checked my diagnose. Maybe it was something else, but the
part didn't arrive and we didn't have a local stock. I only had a locker at the
IBM premises with some parts, but always the wrong ones, of course. Yeah, yeah. And then Richard George, he was the
program manager of the PAS 2000, he decided to put some motors in his
suitcase and also some print cards. And he flew to the US and
well he handed me the parts, and I put
it in the system and it was working fine. And I think it took more than
one and a half weeks to that whole process. And the fun of the story is
that the day that I repaired the system, I came back in my hotel
and guess what? There was a package from FedEx with
a focus motor. Yes, that's Murphy's Law, I guess. Yeah, that's Murphy's Law. And when this all took place, when
we didn't get the order, was that still in the Philips days or was
that actually ASML already? No, that was still in the Philips
days. So then in 1984, when ASML was
founded, April 1, you were in the first batch, right, because your actual
badge says number 27, right? Yeah, my badge is 27, my personal
number. And, yeah, we were a group of
about, I think, 50, 40 or 50, I don't know the exact number. Yeah, I have a list with all
the people's names on it made by Wim Troost. He was the director those days. My name is on that list. And some two other guys are still
working here at ASML. That's interesting, because I think in
those days it was still very much pioneering. If you listen to the stories. And Philips was established and ASML was
this new company. So why did you choose then to
sign a contract formally with ASML and make the jump? Yeah, for me, the main reason was,
let's say, the small size of... Yeah, say that now, but the small
size of ASML, those days, a couple of hundred people in '86, one product
that we could focus on. So it was overseeable. And also, I must say, the atmosphere
of a young, innovative company, not bothered by, let's say, all the
procedures that Philips had. So we had freedom, and I had
the freedom to do a lot of different things. So I was busy shipping systems, I
went to the airports, I went to arrange paperwork. I trained customers, I trained field
service engineers, I could do whatever I like to do. And, yeah, I think that was a
good vibe for me to work in. Okay, last question. What are you most proud of? If you look back? Yeah, I think it's difficult because my standard answer is then,
"well, proud..." I'm thankful for being part of this
incredible journey. So I can't believe even that. If I look back and we started
me at my 23rd, what has been happening? Nobody could predict that. It's amazing. And I often think about the corona
time that we could work because of the fast Internet, we
could connect easily. And I think our products, our scanners,
play an important role in making these fast chips that enable us to work
worldwide together and that that is possible. Yeah. So, yeah, I always think that was
amazing. Yeah. Thank you very much, Ale, for this
for taking us back through your journey at ASML and making us part of
it. And we'll see you around for another
year then. Thank you for having me. That is what you say then. Hello, Anne Bras. Welcome to our podcast, the 40-year
podcast. You're in the first episode,
"The early years". And the theme of the early years
is also gaming. And you're a big game collector, which we want to talk about. Could you start by introducing yourself? Who are you? What do you do? First of all, congratulations on the 40
years. That's amazing. My name is Anne Bras. I'm a well... game collector. I'm married, I have two children, and
I started very early, and later on it grew into something bigger and
bigger and bigger. And now we're here where I'm today. So we'll talk about where you are
now because that's quite impressive, we think. But what did your childhood look like? Did you come from a geek family? Were you inspired by your parents? Was gaming a theme at home? My father, he had a computer at
home for his work, and with that he got some copied games
from his colleagues. And I think it was a monochrome
screen. Monochrome screen. You either had a black and white
or black and green or a black and orange, I think were the most
common colors. And we had an orange screen. I'm not sure how many games we
had back then, but one game I remember pretty vividly, and that was
called Beast. And it's a game that probably nobody
knows, nobody's ever heard of, only the couple few in the world. But it's a fun little game where
there are monsters coming at you and you have to crush them between two
walls. And that's basically it. So how did you roll into the
world of games? When did the fascination strike? I think because of this computer at
home and the games we got early on. So we started with these flexible floppy
disks and later we got these. I brought some with me. Exactly. This is the second generation, I guess,
right? The second generation, yeah. The diskette of 3.5 inch. And this one is Prince of Persia. It says "prince" on there. And that's when I just loved the
games so much, I just wanted to play them. And also at a friend's place where
they have a computer, I wanted to play games and I started collecting with
NES games. So that's like console-wise more. The
Nintendo Entertainment System. That's something that I started collecting
because it was very collectible. You could find them more easily. They looked nice. When you have a combination of games,
they all look the same, so it looks nice. But later I discovered that I used
to play more PC games than NES games. So I was like, why am I
not collecting those games? Also, I knew already a lot of
NES collectors, but not PC game collectors. So that's when I started to collect
PC games. And not just PC games, but Big
Box PC games. Because back in the day, all these
games came in a big box. Like the one we have over here, for
instance. Yeah, exactly. So now you might recognize more the
DVD cased one. This one. Exactly. And now these days you only have
a Steam key to fill in or you download the game. But back in the day, every game
came out in like a big box like this. And you call that a boxed PC
game then? Boxed PC game? Yeah, boxed PC. That's the term. Okay. That's the term because it came in
a box. That's basically it. And you started collecting those and they
grew and grew and grew. There was this moment on the Queens
Day markets that I came across this boxed game called Day of the Tentacle. For the people who know that game,
this will probably give them a smile on their face. It's an amazing, funny game. I love it. And this box was amazing looking. It had a beautiful cover art. And even though I had played the
game before then, illegally, maybe this was the first time I came
in contact with the original box. And that was such an amazing feeling
that I was like, well, all these boxes are actually pretty neat, so, yeah,
why not collect them? And that's sort of the starting point. The starting point, yeah. Well, but that mushroomed into something
quite big. In fact, you brought something with you
that you may want to show because you're in fact the world record holder. Yes. The largest collection of boxed PC games
in the world. Exactly. And it's now on display in the
Home Computer Museum in Helmond. In Helmond, correctly, yeah. For you it's around the corner. For me it's a little bit further,
but yeah, it's such an amazing place to have it on display. It was always my dream to have
my collection on display because... Is the whole collection on display there or... Yes. How many do you have? Around 2200 games. So that's, you can... It's about 30 cabinets filled with
boxed PC games. So that's like a whole panorama of
games. Yeah. And what's your favorite game? That's very hard to describe. I think it's Monkey island. And then 1 and 2 are.... I like them equally as much. So, yeah. Monkey Island is like an adventure game. Also, the adventure genre is like a
genre that I'm very fond of, which is... Yeah. Does that also mean that it's your
favorite boxed PC game, or do you have like a favorite box, if you
will, and a favorite game, are they two different things? You could name that as two different
things. For me. The Monkey Island box is really beautiful. So the artwork of Steve Purcell, it's
the artist who made the cover art. That's really well done. It's really beautiful cover art. So I think it definitely comes in
my... Well, almost my number one spot. There is also the cover art of
Doom, which is amazing. But my favorite cover art, I think,
is from Laura Bow and The Dagger of Amon Ra, which is... Doesn't ring a bell for me, sorry. No problem. It's like an sort of Egyptian kind
of cover art, and it's also embedded a bit, but the art style is
from... Inspired by, I think, let me say
that correctly, J.C. Leyendecker. Well, Leyendecker is like an artist, and
this artwork is inspired by his art. And also the entire game is inspired
by his art. And does your wife share the passion,
or is it like, "I'll just leave Anne..." I get that question a lot. But she does like games. She loves to play them as well. But more the modern games. For me,
it's more... I like the retro, especially when it
has pixels, then I'm sold. But yeah, she does love a lot
of... She's very into Assassin's Creed, like,
the entire series. And now Horizon Zero Dawn from the
Netherlands. It's a Dutch game, and we both
love that game very much. I also like modern games. Not only old games. And you also lecture about games... You go to school, you lecture to
kids. So what is the takeaway message that
you want to give to the kids? It depends a bit on the lecture,
and sometimes it's about the history. So talk about what was before Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. And how do you see the future
of gaming? We saw this evolution and we are
now at a certain, let's say, phase. And now with AI maybe coming up
and more processing power and everything. So where do you think the future
will take us? Well, definitely AI is going to have
a hand in it. I think you already start seeing the
first AI games popping up. VR will get more into our lives
as well. Maybe in that direction, maybe not the
stacks. No, no, no. But more like... More like people get to see how
much more they can get out of it, how much more
they can get immersed into a world and also communicate maybe with others. So not only in gaming, but also
the practical part of VR, maybe like. Blending different realities, which may be
scary in itself, but yeah, it's pretty fascinating, right? It's fascinating, definitely. And I think all the new media
are scary and fascinating when they first start. But we have to be careful in
this time because things can go wrong very quickly. Back in the day, things took more time. You will still continue collecting, I
guess? Yes. Yeah. Is there any game that you need? There is a game that I really
hope to get, but it's not... So I'm like, I see my collection
as maybe two separate collections. Like, one is the international largest
collection of box PC games, but the other part is the Dutch collection. So I have largest collection of Dutch
games as well. And that's not PC, but it's all
consoles, so just Dutch games in general. And I like to get those... The history of the Dutch gaming, I
figured that I was almost the only one here in the Netherlands that was
collecting these games. And if I was not collecting these
Dutch games, then maybe the Dutch game history would disappear or... Yeah, would crumble. So I would try to maybe try
and archive them better and more... For me, it's more like a physical
part that I archive, but also in combination with other museums, trying to
archive them in a digital way. So you also feel like the custodian
maybe, of the Dutch gaming culture or gaming culture in general. A little bit. A little bit. That's good. Yeah. So you have this huge collection now,
and you're a well known collector. Did that also open doors? Did you run into interesting situations,
new situations because of that collection? Yes. Well, in the beginning, collecting was
pretty easy, and it became more and more difficult because of
the media, and prices are staggering. And it's almost insane what you have
to pay for a boxed PC game nowadays. How much are we talking about then? There are some games out there, like
for €500 or maybe €2000. There are some examples out there, which
is insane. And there are some companies in the
Netherlands that have donated their entire collection of games to me because they
see that it's well preserved in physical way and it's displayed for the public. You also develop games yourself, right? And I think you brought this
boxed PC game. Can you tell us something? My first big box PC game. Small box. Yeah. Back in the day when I was,
I think, 15 years old, that was like a long time ago, I started
learning programming, and there I programmed my first little games. So I made this first screen when
I was 15 and later I never thought about it anymore. But then I think a year or
three... Maybe it says here, I don't know. Some
years ago I found it again and I was like, "what would it be
if I could finish that level?" So make the entire first level of
Prince of Persia in this mini ASCII style. And so I did that and I
even made it into a box. This is the game and it's one
of 25 boxes, so there are 25 boxes of these. I'm also working on another cool project
and it's a fan game of Horizon Zero Dawn. But then for the Game Boy Classic. Thanks for taking the time and the
effort to come over and show us your fascination with boxed PC games. Yeah, you're very welcome. Thank you. Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe to
stay up to date with everything ASML.