Albert Theo Hofkamp was born on the 25th of July, 1967 in Leeuwarden. In 1985, he finished the atheneum in Leeuwarden, followed by a study in Electrical Engineering, which was successfully finished in 1989. After serving in the Army, he studied Computer Science at the University of Twente from 1991 to 1995. He graduated within the Tools Group of TIOS (Tele-Informatics and Open Systems) on the subject A static semantics checker for LOTOS, and wrote lcr. After graduating, he continued with the OOTI programme (Postgraduate designer course Software Technology) at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE). The final project Data modeling in Chi for this programme was done at the department of Mechanical Engineering, with the Systems Engineering Group at the same university. In December 1997, he started his PhD project on the design of real-time systems.