Captain Kampf has left the vessel

The Frenchman Serge Kampf [1935-2016], a commercially-successful businessman in the arena of the management of personnel for software development, was a native of Grenoble who used a good part of his personal wealth to promote rugby.

Our paths crossed during my early years in France, simply because Kampf succeeded in purchasing the French company named CAP (Centre d'Analyse et de Programmation), which had been one of my first employers. After that buyout and the subsequent disappearance of the original company, Kampf retained preciously the CAP acronym, which soon acquired a new meaning that had nothing to do with the original sense of "Centre d'Analyse et de Programmation". And that's why I've decided to designate the late Serge Kampf as "Captain".

My first employment with the original CAP company took me to Brussels, where our daughter Emmanuelle was born. After a trip out to Australia with Christine and our baby, I was called back to Paris by the CAP company, to set up their in-house training department, with the aim of producing computer programmers. Then I abandoned completely this activity in order to spend a few years in the French broadcasting world, with Pierre Schaeffer at the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF.

Later, I moved briefly into the new CAP domain that Serge Kampf had started to build up. One of Kampf's key subordinates, a certain Jean-Pierre Descendre, had the impression that I would be the right man in the right place to handle an outlandish adventure that would consist of creating a computerized teaching laboratory for the Shar of Persia and his wife Soraya. I was on the point of accepting naively this crazy mission. Fortunately, Kampf was alert enough to realize that Descendre was surely leading the company (not to mention me too) into a mine field. So, he stopped the project instantly. Thanks, Serge, for saving me from the magic carpets of Persia...