Josephine van der Hoeven (also known as Winky) grew up in Riverside, CT, where she had a happy childhood learning to sail, play tennis and quickly spend all her allowance at The Louise Shop, the friendly neighborhood candy store.

She received a BS in Mathematics from Purdue University and then returned to the east coast. She worked for The Link Group on the simulator for the Apollo moon project, then as a programmer for TWA. She took some time off to have her two daughters and from 1973-1976 lived in Gechingen, a small village near Stuttgart, on the edge of the Black Forest.

In 1982 she returned to work as a consultant at IBM's Watson Research Laboratory, working on a main frame APL graphics application. In 1990 she founded Walpole Software and, as it's employee, continued the work at IBM. The work there involved adding program function to GRAFSTAT (which later became an IBM product under the name AGSS: A Graphical Statistical System) and porting it to the PS/2 (DOS and OS/2 versions) and to UNIX systems (RS/6000, SUN-Solaris).

In 1995 she relocated to Santa Fe, NM and began working with Peter Welch on the development and maintenance of World Wide Web pages. In the sunny Southwest she plays tennis, bikes, hikes, skis, attends concerts of all kinds, is a member of her neighborhood volunteer security patrol and volunteers in the public schools. But she misses her favorite sport, Platform Tennis.