I found him upstairs in the Dorned booth, above his company's collection of Codor laminating machines, where I innocently asked a salesman about the growth in demand for secure personal identification, and soon found myself sitting at a small table in a private room drinking strong coffee with the salesman's boss, and hearing a story unlike any I've encountered at CeBIT.

Born in Indonesia of Dutch hotelier parents, Pans Schomper was 16 in 1942 when the occupying Japanese forces threw his family into the first of a series of concentration camps where he would spend the next four years. After the war, Schomper studied economics in Britain, and built Dorned on the plastics boom that followed, starting out with one of his own inventions, a small plastic ring that proved very useful in reducing vibration in industrial machinery.

In 1951, he heard about a young inventor in Holland who had developed a laminating process. "I bought the whole thing out," he says, "including the inventor." Dorned began manufacturing laminating machines. Since 1955, it has exhibited at the Hanover Industrial Fair, which eventually spun off the wildly successful CeBIT in the early 1980s as silicon was transforming the global economy.

Today Schomper supplies the governments of Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and other countries with machines to make high quality secure identification cards. "Everyone in the world needs one of these cards now," he says, "and we work only with governments. Our big growth area now is the former Soviet Union: Kazakstan and Russia are two of our biggest clients now. This business is growing because security concerns keep getting higher and the methods of falsifying identification keep growing more sophisticated. Frankly, we need to automate all manufacture of identification. As long as people are making passports by hand, other people will be falsifying them."

So what's a poor laminator to do? This week Schomper's firm is showing off a new security device that the government of Holland has adopted, a laminated passport with a kinegram embedded in the identification photo. The kinegram, a more complicated form of hologram, comes apart if tampered with. Says Schomper: "It forgets the image."

That will never be Schomper's problem. While hundreds of exhibitors at CeBIT will give you a CD Rom with a press release on it, and Microsoft will even give you an advance copy of Money 98, only Pans Schomper gives you CDs of the two jazz albums he has recorded with friends, and his best-selling (in Holland) autobiography "Chaos After Paradise" to boot.

-- Janice Castro