Peter DeBetta recently tagged me in what is called “blog tag”. When I described it to Mary, she named it “blog chain letter” and said I should ignore it. But it got me thinking. Although I run my mouth often and have some fairly weird stories, here’s 5 things you may not know about me. But then again, you might…
1. I attended the first home game of the New York Mets baseball team on a Friday at the Polo Grounds in 1962. My dad took me when I was 8. It was, as Casey Stengel would say, amazing, when they shocked everyone by winning it all in 1969. I’m waiting for the Seattle Mariners to do the same today.
2. I have a degree in Chemistry, rather than Computer Science. In fact, I dropped the only CS course I took in college, because I didn’t have enough time in the day for labs. The labs consisted of waiting in (a fairly long) line to punch lab assignment programs onto cards, with a limit of 15 cards at a time. I was taking six other courses that semester…
3. I worked on the first commercial implementation of Kerberos that I’m aware of. In 1992, I joined a startup called Open Computing Security Group (OCSG). We put out Kerberos implementations for almost every variant of Unix and for IBM mainframe, as well as clients for Macintosh and Windows 3.1. Really. The company is now known as Cybersafe. My first port was NeXT OS 1.0 (which is just BSD 4.4 Unix over a Mach kernal + GUI). Our biggest competitor at the time was Cygnus support, who compiled, packaged, and sold support for the open Project Athena code. I never forgot their slogan “We make free software affordable”. IBM had (in addition to RACF) a competing security system called CryptoKnight.
4. In 30 years in this business, I’ve only carried an on-call pager or cell phone for a total of 2 months. Not that I was never “on call”, I WAS on call for YEARS. In the pre-pager days you just had to tell the operations folks where to find you at all times.
5. I wrote the first (that I’m aware of) class on ASP (ASP classic, not ASP.NET) in the alpha2 or beta1 days of it. It was for an internal Microsoft gig. Just to provide some time reference, the day before I taught this class, I attended a pre-release seminar on Active Directory Version 1.0. Teaching across the hall during the class was a guy named Don Box, who I’d never heard of, teaching COM.
I’ll do everyone I know I favor, and not “tag” anyone. Cheers.