Tom Pinckney: Happy birthday Multics

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The first public release of Multics, the ancestor of Unix, was 40 years ago this month....

http://www.multicians.org/chrono.html

The source is available too. Maybe someone wants to port it to x86?

http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics_Internet_Server/Multics_sources.html

About me

I currently work at eBay. Previously, I was co-founder and VP Engineering of Hunch before it was acquired by eBay in 2011. Before that, I was one of the founders of SiteAdvisor, a Boston web-security startup that was bought by McAfee in 2006. My first startup was Vividon, a streaming video infrastructure company located outside Boston.

Before my startup adventures, I was an undergrad and then PhD student in computer science at MIT working for Frans Kaashoek in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group at the Lab for Computer Science. Projects I worked on included the exokernel operating system, storage virtualization and early work on adding client side scripting into web pages.

You can contact me at pinckney at alum.mit.edu. Other various profiles around the web for me are LinkedIn and Hunch.

The authoritative DNS server for this site is the Python Modular DNS Server. This is a side-project I'm sporadically working on to make it easy to build DNS-based applications such as load-balancers or content routing applications.

I'm now also building my personal web sites using YAAPS (yet another app server). It's a minimal Python WSGI app framework designed to do the tedious things that every app needs without getting in your way.

My paper on adding scripting into web pages (before javascript had been invented) has led to a surprising number of lawyers contacting me to help with patent litigation. Apparently that paper may have had some of the first references to web mail systems, mobile browser content caching and web content adaptation for mobile. I generally am happy to help for free so long as someone is trying to _invalidate_ a software patent. I have no desire to help someone sue for infringement of a software patent.

Tom Pinckney

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Happy birthday Multics

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