I’ve been incredibly lucky to encounter some truly amazing people. On about my 15th anniversary of working with UNIX, I decided to send a little thank you note to the guys who invented it – Brian W Kerrighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson – since they’d essentially provided me with the ability to make a living and have a great time doing it. What was remarkable, is that I heard back from all of them promptly, and that they were all pretty awesome.
And as some of you know, I helped get my great-grandfather Thomas E Murray who invented just about everything from the powerplant to the light socket, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. My wife, Jessica Argyle, wrote about the whole thing here.
But I also got to meet three legends…
Sean MacGuire and Robert Khan, co-inventor of TCP/IP
Sean and Martin Hellman, co-inventor of Public Key Cryptography with Whitfield Diffie
Whitfield Diffie
And we got seated with the head of the USPTO as well as Lloyd Conover, the inventor of tetracycline who lamented that “even I need a prescription to get it now…”
Lloyd Conover, inventor of tetracyline
Finally, here’s my quick chat with Neil Conan from NPR: