Friday, December 18, 2009

20 years in av

i knew time was coming, i even thought about marking the occasion here, but my attention was elsewhere at the time so there weren't any posts on the subject.

then eddy willems posted about his 20th anniversary in anti-malware and i thought maybe i should post about this after all - so it entered my to-do list and languished there for a while.

and then today david harley posted about his upcoming 20th anniversary in anti-malware so i figure it's time to pop that task off the to-do stack and actually write something.

you see, i also had my 20th year in the anti-malware field this year - though not in the professional sense that eddy and david did. i don't recall the exact date but i know it was in late november of 1989 that i started down the path i'm on today (i gave a basic run down of how it happened in my about me post 3 years ago).

it's interesting to me to discover that some of the other names i know in this field also got started the same year. it didn't really seem like '89 was all that significant a year or anything, but i guess that's about when awareness of the malware problem (or rather the virus problem at the time since that was the principle form of malware being created) was reaching the critical mass necessary to entrench itself firmly in the general public's consciousness - first as an obscure curiosity, but as an increasingly real and oftentimes personal annoyance for people as they had their own run-ins with the problem. as such i'm sure there's quite a few more who got their start that year.

at any rate, happy anniversary eddy and david. i hope it's been as stimulating for you as it has been for me.

2 comments:

David Harley said...

Hi, Kurt.

Happy belated anniversary to you too. It must be quite a few years since we first started to correspond in a.c.v. too, but I don't have a marker for that particular milestone. :)

Regards
David Harley

kurt wismer said...

@david harley:
that's what google groups is for.

apparently my first post to alt.comp.virus was on dec. 10 1995. the earliest reply to you i can find is jan. 5 1996 but there might be earlier ones. it would appear we've known each other online for approximately 14 years.