OpenVMS

So he is absolutely the, as far as we know, the number one, the first pioneer in cybersecurity and tracing hackers throughout the world.

If you have ever used a VAX, VAX VMS, old school Unix, if you know what a TTY is, dial up modems, 1200 baud, all that stuff, green bar paper from the printer.

This is a memory lane.

It is absolutely wild.

Let's say I got brought into a bank and this bank is still using a mainframe because banks still use mainframes, believe it or not.

And let's say it's a VAX VMS system.

Most people today don't even know what that is, right? How do you implement protections to a VAX VMS system? Well, if you don't know VAX VMS, good luck, right? Because there's not a framework on the planet right now.

And I realize people love frameworks because they want everything to be wrapped up into a tight box with a bow on it.

That's not the way the real world works.

Until I have answers to all those questions, which are subjective to that environment, I can't build a protective environment.

Like, what am I going to do? Go to any modern day security company and say, hey, protect my VACs.

When they go, half of the people that work there are going to go, what is VACs? Now, I'm telling you, this is a real example, by the way, because I know that there's a very large international bank that still runs everything on a VAX VMS back end.

We were their largest customer in the world.

And so I learned VMS, which was their operating system.

Gosh, there were...

That was

a Vax VMS thing, right? What's that? Vax VMS.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and then I'd use weird systems too.

Like I had a OpenVMS system that I had to do, uh, work on in the laboratory, which was just a really odd piece of equipment.

And, uh, gotta learn like, uh, you know, how to, how to get stuff to, uh, parse out as postscript and, and a bunch of other random things in order to get the data on and off an instrument that does not, uh, play well in modern technologies and stuff like that.

And, uh, most of my original Unix work was on SunOS, uh, back in the old ISP days, uh, managing, uh, a Netsc- Netscape email server and, uh, doing DNS on BIND and, and DHCPD and stuff like that.