It’s a bit weird to be reading about Red Hat posting $1 billion in revenue in a year for the first time or this Ars article by James Grimmelmann about HavenCo since, to me personally that’s part of my past.
See, as Grimmelmann notes, HavenCo’s chairman of the board was Sameer Parekh whom I worked with/for at a different internet security company, C2Net Software. Almost everything Grimmelmann writes about I remember first-hand. I even remember reading the Wired articles he references (and how could I forget Neil Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon, it’s still one of my favorite novels).
Around the same time, Steven Levy wrote the non-fiction book Crypto, which tells part of the history of securing communications and modern computing networks; from Whitfield Diffie and the initial concerns of privacy to Netscape and the creation of SSL.
Alas, Levy’s book is already 10 years old. While it covers the basis for the cryptography that powers today’s Internet, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. Parts of the story that are missing, such as the short comings of SSL and its open standard successor, TLS, the adoption of “virtual private networks”, that allow the use of primarily public networks, such as the Internet, to connect remote points securely, as if part of a central private network or that much of today’s emails remain in “plaintext“, despite the availability of encryption methods such as PGP, is missing.
Most of what happens on today’s Internet every moment, took root around the same time of Levy’s work, 1999-2001, when I was right there working for C2Net with its own vision on how to secure everyday communications on the “Information Superhighway“.
And what happened to C2Net? Well it was sold, to……Red Hat of which I become an employee of (and then ex-employee of).
So yeah, I have this odd, I remember that (HavenCo) and oh, good for them (Red Hat). Then I think wow, I wasn’t just a part of the some pioneering companies “back in the day”, but also witnessed some completely cutting edge stuff that’s only now being understood by the world at large.
So weird.