Here is my impressionistic transcript of Robert Cringley's keynote, "I Have Seen the Future and We Are It: The Past, Present and Future of Information Security" from the ToorCon infosec conference in San Diego.
I built, by hand, the first 25 Apple ][s, worked on the Lisa's
GUI. I invented the Trashcan Icon.I had spent the summer of 1979 working for the Fed, debugging
3-Mile Island (I'd been a physicist). Then I wrote a book about
it on a 300-baud modem terminal connected to an IBM mainframe
using a line-editor. I hit the wrong key one night and trashed
70K words. Hell, Lawrence of Arabia lost a handwritten ms for a
350k-word manuscript.When I went to work on the Lisa, I was determined that deleting a
file would be a two-step process. On some systems, the trashcan
bulges (defies physics); on others, the lid goes off (defies my
mother). In my version, a fly circled the trashcan. The focus
groups thought it was fuckin' awesome. But by turning off the
fly, the computer could be made to run twice as fast. They fired
me.
