[TUHS] Sytek (was Re: 8th Edition timeline)

On 3/30/2020 7:41 AM, Clem Cole wrote: Here's a story about Sytek (I hope I haven't told it before - I'm starting to forget who I've told stories to). In 1977/1978 I was an extremely junior engineeer at Ford Aerospace. I was in the group that was both acting as the main Unix promoter in Ford, and also was making a provably-secure version of Unix called KSOS. The group had a bunch of excellent senior people (e.g. John Nagle, Tom Berson, Ken Biba, Mike Pliner, Mike Padlipsky). This was my first real job in the software industry so I didn't know what to expect. After about 6 months I noticed that there were a lot of closed-door meetings going on. I thought this was normal. One day I was walking by an office when the door opened up and I was invited in. I didn't know if I had done something wrong and was about to be fired, or what. I turned out that I had nothing to worry about. What was happening was that some of the people in the group were going to leave Ford to start their own company. They needed some junior people also, and they asked me to join them. I gave it some thought but turned them down because I didn't want to live in Silicon Valley anymore, and wanted to return to Santa Barabara where I belonged. The company that they started was Sytek, which got the contract from IBM to create NetBIOS. They also did other networking work that has been mentioned in this thread. If I had gone to Sytex I would have been employe #8 with lots of stock options. I often wonder how my life would have been different if I had done this. I suspect many people on TUHS have similar stories about the ones that got away. In fact, this might be a good topic for a new thread. Cordially, Jon Forrest