Cringely's keynote at ToorCon

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.

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