Original OSNews Interviews Archive

Interview with Ray Tomlinson on Creeper/Reaper

It's been several weeks since Ray Tomlinson, best known for the invention of email, passed on. Email, however, represents only a very small portion of his work and contributions.

While writing a research paper on possible new methods to reduce and eradicate malware, I came across a bit of intriguing history whose available details did not satisfy my curiosity, and I needed to know more than what the internet had to offer. The event in question was the creation of Creeper, a piece of software created in 1971 by Bob Thomas that, according to most sources, is the world's first computer virus. There hasn't been a lot of information available on the internet regarding Creeper except that it was created to "infect" computers running the TENEX operating system on ARPAnet. It would cause the machine to print "I'M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN." Then Ray Tomlinson created Reaper whose sole purpose was to seek out and remove Creeper from the machines it had "infected".

I wanted to know more, though. Why was Creeper created in the first place? Did it cause problems? Was it an annoyance to those managing the machines it affected? Should it really be considered the first virus (technically worm, if that)? In late 2014 I ended up finding Ray Tomlinson on LinkedIn of all places and asked him if I could ask a few questions about Creeper and Reaper. He very kindly obliged.

Interview With Former Mozilla Exec Behind H5OS

A Hong Kong-based startup run by former Mozilla President Li Gong aims to take on Android with its new Web-based operating system, H5OS. Similar to the Firefox operating system from Mozilla, H50S is based on HTML5, a website development language that tries to give Web apps the same capabilities as so-called native applications that are downloaded to a device like the iPhone. More on H5OS here.

Interview With Baremetal OS’ Ian Seyler

OSNews sat down with Ian Seyler, the Founder and Lead Programmer at Return Infinity, the maker and sponsor of Baremetal OS, a 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers written entirely in Assembly. Editor's note: We'd love to do similar interviews with the people behind other alternative or hobby OS projects. If there's a project that you'd like to learn more about, let us know.

Interview: Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan on the Google Lawsuit

We've covered the lawsuit between Skyhook and Google in quite some detail already, but today we have something very interesting that sheds a lot of new light on the case: an interview with Skyhook's CEO and founder, Ted Morgan, about the lawsuit. While Morgan obviously couldn't talk about everything, he explains a few things and gives some new information, as well. Read on for Skyhook's side of the story.

Timothy Miller, Michael Dexter: OGD1s Almost Here

It's been a while since any of us have seen head or tail of the Open Graphics Project, but they haven't been just sitting around twiddling thumbs. Enjoy an in-depth interview between OSNews and Timothy Miller, the founder of the Open Graphics Project and the main man behind the drive that keeps it going, and Michael Dexter, Program Director at Linux Fund and a key player in Linux Fund's partnership with the OGP. Though it's been some time since there has been much public action, much of the work that the OGP has been putting into the OGD1 is finally coming to fruition.

Arch Linux Team

A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin's responses but answers from various individuals from the team.

OSNews Collaborative Interview Project

A few weeks ago, we asked you for ideas on interesting interview subjects. You had a lot of great ideas, and we started contacting people. We'll probably be working through that list for many months. We've decided to start with three interviews: Timothy Normand Miller from OGP, Michael Dexter at Linux Fund and the Arch Linux Team. We've created a "conversation" for each interview subject over at our conversations area. For the next few days, we're going to collect interview questions in the comments of those conversations.

Who Should We Interview?

In the past, OSNews' interview volume was quite a bit higher than it has been lately. I had the pleasure of having lunch with Eugenia and her husband last week, and she mentioned that we haven't done as many interviews, and that in the past they were always very popular. So I decided that I'm going to make it a personal priority to publish more interviews. I'd like to crowdsource the idea, and ask the OSNews community who they'd like to see us interview. Please let us know in the comments of this story who you'd like us to talk to, and what specific questions you'd like us to ask. Shoot for the moon. It's not as hard to get an email-based interview as you might think. Obviously OS-world luminaries will always be a priority, but feel free to recommend people from the larger tech community, or even geek-oriented popular culture.

Interview: Plamen Dragozov Re: Cross-Platform at PopCap

We are glad to present an exclusive interview with Plamen Dragozov--Director of Engineering at PopCap's mobile studio in Dublin, Ireland. "OSNews prides itself on (trying to) cover the diversity of operating systems, and so whilst we rarely cover games, we have approached you to discuss not so much the games themselves, as the technical challenges you go through bringing your games to a wide range of platforms". Read More for the full scoop.

Lunascape 5: World’s First Hybrid Engine Browser

Lunascape5 Genesis is a feature rich browser that brings the best of everything in the browser world. It is the world's first triple engine browser that gives users the freedom to choose between Trident (IE engine), Gecko or Webkit. The beta version of the browser was released today and it is available for download from their official website. In addition to offering three different rendering engines, the company blog announced that Lunascape5 has emerged as a winner in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark outperforming IE8 (alpha), FF3.1 (beta), Google Chrome and Opera 10 (alpha). We also have a short interview with the CEO of Lunascape Inc, Mr. Hidekazu Kondo.

Interview: Nicki Clyne of Battlestar Galactica

Even though it's not new to OSNews, it is a rare occurrence: an interview with an actress. Today, we have an interview with Nicki Clyne, the Canadian-born actress who portrays Cally Henderson in the popular and critically-acclaimed TV series "Battlestar Galactica". She talks about what it's like to be part of the BSG family, her role as Cally, but also about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the series. Be warned that this interview contains spoilers; you can skip straight to page 3 to avoid them.

Interview: Kevin Musick, BeServed; Haiku Code Drive 2008

BeOS (and Haiku) has a very powerful filesystem, thanks mostly to its extensive use of attributes and live queries to search through these attributes. In order to access these powerful features over a network, you need a network file system that also supports attributes and queries - cue BeServed, Kevin Musick's network file system. A few weeks ago, the code to BeServed was donated to the Haiku project as open source under a MIT license, so HaikuNews and OSNews decided to interview Kevin Musick together. In addition, Haiku launched the Haiku Code Drive 2008.