The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of Novell. To understand Novell, we’ll go to BYU in 1980. As an honors grad in math and computer science, Drew Major might have been listening to the new wave tunes of Blondie or Deve who released Call Me and Whip it respectively that year. But it’s more likely he was playing with the Rubik’s Cube or Pac-Man, released that year or tuned in to find out Who Shot JR? On Dallas. He probably joined the rest of the world in mourning the loss of John Lennon who was murdered in 1980. He went to work at Eyring Research Institute (ERI) where he, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell decided to take some of their work from BYU and started working on the IPX and SPX network protocols and the NetWare operating system using the company name SuperSet Software. Meanwhile, George Canova, Darin Field, and Jack Davis had started a company called Novell a couple of years before, building microcomputers, or the equivalent of the PCs we use today. They weren’t doing so well and Novell Data Systems decided they might be able to sell more computers by hooking them up together - so they hired the SuperSet team to help. The team Superset had worked on ARPANET projects while at the Eyring Research Institute The bankers stepped in and Jack Davis left, then Canova - and Raymond Noorda stepped in as CEO in 1982. In 1983 they released Novell NetWare. NetWare had the first real Network Operating System called ShareNet, which was based on a license to a Unix kernel they bought. While initially based on the Xerox Network System developed at Xerox PARC, they created Internetwork Packet Exchange, or IPX, and Sequenced Packet Exchange, or SPX, creating standards that would become common in most businesses in the subsequent decades. They joined Novell in 1983 and Major later became Chief Scientist. The 1980s were good to Novell. They released Netware 2 in 1986, becoming independent of the hardware and more modular. Servers could be connected through ARCNET, Ethernet, and Token Ring. They added fault tolerance options to remap bad blocks, added RAID support, and used a key card inserted in the ISA bus to license the software. And they immediately started working on Netware 3, which wouldn’t be complete until 1990, with 3.11 setting the standard in network file sharing and when I first worked with Netware. Netware 3 was easier to install. It was 32-bit, allowed volumes up to a terabyte, and I remember this being cool at the time, you could add volume segments on the fly while the volume was mounted. Although growing the volume was always… in need of checking backups first. They didn’t worry a lot about the GUI. Dealers didn’t mind that. HP, DEC, and Data General all licensed OEM versions of the software. This was also my first experience with clustering, as NetWare SFT-III allowed a mirror an a different machine. All of this led to patents and the founding of new concepts that would, whether intentionally or accidentally, be copied by other vendors over the coming years. They grew, they sold hardware, like otherwise expensive ethernet cards, at cost to grab market share, and they had a lot of dealers who were loyal, in part due to great margins they had been earning but also because Netware wasn’t simple to run and so required support contracts with those dealers. By 1990, most businesses used Novell if they needed to network computers. And NetWare 3.x seemed to cement that. They worked with larger and larger customers, becoming the Enterprise standard. Once upon a time, no one ever got fired for buying Netware. But Microsoft had been growing into the powerhouse standard of the day. They opened discussions to merge with Novell but Ray Noorda, then CEO, soon discovered that Bill Gates was working behind his back, a common theme of the era. This is when Novell got aggressive, likely realizing Microsoft was about to eat their lunch. Novell then bought Digital Research in 1991, with a version of DOS called DR DOS, and working with Apple on a project to bring Novell to Mac OS. They bought Univel to get their own Unix for UnixWare, and wrote Novell Directory Services which would later become eDirectory to establish a directory services play. They bought WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, early Office-type tools. By the end of this brisk acquisition time, the company didn’t look like they did just a few years earlier. Microsoft had released Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server in 1993 as the hate-spat between Noorda and Gates intensified. Noorda supported the first FTC antitrust investigations against Microsoft. It didn’t work. Noorda was replaced by Robert Frankenberg in 1994. And then Windows 95 was released. Novell ended up selling Novell DOS to Caldera, handing over part of the Unix assets to Santa Cruz Operation, selling Integrated Systems, scrapping the Embedded Systems technology they’d been working on, and even selling WordPerfect and Quattro Pro too Corel. Windows of course supported Netware servers in addition to their own offering, having moved to NT 4 in 1996. NT 4 server would become the de facto standard in businesses. Frankenberg didn’t last long and Eric Schmidt was hired as CEO in 1997. NetWare 5 was released in 1998 and I can still remember building zap packages to remove IPX/SPX in favor of TCP/IP. But the company was alienating the channel by squeezing margin out of them while simultaneously losing the war in the small business then the larger businesses to Microsoft, who kept making Windows Server better, and by 1999 I was trading my CNA (or Certified Novell Administrator) out for my first MCSE. After seeing the turnaround at IBM, Novell bought a consulting firm called Cambridge Technology Partners in 2001, replacing Schmidt with their CEO, Jack Messmen - and moving their corporate headquarters to Massachusetts. Drew Major finally left that year. The advancements he’s overseen at Novell are legendary and resulted in technology research and patents that rival any other team in the industry. But the suits had a new idea. They pivoted to Linux, buying Ximian and SuSE in 2003, releasing Suse Linux Enterprise Server and then Novell Linux Desktop in 2004 and finally Open Enterprise Server in 2005. Does all of this seem like a rudderless ship? Yes, they wanted to pivot to Linux and compete with Microsoft, but they’d been through this before. Stop slapping yourself… Microsoft finally settled the competition by buying them off. They gave Novell $348 Million dollars in 2006 for “patent cooperation” and then spent $6M more on Novell products than Novell spent on theirs over the next 5 years (keep in mind that technology spats are multi-front wars). Novell was acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion dollars. Because Novell engineers had been creating so much amazing technology all those years, 882 patents from Novell went to CPTN Holdings, a consortium of companies that included Apple, EMC, Microsoft, and Oracle - this consortium the likely architect of the whole deal. SUSE was spun off, Attachmate laid off a lot of the workforce, Attachmate was bought, much word salad was said. You can’t go back in time and do things over. But if he could, I bet Noorda would go back in time and do the deal with Bill Gates instead of going to war. Think about that next time someone goes low. Don’t let your emotions get the best of you. You’re above that. This has been The History of Novell. Thank you for listening we hope you have a great day!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of the Domain Name System, or DNS for short. 

You know when you go to www.google.com. Imagine if you had to go to 172.217.4.196, or the IP address, instead. DNS is the service that resolves that name to that IP address. Let’s start this story back in 1966. The Beatles released Yellow Submarine. The Rolling Stones were all over the radio with Paint It Black. Indira Ghandi was elected the Prime Minister of India. US Planes were bombing Hanoi smack dab in the middle of the Vietnam War. The US and USSR agreed not to fill space with nukes. The Beach Boys had just released Good Vibrations. I certainly feel the good vibrations when I think that quietly, when no one was watching, the US created ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. 

ARPANET would evolve into the Internet as we know it today. As with many great innovations in technology, it took awhile to catch on. Late into the 1980s there were just over 300 computers on the Internet, most doing research. Sure, there were 254 to the 4th addresses that were just waiting to be used, but the idea of keeping the address of all 300 computers you wanted to talk to seemed cumbersome and it was slow to take hold. To get an address in the 70s you needed to contact Jon Postel at USC to get put on what was called the Assigned Numbers List. You could call or mail them. 

Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI) had a file they hosted called hosts.txt. This file mapped the name of one of these hosts on the network to a IP address, making a table of computer names and then IP addresses those matched with, or a table of hosts. Many computers still maintain this file. Elizabeth Feinler maintained this directory of systems. She would go on to lead and operate the Network Information Center, or NIC for short, for ARPANET and see the evolution to the Defense Data Network, or DDN for short and later the Internet. She wrote what was then called the Resource Handbook. 

By 1982, Ken Harrenstien and Vic White on Feinler’s group at Stanford created a service called Whois, defined in RFC 812, which was an online directory. You can still use the whois command on Windows, Mac and Linux computers today.

But by 1982 it was clear that the host table was getter’s slower and harder to maintain as more systems were coming online. This meant more people to do that maintenance. But Postel from USC then started reviewing proposals for maintaining this thing, a task he handed off to Paul Mockapetris. That’s when Mockapetris did something that he wasn’t asked to do and created DNS. 

Mockapetris had been working on some ideas for filesystems at the time and jumped at the chance to apply those ideas to something different. So Jon Postel and Zaw-Sing Su helped him complete his thoughts which were published by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, in in RFC 882 for the concepts and facilities and RFC 883 for the implementation and specification in November 1983. You can google those and read them today. And most of it is still used. 

Here, he introduced the concept that a NAME of a TYPE points to an address, or RDATA and lives for a specified amount of time, or TTL short for Time To Live. He also mapped IP addresses to names in the specifications, creating PTR records. All names had a TLD or Top Level Domain name of ARPANET. 

Designing a protocol isn’t the same thing as implementing a protocol. In 1984, four students from the University of California Berkeley wrote the first version of BIND, short for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, for BSD 4.3. Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou using funds from a DARPA grant. In 1988 Paul Vixie from Digital Equipment Corporation then gave it a little update and maintained it until he founded the Internet Systems Consortium to take it over. 

BIND is still the primary distribution of DNS, although there are other distributions now. For example, Microsoft added DNS in 1995 with the release of NT 3.51. 

But back to the 80s real quick. In 1985, came the introduction of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .com TLDs. Remember John Postel from USC? He and Joyce K Reynolds started an organization called IANA to assign numbers for use on the Internet. DNS Servers are hierarchical, and so there’s a set of root DNS servers, with a root zone controlled by the US Dept of Commerce. 10 of the 13 original servers were operated in the US and 3 outside, each assigned a letter of A through M. You can still ping a.root-servers.net. These host the root zone database from IANA and handle the hierarchy of the TLD they’re authoritative for with additional servers hosted for .gov, .com, etc. There are now over 1,000 TLDs!

And remember how USC was handling the addressing (which became IANA) and Stanford was handling the names? Well Feinler’s group turned over naming to Network Solutions in 1991 and they handled it until 1998 when Postel died and ICANN was formed. ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, merged the responsibilities under one umbrella. Each region of the world is allowed to manage their own IP addresses, and so ARIN was formed in 1998 to manage the distribution of IP addresses in America. 

The collaboration between Feinler and Postel fostered the innovations that would follow. They also didn’t try to take everything on. Postel instigated TCP/IP and DNS. Postel co-wrote many of the RFCs that define the Internet and DNS to this day. And Feinler’s showed great leadership in administering how much of that was implemented. One can only aspire to find such a collaboration in life and to do so with results like the Internet, worth tens of trillions of dollars, but more importantly has reshaped the world, disrupted practically every industry and touched the lives of nearly every human on earth. 

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the History Of Computing Podcast. We hope you had an easy time finding thehistoryofcomputing.libsyn.com thanks to the hard work of all those who came before us. 

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC. 

DEC was based in Maynard Massachusetts and a major player in the computer industry from the 1950s through the 1990s. They made computers, software, and things that hooked into computers. My first real computer was a DEC Alpha. And it would be over a decade before I used 64-bit technology again. 

DEC was started in 1957 by Ken Olsen, Stan Olsen, and Harlan Anderson of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory using a $70,000 loan because they could sell smaller machines than the big mainframes to users where output and realtime operation were more important than performance. Technology was changing so fast and there were so few standards for computers that investors avoided them. So they decided to first ship modules, or transistors that could be put on circuit boards and then ship systems. They were given funds and spent the next few years building a module business to fund a computer business. 

IBM was always focused on big customers. In the 1960s, this gave little DEC the chance to hit the smaller customers with their PDP-8, the first successful mini-computer, at the time setting customers back around $18,500. The “Straight-8” as it was known was designed by Edson de Castro and was about the size of a refrigerator, weighing in at 250 pounds. This was the first time a company could get a computer for less than $20k and DEC sold over 300,000 of them! The next year came the 8/s. No, that’s not an iPhone model. It only set customers back $10k. Just imagine the sales team shows up at your company talking about the discrete transistors, the transistor-transistor logic, or TTL. And it wouldn’t bankrupt you like that IBM. The sales pitch writes itself. Sign me up!

What really sold these though, was the value engineering. They were simpler. Sure, programming was a little harder, and more code. Sure, sometimes that caused the code to overflow the memory. But at the cost savings, you could hire another programmer! The rise of the compiler kinda’ made that a negligible issue anyway. The CPU had only four 12-bit registers. But it could run programs using the FORTRAN compiler anruntime, or DECs FOCAL interpreter. Or later you could use PAL-III Assembly, BASIC, or DIBOL. 

DEC also did a good job of energizing their user base. The Digital Equipment Corporation User Society was created in 1961 by Edward Fredkin and was subsidized by DEC. Here users could trade source code and documentation, with two DECUS US symposia per year - and there people would actually trade code and later tapes. It would later merge with HP and other groups during the merger era and is alive today as the Connect User Group Community, with over 70,000 members! It is still independent today. The User Society was an important aspect of the rise of DEC and of the development of technology and software for mini computers. The feeling of togetherness through mutual support helped keep the costs of vendor support down while also making people feel like they weren’t alone in the world. It’s also important as part of the history of free software, something we’ll talk about in more depth in a later episode.

The PDP continued to gain in popularity until 1977, when the VAX came along. The VAX brought with it the virtual address extension for which it derives its name. This was really the advent of on-demand paged virtual memory, although that had been initially adopted by Prime Computer without the same level of commercial success. This was a true 32-bit CISC, or Complex Instruction Set Computer. It ran Digital’s VAX/VMS which would later be called OpenVMS; although some would run BSD on it, which maintained VAX support until 2016. This thing set standards in 1970s computing. You know Millions of instructions per second (MIPS) - the VAX was the benchmark. The performance was on par with the IBM System/360.

The team at DEC was iterating through chips at a fast rate. Over the next 20 years, they got so good that Soviet engineers bought them just to try and reverse engineer the chips. In fact it got to the point that “when you care enough to steal the very best” was etched into microprocessor die. DEC sold another 400,000 of the VAX. They must have felt on top of the world when they took the #2 computer company spot! DEC was the first computer company with a website, launching dec.com in 85.

The DEC Western Research Library started to build a RISC chip called Titan in 1982, meant to run Unix. Alan Kotok and Dave Orbits started designing a 64-bit chip to run VMS (maybe to run Spacewar faster). Two other chips, HR-32 and CASCADE were being designed in 1984. And Prism began in 1985. With all of these independent development efforts, turf wars stifled the ability to execute. By 1988, DEC canceled the projects. By then Sun had SPARC, and were nipping at the heels. 

Something else was happening. DEC made mini-computers. Those were smaller than mainframes. But microcomputers showed up in the 1980s with he first IBM PC shipping in 1981. But by the early 90s they too were 32-bit. DEC was under the gun to bring the world into 64-bit. The DEC Alpha started at about the same time (if not in the same meeting as the termination of the Prism project. It would not be released in 1992 and while it was a great advancement in computing, it came into a red ocean where there were vendors competing to set the standard of the computers used at every level of the industry. The old chips could have been used to build microcomputers and at a time when IBM was coming into the business market for desktop computers and starting to own it, DEC stayed true to the microcomputer business. 

Meanwhile Sun was growing, open architectures were becoming standard (if not standardized), and IBM was still a formidable beast in the larger markets. The hubris. Yes, DEC had some of the best tech in the market. But they’d gotten away from value engineering the solutions customers wanted. 

Sales slumped through the 1990s. Linus Torvalds wrote Linux on a DEC Alpha in the mid-late 90s. Alpha chips would work with Windows and other operating systems but were very expensive. X86 chips from Intel were quickly starting to own the market (creating the term Wintel). Suddenly DEC wasn’t an industry leader. When you’ve been through those demoralizing times at a company, it’s hard to get out of a rut. Talent leaves. Great minds in computing like Radia Perlman. She invented Spanning Tree Protocol. Did I mention that DEC played a key role in making ethernet viable. They also invented clustering. More brain drain - Jim Grey (he probably invented half the database terms you use), Leslie Lamport (who wrote LaTex), Alan Eustace (who would go on to become the Senior VP of Engineering and then Senior VP of Knowledge at Google), Ike Nassi (chief scientist at SAP), Jim Keller (who designed Apple’s A4/A5), and many, many others. 

Fingers point in every direction. Leadership comes and goes. By 2002 it was clear that a change was needed. DEC was acquired by Compaq in the largest merger in the computer industry at the time, in part to get the overseas markets that DEC was well entrenched in. Compaq started to cave from too many mergers that couldn’t be wrangled into an actual vision. So they later merged with HP in 2002, continuing to make PDP, VAX, and Alpha servers. The compiler division was sold to Intel, and DEC goes down as a footnote in history. 

Innovative ideas are critical to a company surviving after the buying tornadoes. Strong leaders must reign in territorialism, turf wars and infighting in favor of actually shipping products. And those should be products customers want. Maybe even products you value engineered to meet them where they’re at as DEC did in their early days. 

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is not about Fear, Uncertainty, and Death. Instead it’s about viruses. As with many innovations in technology, early technology had security vulnerabilities. In fact, we still have them! 

Today there are a lot of types of malware. And most gets to devices over the Internet. But we had viruses long before the Internet; in fact we’ve had them about as long as we’ve had computers. The concept of the virus came from a paper published by a Hungarian Scientist in 1949 called “Theory of Self-reproducing automata.” The first virus though, didn’t come until 1971 with Creeper. It copied between DEC PDP-10s running TENEX over the ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet. It didn’t hurt anything; it just output a simple little message to the teletype that read “I’m the creeper: catch me if you can.” The original was written by Bob Thomas but it was made self-replicating by Ray Tomlinson thus basically making him the father of the worm. He also happened to make the first email program. You know that @ symbol in an email address? He put it there. Luckily he didn’t make that self replicating as well. 

The first antivirus software was written to, um, to catch Creeper. Also written by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 when his little haxie had gotten a bit out of control. This makes him the father of the worm, creator of the anti-virus industry, and the creator of phishing, I mean, um email. My kinda’ guy. 

The first virus to rear its head in the wild came in 1981 when a 15 year old Mt Lebanon high school kid named Rich Skrenta wrote Elk Cloner. Rich went on to work at Sun, AOL, create Newhoo (now called the Open Directory Project) and found Blekko, which became part of IBM Watson in 2015 (probably because of the syntax used in searching and indexes). But back to 1982. Because Blade Runner, E.T., and Tron were born that year. As was Elk Cloner, which that snotty little kid Rich wrote to mess with gamers. The virus would attach itself to a game running on version 3.3 of the Apple DOS operating system (the very idea of DOS on an Apple today is kinda’ funny) and then activate on the 50th play of the game, displaying a poem about the virus on the screen. Let’s look at the Whitman-esque prose:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks

It will infiltrate your chips

Yes, it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue

It will modify RAM too

Send in the Cloner!

This wasn’t just a virus. It was a boot sector virus! I guess Apple’s MASTER CREATE would then be the first anti-virus software. Maybe Rich sent one to Kurt Angle, Orin Hatch, Daya, or Mark Cuban. All from Mt Lebanon. Early viruses were mostly targeted at games and bulletin board services. Fred Cohen coined the term Computer Virus the next year, in 1983. 

The first PC virus came also to DOS, but this time to MS-DOS in 1986. Ashar, later called Brain, was the brainchild of Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who supposedly were only trying to protect their own medical software from piracy. Back then people didn’t pay for a lot of the software they used. As organizations have gotten bigger and software has gotten cheaper the pirate mentality seems to have subsided a bit. For nearly a decade there was a slow roll of viruses here and there, mainly spread by being promiscuous with how floppy disks were shared. A lot of the viruses were boot sector viruses and a lot of them weren’t terribly harmful. After all, if they erased the computer they couldn’t spread very far. The virus started “Welcome to the Dungeon.” The following year, the poor Alvi brothers realized if they’d of said Welcome to the Jungle they’d be rich, but Axl Rose beat them to it. The brothers still run a company called Brain Telecommunication Limited in Pakistan. We’ll talk about zombies later. There’s an obvious connection here. 

Brain was able to spread because people started sharing software over bulletin board systems. This was when trojan horses, or malware masked as a juicy piece of software, or embedded into other software started to become prolific. The Rootkits, or toolkits that an attacker could use to orchestrate various events on the targeted computer, began to get a bit more sophisticated, doing things like phoning home for further instructions. By the late 80s and early 90s, more and more valuable data was being stored on computers and so lax security created an easy way to get access to that data. Viruses started to go from just being pranks by kids to being something more. 

A few people saw the writing on the wall. Bernd Fix wrote a tool to remove a virus in 1987. Andreas Luning and Kai Figge released The Ultimate Virus Killer, an Antivirus for the Atari ST. NOD antivirus was released as well as Flushot Plus and Anti4us. But the one that is still a major force in the IT industry is McAfee VirusScan, founded by a former NASA programmer named John Mcafee. McAfee resigned in 1994. His personal life is… how do I put this… special. He currently claims to be on the run from the CIA. I’m not sure the CIA is aware of this. 

Other people saw the writing on the wall as well, but went… A different direction. This was when the first file-based viruses started to show up. They infected ini files, .exe files, and .com files. Places like command.com were ripe targets because operating systems didn’t sign things yet. Jerusalem and Vienna were released in 1987. Maybe because he listened to too much Bad Medicine from Bon Jovi, but Robert Morris wrote the ARPANET worm in 1988, which reproduced until it filled up the memory of computers and shut down 6,000 devices. 1988 also saw Friday the 13th delete files and causing real damage. And Cascade came this year, the first known virus to be encrypted. The code and wittiness of the viruses were evolving. 

In 1989 we got the AIDS Trojan. This altered autoexec.bat and counted how many times a computer would boot. At 90 boots, the virus would hide the dos directories and encrypt the names of files on C:/ making the computer unusable unless the infected computer owner sent $189 a PO Box in Panama. This was the first known instance of ransomeware. 1990 gave us the first polymorphic virus. 

Symantec released Norton Antivirus in 1991, the same year the first polymorphic virus was found in the wild, called Tequila. Polymorphic viruses change as they spread, making it difficult to find by signature based antivirus detection products. In 1992 we got Michelangelo which John Mcafee said would hit 5 million computers. At this point, there were 1,000 viruses. 1993 Brough us Leandro and Freddy Krueger, 94 gave us OneHalf, and 1995 gave us Concept, the first known macro virus. 1994 gave us the first hoax with “Good Times” - I think of that email sometimes when I get messages of petitions online for things that will never happen. 

But then came the Internet as we know it today. By the mid 90s, Microsoft had become a force to be reckoned with. This provided two opportunities. The first was the ability for someone writing a virus to have a large attack surface. All of the computers on the Internet were easy targets, especially before network address translation started to somewhat hide devices behind gateways and firewalls. The second was that a lot of those computers were running the same software. This meant if you wrote a tool for Windows that you could get your tool on a lot of computers. One other thing was happening: Macros. Macros are automations that can run inside Microsoft Office that could be used to gain access to lower level functions in the early days. Macro viruses often infected the .dot or template used when creating new Word documents, and so all new word documents would then be infected. As those documents were distributed over email, websites, or good old fashioned disks, they spread. 

An ecosystem with a homogenous distribution of the population that isn’t inoculated against an antigen is a ripe hunting ground for a large-scale infection. And so the table was set. It’s March, 1999. David Smith of Aberdeen Township was probably listening to Livin’ La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin. Or Smash Mouth. Or Sugar Ray. Or watching the genie In A Bottle video from Christina Aguilera. Because MTV still had some music videos. Actually, David probably went to see American Pie, The Blair Witch Project, Fight Club, or the Matrix then came home and thought he needed more excitement in his life. So he started writing a little prank. This prank was called Melissa. 

As we’ve discussed, there had been viruses before, but nothing like Melissa. The 100,000 computers that were infected and 1 billion dollars of damage created doesn’t seem like anything by todays standards, but consider this: about 100,000,000 PCs were being sold per year at that point, so that’s roughly one tenth a percent of the units shipped. Melissa would email itself to the first 50 people in an Outlook database, a really witty approach for the time. Suddenly, it was everywhere; and it lasted for years. Because Office was being used on Windows and Mac, the Mac could be a carrier for the macro virus although the payload would do nothing. Most computer users by this time knew they “could” get a virus, but this was the first big outbreak and a wakeup call.  Think about this, if there are supposed to be 24 billion computing devices by 2020, then next year this would mean a similar infection would hit 240 million devices. That would mean it hits ever person in Germany, the UK, France, and the Nordic countries. David was fined $5,000 and spent 20 months in jail. He now helps hunt down creators of malware. 

Macroviruses continued to increase over the coming years and while there aren’t too many still running rampant, you do still see them today. Happy also showed up in 1999 but it just made fireworks. Who doesn’t like fireworks? At this point, the wittiness of the viruses, well, it was mostly in the name and not the vulnerability. ILOVEYOU from 2000 was a vbscript virus and Pikachu from that year tried to get kids to let it infect computers. 

2001 gave us Code Red, which attacked IIS and caused an estimated $2 Billion in damages. Other worms were Anna Kournikova, Sircam, Nimda and Klez. The pace of new viruses was going, as was how many devices were infected. Melissa started to look like a drop in the bucket. And Norton and other antivirus vendors had to release special tools, just to remove a specific virus.  Attack of the Clones was released in 2002 - not about the clones of Melissa that started wreaking havoc on businesses. Mylife was one of these. We also got Beast, a trojan that deployed a remote administration tool. I’m not sure if that’s what evolved into SCCM yet. 

In 2003 we got simile, the first metamorphic virus, blaster, sobbing, seem, graybeard, bolgimo, agobot, and then slammer, which was the fastest to spread at that time. This one hit a buffer overflow bug in Microsoft SQL and hit 75,000 devices in 10 minutes. 2004 gave us Bagle, which had its own email server, Sasser, and MyDoom, which dropped speeds for the whole internet by about 10 percent. MyDoom convinced users to open a nasty email attachment that said “Andy, I’m just doing my job, nothing personal.” You have to wonder what that meant… The witty worm wasn’t super-witty, but Netsky, Vundo, bifrost, Santy, and Caribe were.

2005 gave us commwarrior (sent through texts), zotob, Zlob, but the best was that a rootlet ended up making it on CDs from Sony. 2006 brought us Starbucks, Nyxem, Leap, Brotox, stration. 2007 gave us Zeus and Storm. But then another biggee in 2008. Sure, Torpig, Mocmex, Koobface, Bohmini, and Rustock were a thing. But Conficker was a dictionary attack to get at admin passwords creating a botnet that was millions of computers strong and spread over hundreds of countries. At this point a lot of these were used to perform distributed denial of services attacks or to just send massive, and I mean massive amounts of spam. 

Since then we’ve had student and duqu, Flame, Daspy, ZeroAccess. But in 2013 we got CryptoLocker which made us much more concerned about ransomware. At this point, entire cities can be taken down with targeted, very specific attacks. The money made from Wannacry in 2017 might or might not have helped developed North Korean missiles. And this is how these things have evolved. First they were kids, then criminal organizations saw an opening. I remember seeing those types trying to recruit young hax0rs at DefCon 12. Then governments got into it and we get into our modern era of “cyberwarfare.” Today, people like Park Jin Hyok are responsible for targeted attacks causing billions of dollars worth of damage. 

Mobile attacks were up 54% year over year, another reason vendors like Apple and Google keep evolving the security features of their operating systems. Criminals will steal an estimated 33 billion records in 2023. 60 million Americans have been impacted by identity theft. India, Japan, and Taiwan are big targets as well. The cost of each breach at a company is now estimated to have an average cost of nearly 8 million dollars in the United States, making this about financial warfare. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Wars in cyberspace between nation states, most of us don’t really care about that. What we care about is keeping malware off our computers so the computers don’t run like crap and so unsavory characters don’t steal our crap. Luckily, that part has gotten easier than ever. 

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re better prepared for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to talk about Apple’s Mobile Device Management; what we now call Mobility. To kick things off we’ll take you back to the year 2001. 2001 was the year Nickelback released How You Remind Me. Destiny’s Child was still together. Dave Matthews released The Space Between, and the first real Mobile Device Management was born.

The first real mobile management solution to gain traction was SOTI, which launched in 2001 with an eye towards leveraging automation using mobile devices and got into device management when those options started to emerge. More and more IT departments wanted “Over The Air” management, or OTA management. So Airwatch, founded by John Marshall in 2003 as Wandering Wi-Fi, was the first truly multi-platform device management solution. 

This time, rather than try to work within the confines of corporate dogma surrounding how the business of IT was done, Apple would start to go their own way. This was made possible by the increasing dominance of the iPhone accessing Exchange servers and the fact that suddenly employees were showing up with these things and using them at work. Suddenly, companies needed to manage the OS that ships on iPhone, iOS.

The original iPhone was released in 2007 and iOS management initially occurred manually through iTunes. You could drag an app onto a device and the app would be sent to the phone over the USB cable, and some settings were exposed to iTunes. Back then you had to register an iOS device with Apple by plugging it into iTunes in order to use it. You could also backup and restore a device using iTunes, which came with some specific challenges, such as the account you used to buy an app would follow the “image” to the new device. Additionally, if the backup was encrypted or not determined what was stored in the backup and some information might have to be re-entered. 

This led to profiles. Profiles were created using a tool called the iPhone Configuration Utility, released in 2008. A Profile is a small xml file that applies a given configuration onto an iOS device. This was necessary because developers wanted to control what could be done on iOS devices. One of those configurations was the ability to install an app over the air that was hosted on an organization’s own web server, provided the .ipa mime type on the web server was defined. This basically mirrored what the App Store was doing and paved the way for internal app stores and profiles that were hosted on servers, both of which could be installed using in-house app stores. During that same time-frame, Jamf, Afaria (by SAP), and MobileIron, founded by Ajay Mishra and Suresh Batchu, in the previous year, were also building similar OTA profile delivery techniques leveraging the original MDM spec. 

At this point, most OTA management tasks (such as issuing a remote wipe or disabling basic features of devices) were done using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). You could control basic password policies as well as some rudimentary devices settings such as disabling the camera. With this in mind, Apple began to write the initial MDM specifications, paving the way for an entire IT industry segment to be born.

This was the landscape when the first edition of the Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide was released by Apress in 2010. Additional MDM solutions were soon to follow. TARMAC released MDM for iOS devices using a server running on a Mac in late 2011. AppBlade and Excitor was also released in 2011. Over the course of the next 8  years, MDM became one part of a number of other lovely acronyms:

• • Mobile Content Management, or MCM, is really just a Content Management System that sends content and services to mobile devices. 
• • Mobile Identity Management, or MIM, refers to where the SIM card of one’s mobile phone works as an identity
• • Enterprise Mobility Management, or EMM, gets more into managing apps and content that gets put on devices 
• • Unified Endpoint Management, or UEM, brings traditional laptops and then desktops into the management feature, merging EMM with traditional device management. 

X-Men First Class came in 2011, although the mail server by the same name was all but gone by then. This was a pivotal year for Apple device management and iOS in the enterprise, as Blackberry announced that  you would be able to manage Apple devices with their Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), which had been created in 1999 to manage Blackberry devices. This legitimized using Apple’s mobile devices in enterprise environments and also an opportunistic play for licensing due to the fact that the devices were becoming such a mainstay in the enterprise and a shift towards UEM that would continue until 2018, when BlackBerry Enterprise Server was renamed to BlackBerry Unified Endpoint Manager. 

An explosion of MDM providers has occurred since Blackberry added Apple to their platform, to keep up with the demand of the market. Filewave and LANrev added MDM to their products in 2011 with new iOS vendors NotifyMDM and SOTI entering into the Apple Device Management family. Then Amtel MDM, AppTrack, Codeproof, Kony, ManageEngine (a part of Zoho corporation), OurPact, Parallels, PUSHMANAGER, ProMDM, SimpleMDM, Sophos Mobile Control, and Tangoe MDM were released in 2012. MaaS360 was acquired by IBM in 2013, the same year auralis, CREA MDM, FancyFon Mobility Center (FAMOC), Hexnode, Lightspeed, and Relution were released, and when Endpoint Protector added MDM to their security products. Citrix also acquired Zenprise in 2013 to introduce XenMobile. Jamf Now (originally called Bushel), Miradore, Mosyle, and ZuluDesk (acquired by Jamf in 2018 and being rebranded to Jamf School) were released in 2014, which also saw VMware acquired Airwatch for $1.54 billion dollars and Good Technology acquire BoxTone, beefing up their Apple device management capabilities. 2014 also saw Microsoft extend Intune to manage iOS devices. 

Things quieted down a bit but in 2016 after Apple started publishing the MDM specifications guide freely, an open source MDM called MicroMDM was initially committed to github, making it easier for organizations to build their own fork or implement that should they choose. Others crept on the scene as well during those year, such as Absolute Manage MDM, AppTech 360, Avalanche Mobility Center, Baramundi, Circle by Disney, Cisco Meraki (by way of the Cisco acquisition of Meraki), Kaseya EMM, SureMDM, Trend Micro Mobile Security, and many others. Each one of these tools has a great place in the space. Some focus on specific horizontal or vertical markets, while others focus on integrating with other products in a company’s portfolio. With such a wide field of MDM solutions, Apple has been able to focus efforts on building a great API and not spend a ton of time on building out many of the specific features needed for every possible market. 

A number of family or residential MDM providers have also sprung up, including Circle by Disney. The one market Apple has not made MDM available to has been the home. Apple has a number of tools they believe help families manage devices. It’s been touted as a violation of user privacy to deploy MDM for home environments and in fact is a violation of the APNs terms of service. Whether we believe this to be valid or not, OurPact, initially launched in 2012, was shut down in 2019 along with a number of other screen time apps for leveraging MDM to control various functions of iOS devices.

The MDM spec has evolved over the years. iOS 4 in 2010 saw the first MDM and Volume Purchase Program. iOS 5 in 2011 added over the air os updates, Siri management, and provided administrators with the ability to disable the backups of iOS devices to Apple’s iCloud cloud service. iOS 6 saw the addition of APIs for 3rd party developers, managed open in for siloing content, device supervision (which gave us the ability to take additional management tasks on devices we could prove the ownership of) and MDM for the Mac. That MDM for the Mac piece will become increasingly important over the next 7 years.

Daft Punk weren’t the only ones that got lucky in 2013. That year brought us iOS 7 for macOS 10.9. The spec was updated to manage TouchID settings, give an Activation Lock bypass key for supervised devices, and the future of per-app settings management came with Managed App Config. 2014 gave us iOS 8 and MacOS 10.10. Here, we got the Device Enrollment Program which allows devices to enroll into an MDM server automatically at setup time and and Apple Configurator enrollments, allowing us to get closer to zero touch installations again. 2015 brought with it The Force Awakens and awakened Device-based VPP in iOS 9 and macOS 2015, which finally allowed administrators to push apps to devices without needing an AppleID, the B2B App Store which allowed for pushing out apps that weren’t available on the standard app store, supervision reminders which are important as it was the first inkling of prompting users in an effort to provide transparency around what was happening on their devices, the ability to enable and disable apps, the ability to manage the home screen, and kiosk mode, or the ability to lock an app into the foreground on a device. 

The pace continued to seem frenzied in 2016, when Justin Timberlake couldn’t stop the feeling that he got when in iOS 10 and macOS 10.12 he could suddenly restart and shut down a device through MDM commands. And enable Lost Mode. This was also the year Apple shipped their first operating system in a long, long time when APFS was deployed to iOS. Millions of devices got a new filesystem during that upgrade, which went oh so smoothly due to the hard work of everyone involved. iOS 11 with macOS 10.13 saw less management being done on the Mac but a frenzy of updates bringing us Classroom 2 management, FaceID management, AirPrint management, the ability to add devices to DEP through Apple Configurator, QR code based enrollment, User Approved Kernel Extension Loading for Mac and User Approved MDM enrollment for Mac. These last two meant that users needed to explicitly accept enrollment and drivers loading, again trading ease of use out for transparency.  Many would consider this a fair trade. Many administrators are frustrated by it. I kinda’ think it is what it is.

2018 saw the Volume Purchase Program, the portal to build an Apple Push Notification certificate, and the DEP portal collapsed into Apple Management Programs, with the arrival of Apple Business Manager. We also got our first salvo of Identity providers with oauth for managed Exchange Accounts, we got the ability to manage tvOS apps on devices and we could start restricting password auto-fill. And this year, we get new content caching configuration options, bluetooth management, autonomous single app mode, os update deferrals, and the automatic renewal of Active Directory Certificates. This year we also get a new enrollment type which uses a Managed Apple ID and then separate encrypted volumes for data storage. 

What’s so special about Apple’s MDM push? Well, for starters, they took all that legacy IT industry dogma from the past 30 years and decided to do something different. Or did they? The initial MDM options looked a lot like At Ease, a tool from the 1980s. And I mean some of the buttons say the same thing they said on the screens for Newton management. The big difference here is that Push Notifications needed to be added as you couldn’t connect to a socket on a device running on your local network. Because most of the iPhones weren’t on that network. But the philosophy of managing only what you have to to make the lives of your coworkers better means pushing settings, not locking users from changing their background. Or initially it meant that at least. 

The other thing that is so striking is that this was the largest and fastest adoption of enterprise technology I’ve seen. Sometimes the people who have survived this era tend to get a bit grumpy because the cheese is moved… EVERY YEAR! But keep in mind that Apple has sold 1.4 billion iPhones as have 423 million iPads, and don’t forget a couple hundred million Macs. That’s over 2 billion devices we’ve had to learn to cope with. Granted, not all of them are in the enterprise. But imagine this: that’s more than the entire population of China, the US, and Indonesia. How many people in those three out of the top 5 populated countries in the world go to work every day. And how many go to school. It’s been a monumental and rapid upheaval of the IT world order. And it’s been fun to be a part of!