Me: Hi, my name is Jason, and I'm a Unix guy.

Crowd: HI, JASON!

Me: I started using Unix a long time ago, more than 20 years now. I started out real easy, real slow; Unix version 7 on a PDP-11. But the next year, there was some new hot stuff on the street - they called it BSD, and most folks had a VAX to use it, so that's what I stepped up to. Did some playing around with an early precursor, version 6; a Unix kernel so small one person could actually hold the entire thing in his or her head.

Most people experiment with that sort of thing during their University days, then grow out of it. Not me. I loved it so much, I got into the business. I went to work at Hewlett-Packard and worked on their Unix, HP-UX (good thing Dave Packard lost the coin toss with Bill Hewlett, eh?); if one Unix system gave someone a buzz, networking lots of systems together could give'em a heck of a head rush, so that's what I did. Did some TCP/IP implementation work, some formal network standards stuff (ISO, IEEE, X/Open and Open Group), some network management.

Then I went to HaL Computer Systems in Austin, TX. Spent 2 1/2 years there. Whoa. Bad trip. Working at HaL, was, well, a four-letter word beginning and ending with the same letters as the company name. I learned some stuff:

• If you have to live in Texas, Austin is the place to live.
• I do not have to live in Texas.

Round about that time (1995) I ran into a friend of mine (also a Unix guy), who turned me on to this completely new thing - the POSIX subsystem inside WinNT. Now, I'd used NT off and on for a couple of years, mostly for a change of pace. I could tell there were some cool things about it, but I had such a major Unix habit I couldn't imagine just switching. When this friend gave me the chance to combine the two - make something useful out of that POSIX thing running on NT - I jumped at it. He and I and a couple other guys founded a company.

Softway Systems built a product called OpenNT, which was an enhanced version of the POSIX subsystem Microsoft had shipped in NT 3.x and 4.0. We shipped five versions of the product in the four years of our existence; changed the name to Interix, too.

Then we got acquired by Microsoft in September 1999. A Unix guy, inside Microsoft. I figured we few Softway Systems survivors would be lonely, huddling in a dark corner of a parking garage trading shell scripts and arcane API calls when the Win32 Police weren't looking. It wasn't nearly that bad. Kinda fun, even.

MS rolled the technology out as Microsoft Interix 2.2, then combined it with their existing NFS client/server product, shipping Services For Unix 3.0 in May of 2002. In January 2003, the LinuxWorld trade show named SFU 3.0 “Best Integration Product 2003”. (Can you just imagine what the typical Linux-head at the show must have thought about that?) We're rolling out SFU 3.5 at LinuxWorld this month.

Since SFU 3.0 shipped, I've been working on the Microsoft Solution for Unix Migration. “There's no one so gung-ho Windows as a reformed Unix user” may have been the thinking, but that's too-simple-minded a way of looking at things. I still see myself as a Unix guy. My mission at Softway Systems was “Make Windows safe for Unix people”; that what I do today. And I still love it.