Richard "Rich" Skrenta (b. 1967 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ( often colloquially referred to as PA (its abbreviation by natives and Northeasterners is a state located in the Northeastern For the valley nicknamed "Silicone Valley" see San Fernando Valley. In 1982, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. Mt Lebanon School District is the public school system for residents of Mt Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild" i It is widely believed to be the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever created.
Skrenta graduated from Northwestern University. Between 1989 and 1991 he worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix. Commodore, the commonly used name for Commodore International, was a US-American Electronics company based in West Chester Pennsylvania Commodore-Amiga Inc, in 1990 did a full port of AT&T Unix System V Release 4 for the Amiga computer family (in addition to the proprietary Between 1991 and 1995 he worked at Unix System Labs and from 1996 to 1998 with IP-level encryption at Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services He later left Sun and became one of the founders of the Open Directory Project. The Open Directory Project ( ODP) also known as dmoz (from directory He stayed onboard after the Netscape acquisition, and continued to work on the directory as well as Netscape Search, AOL Music and AOL Shopping. Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company After his stint at AOL he went on to cofound Topix LLC, a Web 2. Topix is a News aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography 0 company in the news aggregation & forums market. In 2005, he and his fellow cofounders sold a 75% share of Topix to a newspaper consortium made up of Tribune, Gannett, and Knight Ridder. The Tribune Company is a large American Multimedia Corporation based in Chicago Illinois. Gannett Company Inc ( is a publicly-traded media Holding company based in the United States. For the unrelated television series see Knight Rider. For other articles see Knight Rider (disambiguation Knight Ridder Currently, he heads a new startup company, Blekko Inc, an internet search engine[1].
He was involved in the development of VMS Monster, an old MUD for VMS. In computer gaming, a MUD ( Multi-User Dungeon, Domain or Dimension) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of Open Virtual Memory System ( OpenVMS) initially known just as Virtual Memory System ( VMS) is the name of a High-end Computer server VMS Monster was the inspiration for TinyMUD. TinyMUD is the name both of a certain implementation of a Multi-User Dungeon server and the first MUD run using that implementation He is also known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. The Tass newsreader is an Open source computer software package that provides a full screen threaded newsreader tin is an Open source text-based and threaded News client. It is available for a variety of Unix-like Operating systems It is based on Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer In 1989 he started working on a multiplayer simulation game. In 1994 it was launched under the name Olympia as a pay-for-play game by Shadow Island Games.
References
External links
- Skrenta's website
- Associated Press. The Associated Press ( AP) is an American News agency. The AP is a Cooperative owned by its contributing Newspapers radio "Prank starts 25 years of computer security woes", CTV. CTV is a Canadian English language Television network. It is Canada's largest privately owned network the main television asset of CTVglobemedia
- USA Today. USA TODAY is a national American daily Newspaper published by the Gannett Company. "Interview with Topix founder Rich Skrenta".
- about Blekko
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