HhH, no I was never in the military. I was almost stupid enough to go to Marine OCS (in 1972), but when I got to the first question on the "supplemental application" I didn't think I wanted to go any further. For those who haven't seen it, the first question was, "Have you ever smoked marijuana?" I wasn't inspired enough to say, "Yes, but I didn't inhale."
In 1967 I was still in high school. In 1968 I started as a freshman at UCLA. I was there when the ARPANET was started by several of my friends from the UCLA Computer Club and computer science department.
I got interested in cryptography when I read "The Codebreakers." At UCLA I was a math major. Some of the math professors had worked for the NSA, so there was an undercurrent of interest there. (The original UCLA computing center was supported by the NSA, though the money was routed through another agency to avoid disclosing this fact.) I took several computer science courses. One was on operating systems, where I read Butler Lampson's paper about "capabilities," and started to follow his work.
In 1994 I started working for Xerox's internal venture capital division, Xerox Technology Ventures. One of the ventures was Semaphore Communications Corporation, which sought to commercialize Xerox's hardware encryption technology that was originally developed for the military. Semaphore eventually failed, but I wonder if some of the Semaphore people ended up at Wave. (Semaphore was in Santa Clara, next to a big Intel facility.)
Now you know how I developed an interest in trusted computing, and why I would be interested enough to post to MIT Technology Review's forum in a discussion of MS's Palladium. This is where some (undisclosed) dot-connector got the bright idea that HBG = HhH. Quite a coincidence, right? Two Howards interested in trusted computing, both from the Los Angeles area. Must be the same person!
(For those who think so, do the math. Even with conservative estimates, there are probably several Howards in Los Angeles who are interested in trusted computing: Suppose 1 person in 1000 is interested in trusted computing. Suppose 1 person in 1000 is named Howard. Then 1 in 1,000,000 would be a Howard interested in trusted computing. How many people live in Los Angeles county?)
I have references for all of the above episodes of my life. I've discussed most of these things with Bingoman. None of this is made up.
AI
