Stories

storiesHumans love a great story, some might say that storytelling is woven into our DNA. Many cultures define someone by their story, and Scott is no different. Here is a collection of colorful events from his past:

  • In 1998 Lotus wanted Scott and the team he led at IBM fired, then arrested for hacking a Lotus product and mapping Notes dot net slash support to a dummy page on an external IBM test server. His team had managed to expose a flaw in a key Lotus product that Scott’s division at IBM had relied on.PCWeek
  • In 1993 Scott was paying $45/CDR for blanks in quantities of 100. These days everyone has burned a CD, but back in 1993, it was serious voodoo. Scott and a coworker developed the first ever process for installing a computer operating system from CD, OS2. It earned Scott and his team a divisional award, and a place on the cover of PCWeek above the fold when that periodical defined IT.
  • Late in 1983 while at RIT Scott hacked the online testing system used by professors. Technically it was a trivial exploit, but at the time it was very exciting, and he really did earn that ‘A’ in Fortran.
  • Two years after the Lotus incident above, live during a SuperBowl party Scott hacked a website for a dot-com that had just advertised during the game. While their commercial was running Scott made a trivial change to their website. For the change to have taken effect it would have required a server reboot, regardless Scott rolled it back before the game returned from commercials.
  • Have you ever had your domain “Black Holed”? Scott has, but it took nearly 4,000 attempts at getting a job to earn total Internet banishment. How many people do you know can actually substantiate their claim for being banned from the Internet!
  • Who spends $750 on a computer with 4K of RAM? Scott did back in March of 1983, and this is the story of how he took winnings from a SuperBowl pool and turned them into a career.
  • How do you burn $16M in one year while building an infrastructure to support 16 million visitors an hour? Well in 2000 you have a crafty sales rep from IBM sell you $4.5M in hardware, hire another 70 people, for a total of 130, then never earn $1 of actual revenue, and watch the dot-com bubble burst around you. Scott was that sales rep, employee #56, and he left IBM for this lesson.

Scott has other technology adventures, but you’ll have to wait for the book…