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I vividly recall getting a visit (around '96) from Mark Shuttleworth (of Canonical fame). He had founded Thawte Consulting, I think the first competitor of Veri

by raarts 8y ago

I vividly recall getting a visit (around '96) from Mark Shuttleworth (of Canonical fame). He had founded Thawte Consulting, I think the first competitor of Verisign, who were the only company that sold SSL certificates at the time. He was traveling Europe to visit ISPs trying to woo them into using his service for SSL certificates. He had to spend some time explaining what certificates actually are, because I only had a vague idea (I founded one of the first ISPs in the Netherlands but nobody used SSL at the time). He was much cheaper than Verisign, by automating the process on his site so it was an easy sell.

heywire 8y ago
Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t know Mark Shuttleworth founded Thawte. I always knew him as the Ubuntu guy, but never knew where he earned his millions. > Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting in 1995, a currently running company which specialized in digital certificates and Internet security. In December 1999, Thawte was acquired by VeriSign, earning Shuttleworth R3.5 billion (about US$575 (equivalent to $844.70 in 2017) million). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth