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My own little piece of Microsoft history

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One of the first jobs I had at Microsoft in 1998 was helping run Outlook's interoperability lab where we tested against a variety of different servers - POP, IMAP, LDAP, cert servers, etc. One of the certificate servers we had running IIS 4.0 was named “Passport”.

Shortly thereafter, we received an email from a Very Important Person telling us that Bill wanted that machine name for this new thing happening and we had to give it up. We agreed to do this (which was a pain, because it meant reinstalling the cert server since you can't just rename the machine once cert services have been installed), and so I named the machine Retsyn instead.

A lot of folks at Microsoft have their own stories about “the time they rode up in the elevator with Bill” and whatnot[1], but I like this little memory even more. If not for me, passport might have been named something else! Just kiddin'.

[1] I did once, and a woman carrying a huge stuffed gorilla got on the elevator with us, and Bill chatted with her during the ride. That image still cracks me up, but I must admit that I am pretty easily amused.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2004
    Maybe this is a stupid question but why was she carrying a stuffed gorilla?


  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2004
    I am guessing it was a birthday/newbaby/marriage/etc gift for someone in the building or something like that. I didn't want to interrupt their chatter to ask :-)
  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2004
    Lol

    I met Bill once when I was in Redmond but it was in a cafeteria and there were definitely no stuffed gorillas ;)
  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed