Perth Linux Users' Group

November 2007 Seminar

Title: "UNIX in Australia"
When: Tuesday, 13 November 2007, 7:30pm - 9:00pm.
Where: 'Futuresphere', Christ Church Grammar School, Queenslea Drive, Claremont
Presenters: Paul Antoine

To blatantly plagiarise Paul:

• Australia was the first country outside the US to have Unix source code
• Wollongong University was the first to port Unix to a non-DEC architecture (Perkin-Elmer)
• A good deal of the work on a VM-enabled kernel was the result of work at the University of NSW
• UNSW had the first *stable* VM-enabled kernel, where stable is defined as running for 24 hours without crashing :-)
• University of Sydney developed the first Fair Share scheduler to allow 100 staff and students to use a single VAX 11/780 (1MIP... yes ONE MIP)

Paul will be talking on how these and other achievements came about, as well has his involvement in a number of Australian IT startups.

Paul Antoine's professional career spans 23 years. He has more than 12 years of Board-level experience both in Australia and the US and has been a lead investor in several startup companies.

In 1993 Paul was appointed CEO of Softway (now Aurema), a systems software company specializing in enterprise resource management within operating systems, where he completed licensing of their Share II resource management product to companies such as Fujitsu, SGI, Siemens-Nixdorf, and Sun Microsystems. The Share II technology was the first successful commercialisation of software out of Sydney University, and the Sun Microsystems licensing deal the largest dollar value licensing of software in Australia's IT industry history.

Softway's network security division quickly become a preferred supplier of network security systems and services to the Australian Federal Government and achieved $1M in sales in the first year of its operation.

Paul has also invested and participated in other IT startups, including Bullant Pty Ltd, 5th Finger Pty Ltd (Australia's first SMS marketing company) and BePrivate (anti-spam) in Australia and the US.

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