About the Author

My name is Mark Austin and I am the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Avecto, providing the company’s technical strategy and leading its R&D activities. I have spent over 20 years in the software industry, architecting and developing solutions across a number of different platforms.

My first exposure to system programming came in the late 1980s as a software engineer working for Ferranti Computer Systems. In addition to developing software for sonar and various training simulators, I ported a real-time kernel (pSOS) to a Motorola 68030 based single board computer. This involved writing a complete set of device drivers in assembly language, patching the kernel and developing bindings to the operating system for the application developers. I spent a year working alone on a project that gave me a solid grounding in low level programming, device drivers and kernel debugging, which would ignite a passion for operating systems and system programming.

As I moved on from Ferranti, I spent the early 1990s working in the world of Artificial Intelligence. My fascination with operating systems soon led me to take on responsibility for porting a real-time expert system from Digital’s VMS to numerous Unix platforms, including Solaris and HP-UX. It also gave me early exposure to 64-bit computing working with OpenVMS running on the DEC Alpha chip. By now I had become a seasoned VMS and Unix system programmer, and I was only just starting to pay serious attention to the PC. Like most Unix programmers I had dabbled on and off with PCs and DOS for years, but I largely avoided Microsoft Windows until the release of its more serious big brother, Windows NT. I was pleasantly surprised by Windows NT and it would signal the start of my gradual move away from Unix.

Since then, I’ve spent over a decade designing and developing system management products for Microsoft Windows, to solve various operational and security challenges faced by companies of all sizes.