President & CEO
The World ^®
Software Tool & Die
bzs@TheWorld.com
*oo*

• Founder, President, CEO, The World^® - A Public Information Utility, 1989-present.
  
  The World was the first ISP on the planet to provide internet access to the general public in November 1989.
  

  • Wikipedia: The World (Internet Service Provider)
  • Hobbes' Internet Timeline   RFC 2235, November 1997
  • The First ISP   by Spike Ilacqua, Usenix ;login:, February 1999, Vol. 24, No. 1.
  • 11 people who made the internet possible
  • Casting The Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond   by Peter H. Salus, Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN: 0201876744
  • PBS Nerds 2.01 Timeline, 1990-1998    by Robert X. Cringely, PBS, (largely derived from RFC 2235)
  • The Computer Book: From the Abacus to Artificial Intelligence, 250 Milestones in the History of Computer Science (Sterling Milestones) , Simson L. Garfinkel and Rachel H. Grunspan, 2018. Entry devoted to The World as the first internet service provider available to the general public.

  Note: Although at the time it was obvious just because of the furor it caused, I actually got hate mail for letting the general public on the internet and blocked from huge hunks of the net, once in a while someone comes along insisting to me that some other system was first. They're always wrong. But if you feel this way please a) pay close attention to the wording (e.g., dial-up) and b) be very specific with facts and details, don't just send me angry, expletive-filled e-mail asserting that xyz was first and demanding that I prove otherwise.

• Producer, Rock & Roll 50^th Anniversary^®

  The official home for Rock & Roll's 50th Anniversary!

• The Online Book Initiative
  • OBI: A Brief Overview

• Press & Publicity
• Harmonic Convergence: How we got here and where we're going: a multimedia timeline - Wired Magazine Issue 7.08

  1989 ...Barry Shein founds World.std.com, which soon becomes the first commercial dialup ISP.

• Soaking in Spam (cover story supplement) , Brad Stone, Newsweek, Nov 24, 2003.
• Spambusters , Neil Swidey, Boston Globe Magazine, Sunday, October 5, 2003.
• Tangled Up in Spam, James Gleick, New York Times Magazine, Sunday February 9, 2003. NY Times requires free subscription for access
• Stop the Cash Flow, Kill the Spam , Kari Dean, Wired News, February 6. 2004.
• ISP Chief: Spam Is 'A Thousand Times More Horrible Than You Can Imagine' , Mitch Wagner, InternetWeek, December 19, 2002.
• Spam Wars, Evan I. Schwartz, Technology Review (an MIT Enterprise), July/August 2003
• Can Email Be Saved? Online Dialogue, with Dave Crocker Technology Review (an MIT Enterprise), July/August 2003 or click: (requires free signup)
• Discussion of Dec 19, 2002 InternetWeek article , Slashdot, Saturday, December 21, 2002.
• Spam: Threat or Menace? An ISP's View
• Invited keynote, MIT Spam Conference, MIT 2003 Spam Conference, MIT, January 17, 2003.
• Invited keynote, MIT Spam Conference, MIT 2006 Spam Conference , MIT, Feb ?, 2006
• Spambusters, Bruce Schechter, New Scientist, March 8, 2003, (print edition, pp. 42.)
• Making Spammers Pay, John Gordon, Minnesota Public Radio Interview (syndicated, MPR, Canadian Broadcasting Corp., etc.), March 5, 2003.
• ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam, Mitch Wagner, InternetWeek, February 20, 2003.
• ISP Chief on Spam, Slashdot, Saturday, December 21, 2002.
• Ask ISP Owner Barry Shein About the Spam Wars, Slashdot interview, Mar 3, 2003.
• Train the dog, then never call the command, SlashBack, February 25, 2003.
• Maybe Bulk E-Mail's Free Ride Should End, Ken Magill, in DMNews, The Online Newspaper of Record for Direct Marketers, March 3, 2003.
• A Timeline of Silicon Valley 1989: Barry Shein founds the first Internet Service Provider, "The World", in Boston.

• Some Technical Publications...
  • Lynch, D., Rose, M. T, Internet System Handbook,Chapter 10, Creating New Applications,1993,Addison-Wesley,pp 421-466.
  • Shein, B., Callahan, M., Woodbury, P., NFSSTONE: A Network File Server Performance Benchmark, Usenix Summer 1989 conference proceedings, pp 269-275.
  • Shein. B.,Inter-Fashion Portability,EurOpen, Jersey, 1992
  • Fashion is an invention of civilization to make
    us unhappy with everything we already own.
  • Woodbury, P., Wilson, A., Shein, B., Gertner, I., Chen, P.Y., Barttlet, J., Aral, Z.: Shared Memory Multiprocessors - The Right Approach to Parallel Processing, IEEE Compcon 1989, pp. 72-80.
  • Shein, B.: Subnet Implementation, in ConneXions - The Interoperability Report, January 1989, Volume 3, No. 1, pp. 10-13.
  • Shein, Barry: The Internet Protocols - A Functional Overview, in ConneXions - The Interoperability Report, July 1987, Volume 1, No. 3.
  • Author of many technical articles and columns for Sun/Expert magazine, "The World According to Sparc", "What Light From Yonder Window Breaks", "Of Epoch Proportions", etc., while Technical Editor for magazine, 1989-1996.
  • Quoted, original material on the future of networking in The Matrix, John S. Quarterman, 1990, Digital Press, 7.8.4-7.8.7.
  • Comer, Douglas E, Internetworking with TCP/IP, acknowledgements for providing example code, Prentice-Hall, 1988, 1st edition.
  • Comer, Douglas E, Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume One (6th Edition) , 2013, Pearson. Provided updated programming examples.
  • Shein, Barry and Sneddon, Steve, UNIX considered, The DEC Professional, April 1983
  • Deitel, H., Operating Systems, acknowledgement for work on UNIX chapter, Addison-Wesley, 1981.

• Other
• Invited Speaker, HackerSpace Singapore (HackerSpace.SG), 23 June 2011. Topic: The End of DNS.
• Lecturer, Course: Politics and the Internet, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University , Spring 1995.
• Board of Directors, Usenix, 1990-1994.
• Board of Directors, Sun User Group, 1987-1989, Secretary/Treasurer, 1989-1991.
• Keynote Speaker, The Next Few Years, Joint Conference of the John Von Neuman Society and the Hungarian Unix Users Group (HUUG), BME, Budapest, Hungary, September 1993.
• Original (X10) xman design and implementation (try "man xman" on your unix or linux system.)
• Attendee, Woodstock '69
• Cornell, '74
• Lecturer, Ph.d. Candidate, Boston University, Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science (left ABD with M.Sc. in Mathematics), 1979-1988.
• Research Staff, Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Physiology, Occupational Health Group, 1976-1981. Spent three years studying Boston Fire Fighters (cardiopulmonary data) eventually at every firehouse in Boston, riding into fires, etc. Discovered they are true heroes.
• I chose and registered the domain BU.EDU for Boston University.
• Uncredited inventor of flavored dental-floss, 1974 (I'm serious!)
  Patent filed by Johnson & Johnson.
  

• Quotes, some original...all suspect...
• Never use a computer you can lift.
  (maybe original, something similar may've been said by my grad advisor and friend the late Bill Henneman, probably about me.)
• What do they mean money doesn't grow on trees? Money is made of paper, where do they think paper comes from?
  (possibly original but not likely, probably heard it from some comedian.)
• You will never escape the will of the mob; about the best anyone has ever figured out how to do is herd them into voting booths.
  (definitely original, others found it in some posting of mine and began quoting it, search google.)
• PERL is basically TECO-99
  Explanation for non-nerds: PERL is a programming language popular among unix geeks whose syntax is, to be kind, richly complex. TECO was/is a text editor whose origins date back to some of the earliest interactive computing systems of the early 1960's, TECO was also famous for its, to be kind, richly complex syntax. Historically, many programming languages use the year of their release (just like Windows '98 refers to 1998 though that's an operating system not a programming language), so I guess I said that in 1999.
  PERL: Practical Extraction and Report Language.
  TECO: Text (or possibly Tape) Editor and COrrector.
• Do you mind if I smoke?
  I don't care if you burst into flames and die!
  (not likely original but often attributed to me, try google.)
• Yes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out of your head.
  (although I've heard it since from other sources and attributed to Ann Landers, Carl Sagan and others I'm pretty sure this one was original when I said it and others have attributed the quote to me. But it's one of those comments that might pop out of one's, er, head spontaneously, who knows, it's funny no matter who said it.)