Robert Clyde: programming success.

• Author: Blodgett, John
• Position: People

ROBERT CLYDE, chief technology officer of Symantec Corp., got his start in computer security as a teenager writing a program to take over others' computers.

Clyde's father worked at Honeywell when computers cost six figures. As a result of the high costs, companies began sharing computers in the early seventies. The elder Clyde saw an opportunity and left Honeywell in 1973 to start a time-sharing computer company, Intelligent Systems Corp., in Waltham, Mass.

"All of a sudden there's a computer in the family," says the younger Clyde. This computer filled a room the size of a small office and had a fraction of the memory of a PDA. A world away from today's computers, but exciting because computers were becoming more available for business use.

Clyde and his brother were encouraged to use the machine, playing some simple games that were text-based--graphics were years away still--and within a week, having learned every possible scenario, the brothers were bored.

"We started saying, 'How do we make them more interesting?'" says Clyde. The answer was BASIC, the computer language, and they learned to tweak the games they had been playing. Soon their programming efforts shifted to commercial projects. Since software applications were few, they had to build custom programs for each time-share client. They also wrote code for Intelligent Systems' own systems.

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The brothers did much of the company's programming--when they weren't in school. Clyde recalls an older co-worker. "When he brought customers in he'd scoot my brother and me off because he thought customers would be scared off if they saw a couple of high school kids running the computer system."

Clyde started developing a program he would eventually name Control. The "business reason" for writing it was to let a helpdesk person see exactly what a remote computer user was doing in order to solve problems from afar.

The real reason was to win a game he and his brother called Terminal Wars. Every weekend their father would take the computer down for maintenance, but let his sons and their friends use it to play games. "The object of the game was simple," Clyde says. "Everybody would sit at their own terminal and try to take over the other peoples' terminals."

Hence the idea for a program that...