Thorsten Lockert

I started being interested in computers a very long time ago. I got my first computer when I was 16, and, much to the disappointment of my parents, had maxed out it's capabilities about 4 hour later. From then on it was my challenge to find a big enough computer that I could beg access to. When I got old enough to be taken seriously, I was the principal developer of BBB/cs, a conferencing system run by Bergen By Byte AS, Norway. This was one of the first publicly available Internet mail systems in Norway, and was all custom software. I was completely hooked, and in 1994 decided to move to Silicon Valley, CA to be amongst my own kind. I worked at TAL Wireless Networks, Inc., a company providing Internet access via radio, for a few years, till they went under. While at TAL, I wrote a paper on Multi-Processor Locking in 4.4BSD Lite² for a class. Jobless and Green Card-less (and worried about being kicked out of my apartment, not to mention deported!), I took a job as a sysadmin at eBay Inc. in San Jose, CA. It was a small company at the time, and I was just happy to get a job with an actual paycheck and a work permit. I was responsible for setting up the original site infrastructure, hands on, starting with the fourth computer.

Once I was done with that I … needed a bit of a break, and I tried to retire and decided to go live on a boat, the Blue Moon (which has since been sold). My wife chronicled some of our adventures on the boat, if you're interested. This worked for a little while, but then the bug bit again, and I started a new venture, Voop AS, a company to provide phone service in Norway based on Linux and Asterisk Open Source software.

In my personal life I'm a family man, living in suburbia. In June 2001, I got married to Heather. We had a son on June 16, 2002 and a daughter on September 16, 2003. I currently live in Los Gatos, CA where I spend most of my time behind my desk playing on one of my computers.

I have a resume and a bio you can look at if you want to know more about my professional life. If you would like to talk and prefer more secure communication, I have a public key for use with GnuPG or PGP available.

You could follow me on Twitter if you were so inclined. Just don't expect me to be posting much there. I am also on Facebook (for some definition of "being on"; I seldom actually log in) as well as LinkedIn.