About Our Founder

Blaine is a software architect and technologist having plied his trade at Bell Labs, NeXT Computer, and Apple Computer, with two dozen patents ranging from encryption to distributed memory management. 

He elevated Bell Labs’ commercial System V UNIX product to state of the art in the 80’s. He then worked directly with Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems to unify the UNIX industry by merging its two dominant variants at the time and forming SVR4 (Solaris), which became the POSIX standard and the basis of all Open Source Unix variations (Linux, FreeBSD). He then went to NeXT and, in contrast to C++, introduced multiple inheritance of abstraction (Java’s “interfaces”) to Objective-C which has been copied into Java, C#, Ruby, Go, Swift etc. While at NeXT, he co-authored the “Foundation” starter kit for applications, which continues to form the basis for all of the application programming on all Apple devices. Immediately after the Apple acquisition of NeXT, Blaine was put in charge of the OS effort. His innovations in programming fueled the rise of Apps not only at Apple but also on Android.

Since leaving Apple in 2011, Blaine has focused his attention on the fundamental issues of security and multi-core programming issues. In 2012, Blaine founded The Planet Earth Society, Inc which is a social purpose corporation building a social network for good. Humanity depends on accurate information to make informed choices about everything. PES is an advanced research and development software company that builds unhackable networks and messaging.

He is also an active member and contributor to the Patriotic Millionaires which is a group of high-net worth Americans committed to building a more prosperous, stable and inclusive nation.

Blaine has a BS in Economics (age 20) and MS in Computer Science (age 21) and lives in Los Altos, CA.

A Brief Journey Through Space & Time:

• 1971 PLATO user, bit-mapped graphics, chat rooms, dogfights
• 1974 University Laboratory High School, Math & Science award
• 1974 Exposed to UNIX by Greg Chesson
• 1976 University of Illinois, BA Economics
• 1976 Lingo language (IDL with lisp requirement specs per method, e.g. interface abstraction ++)
• 1977 UCLA MS degree requirements met, Bell Labs MTS at age 21.2
• 1981 First person to boot UNIX on 11/782 dual processor
• 1984 Manager System V R2.2 (?), 1st dual processor support
• 1986 Purchased VFS/NFS for System V Release 3 (?)
• 1987 Co-architect (with Bill Joy) of SVR4 as part of 20% purchase of Sun (e.g. Solaris)
• 1988 On “Phase-3″​ team when/where “Spring”​ named/derived (OSF formed in retaliation)
• 1989 “Fizix”​ nanokernel built on Cheriton’s “door”​ IPC idea, 20x cost to do remote vs local procedure call
• 1990 NeXT Computer, Inc.
• 1991 Objective-C Protocols, “ripped-off”​ in Java as Interfaces
• 1992 Foundation: “Distributed Objects”​, retain/release, NSLock, NSRunloop, NSTimer, NSThread, …
• 1993 Direct Embedding Fast Elliptical Encryption
• 1994 “Foundation”​ on HPUX, Solaris, DEC, …
• 1996 JavaBridge – Java subclassing of ObjC, WebObjects as Java basis for NeXT IPO
• 1997 Put in charge of NeXTStep port to Apple Hardware
• 1998 Two-GC cycle recovery in JavaBridge
• 2003 @try…, @synchronized
• 2007 ObjC2: GC, for..in, @properties, …
• 2008 Blocks C,ObjC,C++; TLC: 10^6 alloc+recovery/sec/core
• 2009 n-GC cycle recovery (generalization of 2-GC)
• 2010 _Atomic in the C11 standard
• 2010 Actor collaboration with Dr Carl Hewitt (ongoing)
• 2010 ARC +1/-1 algebra, including retaining stack variables, __weak system
• 2011 Unleashed from Apple
• 2012 Founder, Planet Earth Society, inc.
• 2013 Optimal synchronization “cheeze” primitives (w/Hewitt), single step lockless single feeder FIFO
• 2014 Multiple writer multiple reader 0 memory lockless (!) FIFO
• 2015-2020 Secret Sauces