Jim Thompson has been noodling around the UNIX world for far too long. He knows he started with BSD Unix Release 4.0c on a Vax 11/780 in 1981. He still thinks "echo 'This is not a pipe." | cat - > /dev/tty' is funny. He submitted his first patch to a Free Software project in 1987 for a port of GNU Emacs to a Convex vector supercomputer. Patches for gcc, gas and gdb followed.

Netgate was originally the name for a stateful packet filtering firewall he wrote in 1992. The manual is on-line, should you be curious: http://www.netgate.com/info/SW/Netgate/manual/

Jim refuses to divulge his qualifications and may, in fact, have none at all. He lives in a fortified compound near Austin, TX with his wife Jamie, and two Siberian Huskies (Sudo and Kea).