SSL Surprise

[Yes, I'm a huge nerd]

While organizing my computer I stumbled across these files that I printed out and put in two separate envelopes as a surprise for the 1998 Structured Arts Holiday Party (dinner at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto, RIP).

We had just finished building CertKit, a C++ public-key certificate library, and we were looking for new product ideas. Most anything we might do was going to require SSL and so I set about prototyping it in my free time. It was also a good test of how powerful CertKit was.

Well, I got it working just before the holiday party and printed out these debug traces showing the protocol messages going back-and-forth. At the party, after we had toasted our year, I gave one envelope to Anil and one to Thane (with no explanation), and had them open them. As I recall they figured it out pretty quickly and swapped printouts to confirm. And then we ordered more drinks and dinner. Good times. ;-)