Welcome! You have reached Matt's computer. If you want to reach Matt,
email is probably the best way. My email address is dillon at
backplane.com.
No, I am not the movie star.
Yes, I'm the guy that did all that Amiga stuff years past
Yes, I was associated with BEST.COM and am associated with the
FreeBSD project.
No, the demon in the background is not an evil demon. It's a
server demon. All computers have these things running around in them,
so if you own a computer you shouldn't go complaining to me about it!
Please note: This domain is 'backplane.com', not 'thebackplane.com'.
It is the personal domain of a well known computer scientist and kernel
programmer named Matthew Dillon. If you are looking for venture capital
related stuff, it aint here. Try 'thebackplane.com', and make sure
your address book is updated properly or your emails are going to wind
up in the bit-bucket.
My history isn't dramatic. I start blowing things up when I was 5... oh, wait, that wasn't me, that was Evil-Matt, not Good-Matt!. Ah, here we are... I started playing with electronics from a very early age and very quickly got involved with computers at the ground floor (typing 6502 machine hex codes into a machine language monitor to write programs). It pretty much took off from there, eventually leading into a shareware C compiler called DICE that I wrote for the Amiga and from there into UNIX (BSD in college, then Linux, then FreeBSD, and finally DragonFly). At the same time I was gainfully employed at a small engineering firm in the Tahoe area and having all sorts of fun designing hardware, writing operating systems for same, water skiing in the summer, skiing, then snowboarding in the winter, and sometimes doing both the same day.
I was dragged back to the San Francisco Bay Area when Mike Swartz called me up one day with an idea about starting an ISP. This was 1993 or so. I was a one of three founders of BEST Internet (see Karl's Tour of the original BEST)). BEST Internet was an incredible successs, one of the few ISPs that was not only making money, but also able to grow using its own revenue. In later years BEST merged with another ISP called Hiway Technologies and was finally sold to Verio at which point we founders moved on to other things.
After BEST I was involved in two more startups, a game startup called Orcus and an ASP which we named Backplane, Inc. after my personal domain (the best name we could think up). Unfortunately, we could not pick a worse time to do a new startup so despite their technical excellence these two babies had to be shutdown. However, other more passive investments made since BEST have worked out quite nicely. Still, due to the great success of BEST Internet, I now have the ability to persue new, cool hobbies.
These days most of my attention is focused on the The DragonFly Project.