This page was last updated in 1998. It is the closest thing you'll find to my biography on www.totic.org |
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Aleksandar Totic Cell: (415) 297-3695 Fax: (415) 428-4058 |
Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where I lived for 15 years (Konjarnik). Finished high school at New English School in Kuwait, could not go back to Yugoslavia, so at the age of 17 I came to US. After landing in upstate New York by accident (I've thought that I was going to a suburb of NYC), I quickly backpedalled to Boston, where I got my degree from Boston College. After an interesting few years of delivering pizza, packages, temping, working for a strange startup, I decided that I'd like to do something more with my life. GRE later, I got accepted to UofI, Urbana-Champaign. While working to pay for the grad school in the basement of NCSA, I've decided that I prefer writing code to writing papers. At this time, very few places besides CERN had a home page. For a while, I had lot of fun with Mosaic, and then I followed our fearless leader to California. The move was promptly commemorated on our whiteboard. Then the real life started at warp speed.
Oh, life, I am working much less so there is more of it.Windsurfing, skiing, oasis in Palo Alto, pad in San Fransisco. Of course, none of this would be worth much without friends to enjoy it with:
Chouck - the weenie, Lou - the Montulli, Matt - Mr. Neck Beard and roomate to be, jevering, and rest of the knobs.
Other hobbies? Not many, life is busy. Since I hate cars, got a motorbike, my friends are betting on my life expectancy. Trying to read, quitting smoking. And the usual passtimes of overworked engineers: The No Hair Club For Men, The Swirl Society of Netscape.
A friend of mine, Sarah, started a company, Six Red Marbles, and I've helped out a bit.
ex-mozilla.org is hosting the web pages for ex-netscape employees.
You really do not want to read about my work. You've read all about it already: Netscape, "All Praise The Company". At least, that was what we used to say in the early days. The early years that produced the BLINK tag are a great story, better told over a beer. jwz has a great diary, NSCP dorm. I am happy to have lived to tell about it. I've worked on Mac browsers for a long time, and burned out around January 1996. Now I am happily coding cross-platform code, SmartUpdate was a training exercise. It shipped, used our own dogfood (Java, JavaScript, Security Framework). Roaming was the next big thing, right now I am contemplating retirement, and working on building the foundations
Tim Berners-Lee on home page:
Q. The idea of the "home page" evolved in a different direction.
A. Yes. With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression;
it's a public billboard that people work on to say what they're interested in.
That's not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It's
exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It's openness, and it's great
in a way, it's people letting the community into their homes. But it's not really
their home. They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in
somebody's front yard than the home itself. People don't have the tools
for using the Web for their homes, or for organizing their private lives; they
don't really put their scrapbooks on the Web. They don't have family Webs. There
are many distributed families nowadays, especially in the high-tech fields,
so it would be quite reasonable to do that, yet I don't know of any. One reason
is that most people don't have the ability to publish with restricted access.
