Niels T. Ferguson

Born on December 10, 1965 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Member of DJOE from August 1979, membership number 236 (formerly 136)
Member of ORD-GROUP since 1983

Niels, 1979Niels, 1986
19791986

Niels was one of the ORD-GROUP's software people, although he occasionally dabbled in hardware. He and Jurjen were responsible for the basic ideas (ORDSYS) that grew into the time-sharing system TS and its never-built successor CHAOS (loosely based on their JANOS system). Niels designed the NANOL programming language and implemented its compiler. Together with Jurjen he designed and built the SASL compiler/interpreter, notable for its stackless garbage collector and infinite precision integers using a linked-list representation. Apart from these major projects he spent a lot of time working on many of the smaller sub-projects in varying subsets of the ORD-GROUP.

Niels went on to study mathematics and specialized in cryptography. The ORD-GROUP experience was put to good use in various cryptographic security systems where a careful cross-optimization between the mathematics of cryptography and the assembly-language implementation yielded significant efficiency improvements. He worked for DigiCash, Counterpane, and his own consulting company MacFergus. In 2003 he co-authored Practical Cryptography, a book on the practical aspects of implementing cryptographic systems. For more information see his personal web page.

Digging in the DJOE archives uncovered an old document that is typical for Niels' time at DJOE.