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Brad Pedersen, Citrix's Chief Architect, talks about the technical history of Presentation Server

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Last week I wrote that I would be visiting Citrix's headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale to record podcasts with several folks.

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Last week I wrote that I would be visiting Citrix's headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale to record podcasts with several folks. I recorded nine separate interviews that I'll be releasing as Brian Madden Live! podcasts over the next few weeks.

The first interview from that trip is with Brad Pedersen, one of the earliest Citrix employees from 1989 and Citrix's Chief Architect. In this podcast, Brad talks about how Presentation Server came to be. He starts with the early days of Ed Iacobucci in Texas and walks through Citrix MultiUser, WinView, WinFrame, and then into MetaFrame and Presentation Server.

This conversation is technical, and Brad talks about what worked and what didn't work, and why Citrix did what they did. He talks about things like adding TCP/IP support, the evolution and creation of the ICA protocol. the creation of the Program Neighborhood service and the evolution to IMA in MetaFrame XP. Brad also talks about why the IMA datastore uses this strange binary blob format, and how they hope to eventually migrate that to a standard relational database.

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Oh yeah... The lobby of the building has about 30 patents displayed in a case, and easily half of them have Brad's name on them. And then you walk into his office and there's another stack of boxes of unopened patent plaques that belong to him--unopened because he doesn't have room to display them!

Brian
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Number 1 PodCast,
 
Thanks Brian, and thank you Brad Pedersen for the Citrix history, awesome.
 
I have been waiting years to hear that story.
 
ScottC.
www.thin-world.com
 
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Kevin,
I seem to recall that you have a few interesting patents as well. Not 20 perhaps, but still, it's what you do with them that counts .
Dan
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I will have to say. I only met him in July for the first time, but he is two things 1: a sharp cat. and 2: a real guy. Brad isn’t an ivory tower propeller head. The discussions we had around technology were practical and based in reality. He is as ready to drink a beer as Brian is, and as quick to talk about technology as he is other things.... I was very impressed. Hope to see more of him in the public.
 
Ron
 
 
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I listened to the Podcast for the first time last night. Overall I think most of everything I said was accurate, but I did identify one error that I would like to correct.  In the Podcast I said that Barry Davis was part of the Citrix team that negotiated the Microsoft license to Citrix’s NT multi-user changes.   It was actually Barry Dockswell.  Barry was our chief negotiator and he was instrumental in getting the license agreement with Microsoft signed.  Without Barry there would be no Citrix today.
 
I want to thank Brian again for the opportunity to talk about Citrix’s history.  I had a lot of fun doing it.
 
-Brad
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