My own little piece of Microsoft history

One of the first jobs I had at Microsoft in 1998 was helping run Outlook's interoperability lab where we tested against a variety of different servers - POP, IMAP, LDAP, cert servers, etc. One of the certificate servers we had running IIS 4.0 was named “Passport”.

Shortly thereafter, we received an email from a Very Important Person telling us that Bill wanted that machine name for this new thing happening and we had to give it up. We agreed to do this (which was a pain, because it meant reinstalling the cert server since you can't just rename the machine once cert services have been installed), and so I named the machine Retsyn instead.

A lot of folks at Microsoft have their own stories about “the time they rode up in the elevator with Bill” and whatnot[1], but I like this little memory even more. If not for me, passport might have been named something else! Just kiddin'.

[1] I did once, and a woman carrying a huge stuffed gorilla got on the elevator with us, and Bill chatted with her during the ride. That image still cracks me up, but I must admit that I am pretty easily amused.