As technical director and architect at Symantec, Zulfikar Ramzan spends his time trying to outsmart the virus writers responsible for the onslaught of malware that infects millions of computers on a daily basis.
Ramzan, 33, talked with CNET News this week about how his early hobbies of chess and computer programming led to his cryptography studies and a job at Symantec, where he puts theory into practice.
Q: When did you get interested in computers?
Ramzan: I think I was probably around 8 years old or so and my birthday was coming up and I saved a bit of allowance money, and my parents helped supplement it, and we went out and bought a Commodore VIC-20. It was $100 for the keyboard and you hook it up to the back of your television. Games were pretty expensive back then, and being 8 years old and somewhat naive, I said “I’ll just write my own games.” I was forced to open up the manual and figure out how it worked.
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