When I was little, my passion was chemistry. I just loved it. The equations, the way two substances react together to form something else and the insights you can get about the nature and the structure of the things around you. I was sure chemistry was to be my vocation and future career.
But in 1994, my parents – a little bit worried by a somehow failed experiment from my lab – decided I needed a computer. So they’ve bought me a 286 with 2MB of RAM, and a 40MB HDD.
That was the end of my bright chemistry career.
So I’ve started to learn about computers, how they work and found many interesting analogies with my passion for chemistry. From the beginning I’ve had a fascination with the way computers work and how the bits operate under the hood. To see deeper than the wonderful 256-color text-mode interfaces. To understand computers and what makes them tick.
Six months later I’ve published my first antivirus, called MSCAN. One year later, the first version of RAV – v3.0 started to sell. Basically, RAV 3.0 was MSCAN renamed. In the beginning, RAV stood for ‘RSN AntiVirus’. MSCAN and RAV 3.x were written in Pascal and compiled with TP6.
The business became profitable, so for version 4 I have rewritten everything in C. Back then, RAV3.0 was already closing to 100,000 lines of code. Because everybody was asking ‘What is RSN?’, we’ve decided to rename RAV to ‘Romanian AntiVirus’.
RAV6.0 marked the transition to C++, which was also massively used in RAV7 as the base for the UFS plugin system. There was only one more version of RAV, v8.0 before it was bought by Microsoft in the summer of 2003. Before that, the product went through a final name change, to the now wellknown Reliable AntiVirus.
While pursuing my passion for antiviruses and data security I’ve travelled around the world and met a lot of interesting people which I consider friends. CARO is such a group which stands out by the level of trust between its members, their reputation and technical skills.
I’m a member of CARO since May 2000.
If you are interested about security, you may want to check my weblog. Posting is moderate to low, depending on the amount of spare time. I’m also a regular poster to the Kaspersky Labs Analyst’s Diary weblog.
Photography is now between my top interests, and during the virus-free weekends I am contributing to photography-oriented e-zine called ‘Fotomagazin’. Take a look if you want: www.fotomagazin.ro (Romanian Only).
Finally, my personal website can be found at www.craiu.com. You will find some of my personal projects there, of which the latest one is CGAL – a photo gallery software written in PHP. Please send any questions, samples or complaints to craiu@kaspersky.ro or contact me directly via Y! – craiu_67.