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Nathaniel (nsb) Borenstein
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I'm a scientist/programmer/inventor/entrepreneur who has been involved
in Internet-related innovations since 1980, specializing in
e-mail technology, human-computer interaction, and electronic
commerce. Journalists have called me an "Internet Guru" and "a
geek's geek," among other things.
I like to help build consensus in diverse groups, and to facilitate
communication across different perspectives, such as software development and business strategy.
I am currently serving on
the faculty of the School of
Information at the University of
Michigan.
I live in Guppy Lake, in
northern Michigan and Ann Arbor.
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Things I'm Known For
My standards work. Among other things, I'm co-creator of
MIME, the Internet standard multimedia data format, now used
trillions of times each day. My old barbershop quartet is featured in
what is sometimes called
the first MIME message. I've also worked on
other aspects of email standards, and on standards for calendaring,
document formats, instant messaging, and a few other things. Nowadays
I'm not active in standards work but still potentially interested, particularly in standardizing dynamic messaging.
My entrepreneurial ventures.
I co-founded
First Virtual Holdings, the first Internet payment company, in
1994, which became MessageMedia and was ultimately swallowed up by Doubleclick when the Internet
bubble burst, NetPOS.com, the
first Internet-centric point-of-sale system, in 2000, and AmplifEye in 2014. (But NOT
Mimecast, however. Although
people often assume I founded the company because of its name, I
actually didn't join Mimecast
until it was several years old.)
My software projects (notably metamail, Safe-Tcl, and the
Andrew Message System), which have been used by millions.
My
1991 Girl Scout cookie message, an early demonstration of
"dynamic email"
An
early overview video of the Andrew System, from the late 1980's
My writings, which include three books, and
numerous journal articles and 16
Internet RFC documents.
I also
blog occasionally.
A Spy In the House of War:
My Life as a NATO Collaborator , my 1989 essay
that won the NYU Olive Branch award for writing about peace
Programming As If People Mattered, my 1991 book about
designing software for usability, now notable primarily
for the incredibly dated examples
My 26 patents
My social activism.
Things I Hope to Be Known For Some Day
Immodestly, I think some of the most
important things I've done are less well known. A few of my sins of pride:
In 1992, I applied for
a patent on what is now known as "dynamic
email". Bellcore, my employer, decided not to pursue the application because it was deemed to be
of little commercial potential, and thus not worth the bother to
differentiate from two pieces of prior art (John Vittal and John
Hogg). That was a smart commercial decision, because the patent would
have expired in 2012, six years before Google launched AMP for Email,
the first thing that could have seriously infringed on it. As of 2021, dynamic
email is still sometimes seen as the "next big thing" in the email
world, but I increasingly suspect it won't become common until made
more necessary by
speed of light delays in interplanetary communication.
In 2013, I applied for
a patent on "Sharing Artifacts in
Permission-Protected Archives." This time my employer, Mimecast,
persisted, and US patent #11,163,898 was issued on
November 2, 2021. This invention could allow organizations to be much
more efficient by mining their email archives for redundancies and
opportunities for internal collaboration. However, whoever actually
tries to do this first will require significant resources and determination to work through all
the legalities and the privacy details, so I rather doubt that I will live to see it happen.
My forthcoming book on how the Internet affects the human
spiritual journey. The most recent draft is titled "Digital
Sacraments: Finding a Spiritual Path in the Information Age" but that could still change.
My amazing children and grandchildren.
More than You Need To Know
For over 40 years, I've been collecting my favorite
quotations. You can
sample one
here
(reload to sample another)
or see them all
here,
here, and
here.
My wife Trina and I are empty nesters; our remaining descendants
live in Chicago, New York
City, and northern California. Two of my brothers and two of my
daughters have public personas:
Eliot is professor
Vice Chancellor of NYU
Seth is
Senior Science Reporter for the Associated Press (AP), and is
periodically
attacked by nut jobs.
Miriam is a historian,
writer, and comic afficionado.
Lea is a writer and author
My Meyers-Briggs type is very strongly ENFP:
I was a lifelong sufferer of depressive disorder, but it had been
well controlled by medication for decades before my
amazing life
transformation in 2021 somehow made them unnecessary. I urge anyone who is
battling depression to seek help. The right treatment can not only
save your life, it can make life better than you can probably imagine.
Like most of us, I too rarely reflect on how lucky I am in general,
and in particular to have had so many remarkable people in my life.
Here are a few of the ones I miss most.
