Henry Spencer is author of C News and The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. Whilst working at the University of Toronto he ran the first USENET site outside the US, starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s.

He is a highly regarded space enthusiast and historian, and is a familiar and respected presence on several space forums, including USENET and the Internet. His knowledge of space history is such that the "I Corrected Henry Spencer" virtual T-shirt award was created as a reward for anyone who can catch him in an error of fact. Thus far, there are few winners.

Henry is also the author of regex, from which the original Tcl and Perl regular expressions were derived.

He planned the Canadian Solar Sail project (now defunct), and was Software Architect for MOST, a Canadian science microsatellite dedicated to studying variable light from stars and extrasolar planets launched by Eurockot in the first quarter of 2003.

He was technical lead on the FreeS/WAN project, implementing the IPsec cryptography protocols for Linux.

External links

• http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html
• http://www.eurockot.com/
• http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/451?x-t=book.view
• http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/henry.html
• http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bin2/011205a.asp
• http://www.freeswan.org