Wes Kussmaul

Founder of the Kussmaul Encyclopedia, the first online encyclopedia, and developer of online identity security, Kussmaul is also the author of several books about online security. In 1971, while stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base (SAC), he received a degree in physics from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Missouri. After his military service, he became a systems analyst at Liberty Mutual, developing mainframe database applications.

His positions in sales management for Gould Incorporated, Benson SA and Tektronix, Inc. and his territory in the Cambridge, Massachusetts research and development community put him in contact with the pre-web Internet pioneers. In 1980, he developed the Kussmaul Encyclopedia, which came complete with its own computer system. His online encyclopedic database cross-referenced topics by employing an early example of hypertext. In 1981 he founded the company that became Delphi, but was first known as Kussmaul Encyclopedia. In 1982, it featured the ASCII-based encyclopedia, chat, email, newswires and bulletin boards. On March 15, 1983, the Delphi name was first used by General Videotex Corporation.

Kussmaul recalled: "Delphi was actually launched in October 1981, at Jerry Milden's Northeast Computer Show, as the Kussmaul Encyclopedia—the world's first commercially available computerized encyclopedia. (Frank Greenagle's Arête Encyclopedia was announced at about the same time, but you couldn't buy it until much later.) The Kussmaul Encyclopedia was actually a complete home computer system (your choice of Tandy Color Computer or Apple II) with a 300-bps modem that dialed up to a VAX computer hosting our online encyclopedia database. We sold the system for about the same price and terms as Britannica. People wandered around in it and were impressed with the ease with which they could find information. We had a wonderful cross-referencing system that turned every occurrence of a word that was the name of an entry in the encyclopedia into a hypertext link—in 1981! (Phil Macneil gets credit for that one.)"

As Delphi's CEO, Kussmaul launched a spin-off company, Global Villages, Inc., to provide magazine publishers with the tools and information that allowed them to offer online services to their subscribers and advertisers under their own name. He sold the hosting portion of Global Villages Inc. to a partnership that became part of NTT Verio, an operation known as The Village Group. This occurred after Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought Delphi in 1993. Delphi also carried the Grolier's Online Encyclopedia, which by 1989 had 31,000 entries. One of the contributors to the Kussmaul Encyclopedia was Dudley M. Marchi, who wrote the following entries in May 1984: "Thomas Pynchon," "Harold Pinter," "The Beatles," "John Fowles," "John Lennon," "Michel Foucault."

Kussmaul has subsequently served as the CIO and CEO of The Authenticity Institute, which he developed in conjunction with his two books: "Quiet Enjoyment" and "Own Your Privacy" (PKI Press). It has been a business incubator that focused on commercial, non-commercial and non-profit enterprises that promoted authenticity of identity online. All three were a response to the architectural flaws of the internet that make identity security difficult and an impending authenticity inflection point, which demonstrates a paramount need for authenticity among internet users.

The Authenticity Institute and its members produced Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure (QEI), which was the construction of "safe spaces" online where users could operate without worry of identity theft and manipulation. QEI was a form of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that used personal assertions of identity, attestation of identity by a public authority, and a set of "keys" for encrypting and decrypting information which were controlled by the user in order to create and ensure these "safe spaces." The Institute counted five members that directly contributed to QEI: Reliable ID, a commercial branch of notaries that attested to assertions of individual identity; StartCom, a commercial group in charge of hosting and managing certification authority; The City of Osmio, which provided duly constituted public authority, backed by the International Telecommunications Union, to all attestations of identity; Authentrust Inc, serving mid- to large-sized identity management software enterprises to ensure the identity of people given access to their networks; and Internet Child Protection Inc, a non-profit that verified and made known the age and gender of all site users.