Alumni Profiles

In the late 1990s, the initial "wow" about the power of the Internet was turning to "whoa." Teenagers were chatting online with strangers. A corporate secret could be leaked with the hit of a return key. "I saw people at work in chat rooms just goofing off. And I knew that the products for parents all fell into the filtering category," says computer software entrepreneur Doug Fowler '82. "And nobody was talking about it."

In 1999, Fowler and Ron Chesley '83, who had partnered before on successful software ventures, launched SpectorSoft and its first product, Spector, a powerful computer-monitoring program. Today, their five award-winning products take snapshots--as frequently as one per second--of a computer screen without the user's knowledge. Parents and bosses can see simple details of activity or view keystroke by keystroke what the user typed.

Fowler knew from the beginning that SpectorSoft would spark debate among privacy advocates. "I knew it would be useful to both employers and parents, and I knew it would be controversial and get press." They saw the controversy as a good thing. "We got tons of press," recalls Chesley. "We were on every major media outlet--and it was free!"

More seriously, they point out that since computers and the Internet have great capacity to do ill, parents and employers are just being responsible when they make sure their children, or companies, come to no harm. Criminal evidence has been gathered using the software to help convict murderers and pedophiles, they say. "Parents can have it on the computer just in case," says Fowler. "They don't necessarily look on a regular basis, but they can get an overview. The important thing is that they have it there in case something goes wrong."

Fowler and Chesley became friends at UNH, where Fowler, an interdisciplinary math major, picked out Chesley, a computer science major, to compete against academically. Chesley remembers Fowler as the "whiz kid." But both found UNH academically stimulating. In the '80s, Chesley got started with a computer terminal in his apartment that functioned over a phone line. "It was only 300 baud--that's about one-thousandth of the speed now!"