Tony Mason
Technical consulting and expert witness

Nearly four decades in systems software, from operating-system kernels and distributed file systems to the reliability of large language models.

Tony Mason, who appears in patents, court records, and books as W. Anthony Mason, has worked in systems software since the late 1980s. He began in operating-system and distributed-systems research at Stanford, on David Cheriton's V system, then spent four years at Transarc building distributed file systems: AFS, DCE/DFS, and Episode, the last of which still runs today as the POSIX file system of IBM's z/OS, more than thirty years on. From 1994 to 2016 he was a Consulting Partner at OSR Open Systems Resources, leading Windows file system and filter-driver architecture for more than 160 technology companies; the twelve US patents, two of the three books, and the still-shipping File Encryption Solution Framework date from that period. Since 2016 he has worked independently through wamason.com LLC as a consultant and expert witness. From 2017 to 2025 he returned to graduate study, completing a PhD at the University of British Columbia under Margo Seltzer and Ada Gavrilovska; his dissertation, Indaleko, built a unified personal index across heterogeneous storage. His current research concerns the reliability of large language model systems.

Career

The same arc, in chronological detail.

  • wamason.com LLC 2016–present
    Systems Architect & Researcher · Remote (US)
    Technical architecture and AI due-diligence for engineering teams: deployment architecture, AI reliability, and the cost/quality/latency trade-offs of running AI features in production.
    Research on LLM systems reliability (six 2026 arXiv preprints), including demand paging for LLM context windows.
  • University of British Columbia 2017–2025
    Doctoral Researcher & Sessional Instructor · Vancouver, BC
    PhD in Computer Science (2025). Built Indaleko, a unified personal index integrating storage metadata, activity context, and AI-driven query translation, evaluated against ~32.5 million files across eight distinct storage platforms.
    Taught undergraduate and graduate distributed systems, graduate operating systems, and undergraduate cloud computing; mentored graduate students.
  • Microsoft Research, Cambridge UK 2020
    Visiting Researcher (fixed-term) · Cambridge, UK
    Built a discrete-event simulation of holographic storage media wear; work contributed to "Holographic Storage for the Cloud" (ACM Transactions on Storage, 2025).
  • OSR Open Systems Resources 1994–2016
    Consulting Partner; Vice-President & Treasurer · Amherst, NH
    Led Windows file system filter-driver architecture and delivery for 160+ technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, HP, Dell, Intel, EMC, NetApp, Seagate, and Symantec.
    Designed the File Encryption Solution Framework (FESF) and the isolation-filter architecture for transparent file encryption, compression, and streaming data delivery, still shipping in 2026 and a precursor to container/cloud storage virtualization patterns.
    Designed the FSDK filter driver that underpinned Microsoft App-V for more than a decade before Microsoft reimplemented the pattern across its cloud, container, and version-control workflows.
  • Transarc Corporation 1989–1993
    Member of Technical Staff (later Area Manager) · Pittsburgh, PA
    Built distributed file systems on unreliable hardware, AFS, DCE/DFS, and the Episode file system, which remains in production today as the POSIX file system of IBM's z/OS platform 35+ years later.
  • Stanford University 1987–1989
    V Operating System / Distributed Systems Group · Stanford, CA
    Kernel and distributed-systems work on the V Operating System in David Cheriton's Distributed Systems Group, an early microkernel and distributed OS research platform.

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science
University of British Columbia, 2025. Supervised by Margo Seltzer and Ada Gavrilovska. Dissertation: Indaleko: The Unified Personal Index.
Master of Science, Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017.
Bachelor of Science, Mathematics
University of Chicago, 1987.

Teaching

From 2017 to 2025 Tony taught at the University of British Columbia as a sessional instructor, covering undergraduate and graduate distributed systems, graduate operating systems, and undergraduate cloud computing, alongside graduate-level teaching at Georgia Tech and the supervision of graduate students. The fuller academic and research record, including publications and current work, is at fsgeek.ca.

Contact

Tony works through wamason.com LLC. Email is the most reliable way to reach him; the consulting and expert pages describe how engagements are scoped, and professional links are in the footer below.