Slashdot Mirror
Programmers At Work, 22 Years Later
Firebones writes "In 1986, the book Programmers at Work presented interviews with 19 programmers and software designers from the early days of personal computing including Charles Simonyi, Andy Hertzfeld, Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates, and Pac Man programmer Toru Iwatani. Leonard Richardson tracked down these pioneers and has compiled a nice summary of where they are now, 22 years later."
It's also licensed under the creative commons and has not one ad. Can your site say that?
Sometimes, a bulleted list of black text on a white background is a godsend to these old eyes and more than gets the jobs done.
My work here is dung.
I absolutely loathe sites that don't expand to match the width of my browser.
On a 1920x1200 screen any site that only lets me see 66 characters will earn my wrath forever.
Works just fine in lynx, too
I don't care why you're posting AC
I take it your comment implies there was something wrong with it? Lets look at if from a perspective of communication they way we might critique any work of language print or otherwise. I will pose the questions to you but answer from my perspective?
Did you experience any difficulty or distraction while trying to acquire and understand the message the author was trying to send?
I did not.
Did the presentation cause confusion or ambiguity of any kind?
I don't think it did.
This one is a little machine specific, did you have to use any special tools or software such as specific browsers, decoders, certain display resolutions?
Nope not me and it looks like it would render fine even for someone using links, but I did not try.
Has the media proven robust?
Well its a website and so far its stood up to slashdot traffic, so its fairly tough, probably thanks to its small size. It would be easy to cache for the likes of Google to sense it has no external files, like css sheets, graphics etc.
All and all I think it was an excellent solution to for making the information available that as the author wanted to do so and deliver it to a broad audience. Its a real shame more of the web is not like that. Ok now go back to your visual studio Silverlight, script ridden abortion now.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Or sites that don't shrink to match the width of my browser. I shouldn't be forced to use the horizontal scrollbar to read text.
My question is. Retired how? Obviously a few are fabulously rich. But of the others, how many were forced into retirement by an ungrateful company? How many quit in disgust when profit motive sucked all the life out of programming? I am fortunate to have in my employ several employees who worked on exciting and challenging technology at Bell Laboratories, working on various aspects of switching systems which are still in use around the world today. However, Lucent forced all of them into early retirement. I know of other highly skilled technical people who couldn't take the annoyances any more and have quit to work at places like Home Depot (I'm not talking the IT department either).
Maybe it's just me, but I don't feel that the IT industry appreciates the people who made them great. I'm not an old codger bemoaning my fate either. I'm under 40, but I'm just observing what I feel is an injustice done to the greats of my dad's generation. I don't hold great hope for my generation either. I work in IT, and I love IT, but IT treats me like crap, so I'm building up my inventory of rent houses, and one day I will abandon my abusive lover and work quietly at home doing my own programming projects for the sheer joy of it just like I did back in 6th grade.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The guy wrote some damn nice utilities in the old days. Credit where it's due. However, I don't know what he was like as a person back then but if what you're saying is true he sounds like an asshole today. No amount of expertise excuses it. When I hear about Gates and Jobs abusing people or bullying people I don't think "wow I wish I could see it first hand". I think "Wow, what an asshole! Nothing you do gives you the right to treat your staff that way. Thank the flying spagetti monster I don't work for you!".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer