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."
killer site design....
If you like reading about the earlier days of personal computing, I'd also recommend Fire in the Valley by Freiburger and Swine which has a ton of cool anecdotes and dramatic confrontations.
So, like 8 years ago when I was a sophomore in High School, my friend and I used Yahoo! people search to find Andy Hertzfeld, then used Dialpad.com (back when it was free...) to call him.
We left a really, really long voicemail message on his answering machine saying how "insanely great" we thought he was and stuff. He never called us back but changed his phone number to an unlisted one shortly thereafter...
I hereby declare myself the biggest Mac "fanboy" ever. and first post.
A billion ain't what it used to be ...
I recognize most of the names on the list, but who is this Bill Gates character?
Thank God for evolution.
I've always wondered whatever happened to Bill Gates.
Damn microsoft keyboard....
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I have this book, by chance, because a professor left it out on a table and wrote, free books. A really good read, shows that to get to the top you need skill, dedication, and some luck. Oh, and in the case of CS, a burning desire to know how the machine operates at all levels...
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
Another big name (often forgotten). Last time I heard about him, he was an art collector and trader.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Wow, it's the original Duke Nukem Forever dev team!
This was a very good book. Probably my favorite bit was hearing the history of Pac-Man
Best Quote:
"I thought that one of the things women like to do is eat. So I started working on a game concept based on eating."
--Toru Iwatari, inventor of Pac-Man
Hearing about the SwyftCard idea was cool too.
Some of the best things were the artifacts, from in house materials to source code to random sketches and napkin plans:
I made some banners for The Gamers Quarter with the early sketches of Pac-Man:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2007.11.13
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
As a teenager in the early '80s, I wasn't terribly aware of the people who were actually getting paid to do what I and my friends were figuring out how to do on the TRS-80 and Apple ][. But one name that percolated up was Bill Budge, the programmer behind the wildly popular Pinball Construction Set. It was probably the closest thing you could get to The Sims on a 6502.
Oddly enough, I don't think I ever played it myself. Or rather, I never built anything -- I probably played some of my friends' creations. His name stuck in my mind thanks to a list in some computer magazine about "Opcodes we'd like to see". (That's an assembler term, for you High-Level Language junkies.) The only one I still remember was "PBB -- Program like Bill Budge".
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
... they just as regularly roll their eyes when they see the gian head of Bill Gates.
Then they just as regularly come back and thank me.
Good to see a recap that these people made a difference and are (mostly) still doing so.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
>Jef Raskin. Then: Macintosh project creator, founder of Information Appliance. His excellent web site is still up. Author of well-respected book The Humane Interface. The project he's working on in PaW, the SwyftCard, was a minor success.
RIP Jef. On a lighter note, check out his son's work at Humanized
Edit: Looks like he just updated it. I guess someone informed him of Raskin's departure...
Three years! In (Moore's) computer years that's like 18 generations, prior to the great depression of dotcoms or even the Civil (browser) War.
It's amazing that some employer is kind enough to provide this old geriatric coder a job. I try to stay out of the way of the new blood and stave off death for a few more years but my old concepts of "EJBs" and "Java Server Faces" is just embarrassing to them.
A new recruit came in the other day, I told him not to feel bad and we'd make him 1337 soon enough. He just chuckled and patted me on the head and said, "There there, old timer, we'll get you some streaming Matlock off the server while we clean up your mess."
I miss my friends that have already moved on from this life to the next, those that are managers already. I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friends.
So please, when you see an ancient dinosaur like me lumbering around trying to figure out what the f*ck ruby is and why I have to put it on rails and then wonder how that was any different than what I used to be doing, please be kind. Have patience, my mind isn't as nimble as it once was. Three years of Jack Daniels and coding ravages a man and leaves him a dusty shell.
Just promise me you'll never forget me when I'm put in the basement next to a pile of boxes next month. Please come visit, please!
My work here is dung.
So while we may not be able to reconcile our differences now, I realize that at the end of the day we might find ourselves in the same spot of alienation and place of decay.
In a different reality, I might have called you friend
My work here is dung.
Booth was willing to give his life for his country. That makes him a patriot. Wont debate if he was right or wrong in his actions as that isnt my intent. The intent is to make people think, which you have done.
And back on topic i wasn't speaking just of Mr Gates, a lot of the 'big players' that made it out of the 80's either had help, ( like rich parents) or really good luck ( location, location, location ). ( actually, that goes for most people that have made it big, they often build on the success of the family before them. if they had to start from scratch like the rest of us, they would still be like the rest of us.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree about successful people having help -- rich parents, or powerful connections. What is even more annoying is that those who genuinely innovate (someone like Dan Bricklin comes to mind) will often have their work stolen/copied/sidelined by someone in a more powerful position. The corruption of the system always approaches 100%.
All we little people can do is try to give credit to the true innovators, geniuses and hard workers. In the latter category I would place David Harris of Pegasus fame. Philippe Kahn would go in the true innovator (Sidekick) and genius (his compilers vs. microsoft ones) categories. And if Paul Katz were alive, it is doubtful we could give him enough credit and reward for PKzip. He made ARC look bad and we benefited from that.
In the "from out of left field" category, I would suggest Neil Rubenking. I think he has a vast and deep understanding of PCs and, unlike Jerry can-never-get-one-computer-working Pournelle he has helped a large number of us over many years from the back pages of PCMag. Steve Ciarcia did the same thing, but for hardware guys.
I come here for the love
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.
This guy, Charlie Anderson, wasn't a big enough success to warrant inclusion in Programmers at Work, but his basic source code for Tuesday Night Football on the Apple II was some of the first code I ever had a chance to read. Be sure to visit his virtual PC museum and check out the 1980 letter he preserved that showed his royalty arrangement for what had to be about 500-1000 lines of Basic source code for the game. I'd love to see the source again, but wasn't able to track it down. I'm still looking for Tuesday Night Football.
There's another great book, Founders at Work, that covers entrepreneurs. What's striking to me is the difference between the relatively humble and down-to-earth programmers of the early personal computing era compared to the egos on display from the post-bubble entrepreneurial bubble. More here on that contrast. A few of the founders, like Joshua Schacter and James Hong, seem to be cut from the same mold as the Programmers at Work guys, but they're the stark exceptions.
O.K. I know "PC" is now well integrated into the popular vocabulary as an X86 machine which runs Microsoft Windows and for most outside the Slashdot readership, "programmers" now means those who understand Visual Basic and Excel and "FOSS" means something with a linux kernel under the hood.
But once there was a time when home computers had no DRM, corporations or hobbiests would document the hardware interfaces and share their knowledge and source code via tapes, printouts and magazines such as Compute! I was surprised that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Butterfield and other Commodore/Amiga/Atari... hackers were not on this list.
I'll never forget the article Jim wrote for one of those classic computer magazines where he showed how to copy the Commodore 64 BASIC interpretor into volatile RAM, fix a bug with a 1 byte poke and tell the CPU to use that RAM based interpretor.
The bug was that a program-stopping error occured any time you tried to access the ASCII value of a null string:
Jim Butterfield is no longer with us but the optimism and excitement he brought to the world of computers is far more real and lasting than the slash and burn corporate domination brought upon us by the likes of Bill Gates.e.g. print asc("")
I found that this one byte bug existed on nearly all versions of BASIC available on small computers at the time. Atari, Apple, Amiga, Vic 20, IBM-PC junior. What do these machines have in common? They all purchased parts of their BASIC interpretor from a company called Microsoft.
I remember reading that book a couple of decades ago. I think I was given a copy by Jon Sachs. I am amazed at how many of these people I actually worked with, or even had meaningful conversations with in my life:
... and some more virgins."
... a lot. I like Ray, and communicate with him once or twice a year, even tho he works for Microsoft.
Gary Kildall: I never met him in person, but corresponded with him by telephone and email a bit back in 1982-3 when I was working on CP/M and MS-DOS BIOS for 3R Computers' TC-1 and TC-100. I really shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but Kildall was an ass.
John Warnock: I really only met him twice at some Adobe functions. Adobe was next door to Verity, and they embedded some Verity technology into Acrobat, so we were over there a bit.
Dan Bricklin: I met him once at some small conference where he was pushing his prototyping product "Dan Bricklin's Demo Program". I remember being interested because I was doing a bit of rapid prototyping with NeXT's InterfaceBuilder.
Bob Frankston: Was kept locked in a secret room at Lotus in the mid-to-late 80's when I was working on Lotus Manuscript. I met him twice. I believe his official job title was "I'm Bob Frankston, dammit! I invented the friggin VisiCalc. Have you heard of it? Now get me a sandwich
Jon Sachs: Sachs actually started the Lotus Manuscript project, so I worked with him extensively from 1986-1988. I also met him briefly in 1981 (82?) at Data General (I was hired about 2 weeks before he left). Of all the people on the list I have met, Sachs was definitely the most modest and the coolest. Even though he was worth like $130M at the time, he used to drive this beat-to-crap old Jeep. When that finally gave up the ghost, he bought an Audi Quattro - used.
Ray Ozzie: Another Lotus Manuscript contact. Ray was running Iris, developing Notes for Lotus. They wanted to use the same printer driver technology that Manuscript used. I also remember Ray when he worked at Data General in the early 80's. Although I didn't work with him directly, I do remember him playing Snake
Not mentioned above, but just as significant:
Mitch Kapor: Founded Lotus with Sachs and was still running it when we were developing Manuscript. I first met him at some big Lotus gala featuring the Pointer Sisters or the Pips or someone like that. I think they were celebrating the one-millionth wheelbarrow full of money they had dumped into the Charles River because they had just too damn much money. I spent much more time talking to him when I met Kapor at some conference pushing his uber-calendar project, Chandler. Chandler can best be described as the "Black Hole of Calendaring" - it is so massive that not even light can escape its gravitational attraction. I've seen many good programmers sucked into that black hole.
Steve Jobs: Like Kapor, Jobs is not a programmer, so not featured in the book. My experience with the Steve occurs during his time at NeXT Computer. I was an early adopter of NeXT. I was won over when Steve demo'ed the system at Lotus in 1988, and have been using NeXTStep/OpenStep/MacOSX as my primary development environment since. Steve once offered me a job after I gave detailed feedback on some broken app with suggestions on how to make it better. I've spoken to him only once since he returned to Apple.
Steve Wozniak: Woz lived in the next town over when I was in Sunnyvale. I met him once when he was promoting his tech-heavy school for kids. He was a major influence to my "give back to the community when you have been fortunate" ideals. If life were Star Trek (it isn't?) then Woz is the result of some "Enemy Within"-style transporter accident -- with the evil Bill Gates materializing shortly after. Woz is definitely the funniest and coolest person on this list.