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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.
Wow, it's the original Duke Nukem Forever dev team!
I heard he still takes the time to get his picture taken for Symantec products that have the Norton name on them. They still pay him royalties over using his name, though his original software has been rewritten a lot since he sold it to Symantec and he cannot claim ownership of it anymore.
I think Peter Norton ran out of ideas, but had made so much money that he decided to buy a small island and start buying art with his billions for investment purposes should the world economy collapse due to something like, oh I dunno, crappy commercial software having so many security holes in it that everyone gets their identities stolen by hackers who withdrawal all money from bank accounts and cash in stocks from data stolen from commercial database servers they installed some trojan on when the system administrator clicked on one of their web ads while he was looking for how to fix the problem of the server crashing 12 times a day on some web forum. Then whole nations' economies collapse, except for some small island nation that Peter Norton bought and stores his art collection on?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
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
I heard he still takes the time to get his picture taken for Symantec products that have the Norton name on them. They still pay him royalties over using his name,
Can he sue Symantec for defamation of character? The real Norton Utilities were lean, mean, useful, and essential. The current Norton-branded crap from Symantec is slow, bloated, is DRM-laden, and doesn't play well with either itself or with others. Kind of like the Anti-Norton Utilities.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
>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.
I was on a panel with Peter at a conference a few weeks ago. He still looks just like he did on the box covers in the 80s. Our talk was on The Future of Software and Technology or Something Like That, and of the 8 people on the panel, I found Peter's remarks to be the most eccentric and Sci Fi. He was talking about head's up displays in our eyeglasses and things of that nature.
After we all had our say, the moderator asked if anyone of us had anything to add. The mod looked at Peter, at which point Peter, who was sitting with his arms crossed looking either bored or disgusted (I couldn't tell), stated, "Yes, I have something to say. I am out of here. See ya." So he got up and left.
Most of the audience did not come from tech backgrounds, so I don't think even 10% of them had any idea who he was, or how much of a name he had in the olden days.
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