Michael Lewis Profiles Jim Clark in NY Times

GrokSoup writes "Magnificently loopy -- and spot-on -- profile of Jim Clark in Sunday's NY Times Magazine. In it, writer Michael Lewis manages to make the profoundly unsympathetic multibillionaire Clark at least somewhat sympathetic, while simultaneously dissecting the venture capital food chain, getting inside the Valley culture, describing Clark's many missteps, and generally doing a yeoman job of promoting his upcoming book. Read it." Great stuff! Up there with The Soul of a New Machine, but about the financial side of things. I strongly second GrokSoup's "read it."

Comments

Jim Clark's first job

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the first one I know of was at The New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab. NYIT was a great place to be (if you were at the Lab, not if you were a student), and an astonishing number of people who went on to become the core of computer graphics worked there in the late seventies and early eighties.

The Lab was a completely anarchic group of researchers, doing whatever we could think of with some of the best toys available at the time. Becasue of the lack of focus, many blind alleys were explored, but on the other hand many interesting discoveries were made.

Clark blew into NYIT like a whirlwind, with a bunch of ideas for doing all sorts of things, mostly combinations of custom hardware and software (in that era, most interesting work required building of custom hardware, as the general purpose computers were expensive, big, and slow). I remember several times when Jim was whaling away at a whiteboard, drawing stuff, trying to get people interested in building his latest dream. And they were good ideas, in general, but it was hard to get people interested.

The end of the era came when Clark wrote a letter to Evans and Sutherland, describing some ideas he had, and suggesting that maybe he could work better there than at Tech. Somebody stole the letter from the line printer queue, and forwarded it to the Chancellor of the school, and Clark was given his walking papers immediately. It's one of many poor business decisions that NYIT made, but in perfect synchrony with all of the others.

AC for today -- I'd love to work with Clark again if the job was right :)