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Programmers At Work, 22 Years Later
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Feb 21, 2008 03:15 PM
from the still-crazy-after-all-these-years dept.
from the still-crazy-after-all-these-years dept.
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."
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wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:wow (Score:4, Funny)
At least they didn't refer to "difference engines."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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* text is too wide, 66 characters is said to be the ideal. At my resolution, I got lines with >150 chars,
* some separation between each post would help,
* some background color or border separating the menu and the header area from the body would help
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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In both cases, I disagree. The former would render the text far too small to be comfortably read on (windowed) SVGA while producing huge letters on (fullscreen) WSXGA. The latter also has it's share of problems, think rasterized images that ought to stretch the text's width, think ads embedded besides the text (requiring a given width in pixels).
Also, to be pedantic: Any markup specifing the width of text is
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Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Works just fine in lynx, too
Parent
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Horrible, Isn't It? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Parent
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Now get off my porch! I have some C to write.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Cold Dark Server Room (Score:5, Funny)
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
Parent
Sounds like Fire in the Valley (Score:5, Informative)
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Andy Hertzfeld (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Life's not fair (Score:2, Funny)
Inaccuracy - Gates is no longer richest (Score:5, Informative)
A billion ain't what it used to be ...
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!@#$@ off!!!
Superman comics were out in the 1930s. Credit where credit's due.
Bill Gates popularized the phrase "blue screen of death" by demonstrating it at CES.
Who is that? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Who is that? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Exploiter "of" - sorry.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Informative (Score:5, Funny)
Nice! (Score:3, Informative)
Peter Norton (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Peter Norton (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Parent
Re:Peter Norton (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Peter Norton (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Peter Norton (Score:4, Insightful)
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Duke Nukem Forever section... (Score:4, Funny)
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I think most of them are just waiting for Raskin and Kildall to get off their asses and finish their assignments. They're good programmers so it should be any time now.
very good book (Score:5, Funny)
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 [kisrael.com]
Not Dead Yet (Score:2)
It's a revealing statement about the age group that drove the industry in that era that only two of the people profiled are now known to be dead this many years later.
Missing: Bill Budge, Pinball Construction Set (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
I regularly foist this book on my students... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Interesting, but... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Excellent book, as is _Inventors at Work_ (Score:2)
And the material on Bill Gates is an interesting read in his own right. (And yes, Bill Gates was a programmer).
_Inventors At Work_, also published by Microsoft Press (and regrettably out of print), by a different author, is excellent, too.
I wonder if there are any other titles in the same series?
Jef Raskin (1943-2005) (Score:3, Informative)
RIP Jef. On a lighter note, check out his son's work at Humanized [humanized.com]
Edit: Looks like he just updated it. I guess someone informed him of Raskin's departure...
Mostly retired. Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Jim Butterfield and other pre-borg FOSS hackers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
My personal experiences with many of them. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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. Ph