[TriLUG] even more memories

[Rick DeNatale]

On 12/14/05, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you haven't seen Triumph of the Nerds I highly recommend seeing it.
>  Screenshots of the Xerox Alto and insider shots of PARC are worth it
> alone but the gem, for me, were interviews with the ALTAIR creators
> and the IBM Project Managers that created the XP.  The Mac stuff was
> really cool too, but everyone kind of "knows" Woz and Jobs.

For some interesting anecdotes about the Mac team, have a look at
http://www.folklore.org/index.py it's a sort of wiki apparently run by
Andy Hertzfeld with lots of personal recollections by the original
people.

I've had the opportunity to meet Woz once, and Jobs twice.  Woz is
just as he's perceived, quite a nice guy.  Jobs is one of the most
charismatic guys I've encountered.  He might make a few questionable
decisions, but he's a born leader, and often makes good ones. The
first time I met him was when I drove out to see him introduce the
Macintosh to the Boston Computer Society in 1984.  The second time was
in a business context. IBM had made some investments in NeXT and was
licensing parts of NeXTStep.  Despite the opinions of some Steve Jobs
is pretty technically savvy.

On the other hand, I was less impressed by Mr. Gates.  I sat next to
him in his conference room while some of his senior engineers were
presenting their plans for a new operating system to a small group of
us from IBM.  They were proposing a huge inheritance based framework
system using strong typing, an idea which was popular back then, Apple
was pursuing a similar idea with Pink (which eventually evolved into
Taligent). The problem with this idea is that it doesn't scale very
well.  As the function grows, the strong typing becomes very
restrictive, and worse, it's very hard if not impossible to evolve the
system while maintaining backward compatibility.  I kept pushing the
presenter on these points, while Gates was rocking back and forth in
his chair next to me.  The best answer that the presenter came up with
was "We'll get it right the first time, cause we have our best people
working on it." to which my reply was something like "If your best
people think that they can get it right the first time they can't be
very good."

Gates finally interrupted his presenter and told him "You guys don't
explain our stuff very well."

--
Rick DeNatale

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