I first met Roger 32 years ago today. I think it was when Ian Sharp announced his retirement. There was a two-day event at IPSharp—Peter went to help my team with a problem so I could stay. Later he called to say he was back home to watch the game but it was interrupted by an earthquake. I was sitting across from Joey Tuttle and another presenter from San Francisco who seemed non-plused as if it was a weather report of rain until later that evening as they related the next day how close catastrophe came to loved ones.
This Day in Weather History October 17 - The 1989 !EARTHQUAKE! World Series On October 17, 1989 the "Bay Area Series" featuring the East Bay Oakland Athletics VS the West Bay San Francisco Giants, was scheduled to start Game 3 at 2:30 p.m. pst. at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park…...that did not happen this day in weather history. I was invited to join a group from IPSharp the next evening and Ken introduced me to Roger and told me he was implementing J. I admit at the time thinking he would be overwhelmed by the task—who knew how tenaciously Roger would pursue that goal. I could see how devoted he was to Ken. Years later there was some event that brought Joey back to Toronto and I met Joey and Roger for lunch. At some point I asked Roger about whether J would benefit by a financial backer or entrepreneur who could understand how it could be deployed to advantage. I started to tell him about the engineer from Sun Microcomputers who helped me implement when I migrated our mainframe APL applications. Kevin founded a company that sold seven years later for $3.1 billion—Roger stopped me right there. I agreed I was probably mistaken on the amount—it had been a few years but Roger was so skeptical he got out his phone to look up the Solect sale on the internet—I had inverted the numbers it should have been US$1.3 billion. > Solect remains the largest software company sale in Canadian history, at $1.6 > billion, to Amdocs Inc I was out by 1.8 billion but Roger said that wasn’t so bad as he expected an acquisition price between $30 and $300 million I am saddened to hear about Roger’s death. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
