On 12/14/05, Greg Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/ -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
