Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 16th, 2021
The Showstopper Show
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 16th, 2021.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 16th included special guests G. Pascal Zachary (see gpascalzachary.com), and Jessamyn West (see jessamyn.medium.com), as well as Dan Cross, Tom Lyon, Josh Clulow, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- G. Pascal Zachary’s “Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft” book
- Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” book
- [@0:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=46) “The endless debate of NT vs Unix.”
- Bryan: My whole career was kind of defined by going where Windows wasn’t. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I found was a real time capsule from software development in the 90’s.
- [@2:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=166) Jessamyn: There was some familial impact (from developing DG Eclipse) that wasn’t mentioned in the book.
- “O, Engineers!” retrospective from wired
- [@6:30](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=390) What was Kidder’s process? “He lived in my house!”
- [@8:32](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=512) Zachary interviewed family members extensively. > People couldn’t leave, they were staying at the office all the time.
- [@14:23](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=863) I do feel this is a time capsule. A time before two mega-trends hit: the Internet and open source.
- [@17:33](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1053) Microsoft was kind of a joke software company in the early 90’s. > Dave Cutler was a force of nature.
- [@19:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1199) No one understood why someone was good at coding. It was a mystery to everyone, why there was such a wide stratification of coders. > There were projects that never saw the light of day.
- Ashton-Tate, dBase > There was a sense from Cutler and Perazzoli, that leadership of the team, > that these guys at Microsoft really didn’t get how serious the process > of building this battleship was.
- I think the level of anguish did surprise me.
- [@23:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1439)
In “Soul of the New Machine,” the machine was the star, and people served it. East Coast vs West Coast attitudes. > On the West Coast, the personal computer were supposed to help you > actualize your counter-cultural values. - [@26:09](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1569) Crashes. > Wozniak dreamed of owning > his own PDP > computer, which cost as much as a house. So he was aware of the robustness > of the minicomputer, and by contrast, the puny power of a personal computer.
- Thirtysomething > Dave Cutler was not cuddly. He was menacing, he could lose his temper. > And I tried not to get to close to him physically for that reason. > There were two looming father figures in Cutler and Gates. > And I think it created a lot of anxiety.
- [@29:52](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1792) The stakes for NT at Microsoft were high.
- Fred Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” book > It was a watershed moment in the history of computing. > It was more like the last battleship, rather than the next frontier.
- Bryan: I didn’t realize this, that Gates was arguing against memory protection with Cutler. From our perspective, shipping an operating system without memory protection, in an era when microprocessors supported it, is malpractice.
- [@33:14](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1994) Cutler’s vendetta against Unix. > Conflict was at the heart of innovation at Microsoft at that time.
- Mitch Kapor of Lotus. > These early personal computer innovators were dismissed and sometimes > humiliated by mainstream big iron people of the 60’s and 70’s.
- Bill Gates’ “The Road Ahead” book doesn’t mention the internet.
- Zachary’s “Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century” book > Computers on the West Coast were seen as extensions of your creativity, > and a tool for liberation. And for a long time that dominated the horizons.
In 2005 Gates and Ballmer don’t want to do cloud computing. “Who’s gonna want to put their stuff in the cloud?” We’ve found that computing is a collective experience.
- [@38:28](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2308) Email and personal messaging
- Sun Ray thin client computer
- Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s “The UNIX time-sharing system” paper > Unix was an experiment in collaboration.
- RSX-11 for the PDP-11. And VMS for the VAX. > The attitude of looking down on Unix (as undesigned, academic) is > carried forward by Microsofties today.
- Tom: You can forgive Cutler’s misgivings, because Unix pretty much stole the thunder out of VMS.
- [@42:24](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2544) Interviews for the book. Family members perspective on workplace behavior.
- Betty Shanahan, Society of Women Engineers. Brief Q&A
- EAGLE (Eclipse Appreciation and Gratitude for Lonely Evenings) award > Betty’s husband got an award for having to do his own laundry…
- Jessamyn’s “Women in Early Tech” blog entry about Shanahan
- [@48:10](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2890) Where did these engineers end up? They are broadly no longer engineers. This project burned people out.
- [@53:20](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=3200) Cutler got to run his own show. > Ken Olsen was like the LBJ > of the computer industry: he’s waist deep in the big money.
- Corporate culture. Hotshot coders. Renegades, rebels, hero programmers. > It’s the majesty and mystery of code writing, that there’s such a wide > range of performance.
- Pascal: I wasn’t invited to the 25 year anniversary of the NT team..
- [@1:01:47](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=3707) Journalists and companies. > Soul of a New Machine was very flattering to the company.
- Jobs backdated stock options, in violation of clear federal law. Gates repeatedly stole things. > The hobbyists were a small market, Microsoft needed to sell to corporations.
- Zachary’s “Software, the Invisible Technology” 2016 essay > Where we used to relate to programs, we now relate to services.
I think there needs to be a greater literature of software: the making of it, its purpose, its vulnerabilities, its values.
- Tom: It’s because us practitioners are too embarrased about it all..
- [@1:05:49](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=3949) Josh compares and contrasts. > Coders don’t have to test their own stuff. The second stringers do that.
- Pascal: I would encourage people to write more about software and how it’s created.
- Zachary’s “Code Rush” film ~56mins about Netscape.
- [@1:08:58](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=4138) The rise of open source. Software as immutable artifact: once it’s written, it’s written. > Amazon, Google, Netflix are not possible without open source.
- [@1:10:50](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=4250) Jessamyn on helping people use tech. Accessibility > I’m a service oriented person. I work with > people who are struggling with technology.
- [@1:15:24](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=4524) Agency of users. > Bryan: Without memory protection, you would lose hours of work. > One bad application could cause the computer to reboot.
- [@1:22:01](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=4921) Pascal’s parting thoughts. > The transformation of software from artifact into service, > is both fabulous and also scary. It changes all the time. > When NT was done, it was a fixed unchanging thing.
- Bryan: The darker side to services is people need to attend to it whenever it breaks.
- Adam: It’s the death march with no end. > Pascal: Thanks everyone, I’d love to hear from you individually. > I’m interested in why people continue to turn to Showstopper > and find some value in it.
- Pascal: I encourage you to think about the literary aspects of software. I think it’s valuable for society and civilization, for our culture, because there really is an artistic, artisanal side to software. Thanks again for including me.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Creators & Guests
What is Oxide and Friends?
Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://sesh.fyi/api/calendar/v2/iMdFbuFRupMwuTiwvXswNU.ics
Excellent. Well, welcome, everybody. I am super, super, super excited for in I I'm like, I'm almost gonna have, like, a and, Justin, I'm just gonna mute you when you're not talking so I can hear you're, sending an email or something. The Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Here we go. Sorry. So we've got, we've got a lot to talk about. Adam, you you had not read this book prior to this.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. Not not I think you gave me the heads up on this, like, a week ago or something like that.
Speaker 2:But, no, I had not even heard of this book prior to that.
Speaker 1:Okay. And so I heard of Showstopper from Dan. So, Dan, how did you, I mean, you really were emphatic that that this is one that we all needed to read.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I heard about this from Buckle Shaw on the Tusk list. And, because we were debating the endless debate about n t versus Unix. And so Buckle recommended this, and I read it about, I don't know, 4 or 5 years ago. I I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 1:It was that. And I, you know, I had known about this book for a long time. I have to say I was resisting reading it just because I view myself as, like, a Windows NT congamous objector. Like, I'm not you know, my my whole career was kind of defined by going where Windows wasn't. So I'm like, why do I wanna learn about, you know, the this technology that I define my career to be not, to be kind of in opposition of?
Speaker 1:But, Dan, you were you really strongly recommended it. And what a book. So I think this is amazing on many different levels. And I'm gonna use this kind of an entree to our our our 2 very special guests here. So I I don't know what I was expecting, but what I found was a real time capsule from software development in the nineties.
Speaker 1:And one that I don't know if folks read the book. If if you didn't, Cole, who's on here, has got a great, like, synopsis of some of the high points. The book is remarkably personal and goes into so much I mean, there's so many people that that the the book not interviews, not just the the people, but their families. It's incredible. And it gets kind of the to the the full the fullness of the effort and the the kind of the fullness of the cost of the effort in terms of the impact that it had on on families and on others.
Speaker 1:And it immediately made me think back to to get to kind of special guest that are the special guest number 1, is, it made me think back to, my reading of The Soul of a New Machine. I know many of us have read Soul of a New Machine. Great book, amazingly well written. I had a blog entry a couple years ago after having reread it. And one of the comments on the blog entry was from Tom West's daughter, Jessamine West, who's here.
Speaker 1:Jessamine, it's so great to have you here. And one of your comments was, hey. I'm glad you like solving a machine, but you should know that there were some familial impact to this that is not necessarily in the book.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely. I like to travel the Internet telling people that, you know, my dad was an interesting guy. He was a you know, I really liked him. I got along with him.
Speaker 4:But in terms of being a dad, he could have been a little bit more present in my life and not a big deal. Like, I'm not I'm not whining or complaining about it, but I always drop into the of every man's blog post because, oh my god, it is only men's blog posts talking about, like, how formative this book is for them. More power to them. That's cool. And, you know, I'm over it.
Speaker 4:Like, I'm a grown ass lady. My life is fine. But it is worth kind of pointing out to people that Tracy Kidder didn't write about the familial impact of that. And in fact, there are huge stories behind the whole thing. Wired Magazine did a kind of retrospective later, you know, like, whatever happened to you, blah blah blah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, there's a lot of stories, behind that. And one of the things I've heard that's interesting about Showstopper is it really does talk to the people, not just sort of the the the main, you know, white male protagonist.
Speaker 1:That is right. And and that is a good intro to kinda special guest number 2, who I'm just, I I feel very excited to get, gpascalszachary, AKA Greg, AKA Zach. Greg, we got you back on the Internet for this. I'm very excited. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1:And, thanks for writing such an incredible book. I would love to hear about when you wrote this book, because I think so many of us did have the same reaction of, like, telling these full stories. Was that how was that your mindset going in? How did you end up, telling those full stories? Uh-oh.
Speaker 1:Hope we lost Zach. Hold on.
Speaker 2:Oh, Zach is a listener.
Speaker 1:He's back. So listen. He's a speaker.
Speaker 3:I got a speaker. Speaker. He's a speaker.
Speaker 5:Do you have the correct Zach as a speaker?
Speaker 1:That's an excellent question. Speaker. Oh, I
Speaker 3:just saw. Zach, we can hear
Speaker 1:you. Hear me?
Speaker 2:Oh. Yeah. We got you now.
Speaker 1:He was there? Hold on. Is he DM ing me furiously? Like, my laptop doesn't work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Alright. Hopefully, we can get those resolved. In, if, in the state, he says I I lost my connection. Okay.
Speaker 1:So hopefully, he can get back in. If we could he can try rebooting it sadly. He's got I I need
Speaker 3:to know exactly. No. Here's here's
Speaker 1:Oh, there you we can hear you. We can hear you. Greg, you there? Oh, God.
Speaker 3:I heard him speaking, but
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 3:The question has to be asked is you're running Windows.
Speaker 4:Oh, God.
Speaker 1:Rude. Yeah. You know, so the, and god bless Twitter spaces. I I'm I'm hoping that he can get back in here. I the, because, oh, what so let me while we're kind of, waiting for him.
Speaker 1:So, Jasmine, would be in terms of telling those fuller stories because I think, Kira, how do what was Kira's process for do you know anything about how he was kind of embedding himself with that team?
Speaker 4:He lived in my house. Like like, there's there haven't been a whole bunch of making ofs. Right? Because this was in the seventies. And so there wasn't this whole, like, meta, you know, DVD extras track.
Speaker 4:And so he lived in our house on the weekends, and him and my dad would go, can can I swear?
Speaker 5:Oh, go. Please. Yes.
Speaker 4:We can. Right? They would just go fuck around and sailing and do, you know, do guy stuff. But, like, during the week, he would go to work with my dad. You know?
Speaker 4:He was like mister embedded reporter guy. And don't get me wrong. Like, I get along with Tracy really well and have ran into him, you know, over and over, you know, over the years. And, you know, he was, like, the method actor equivalent of a writer. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, he would just get involved in what's the whole thing. Like, he talked to, like, me and my sister, and he talked to my mother, but that just didn't kind of it it will hit that wasn't the story he was telling. You know? It was a story about the guy and the project.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you were because it's almost kinda dismaying that he that he did live in your house and spoke to your mom because you don't you don't feature in the book at all even as kind of a passing mention, I don't think.
Speaker 4:Yes. I'm on page a 111. He goes bike riding with me. That's me. He doesn't mention my little sister actually at all.
Speaker 4:And it's always been, like, this thing in our family. Right? Like, well, at least you made it into the book. Not by name, but I am the the daughter. That's me.
Speaker 4:But there was another one, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because he doesn't and so, Greg, are you there? I can see that you you you hopping back in maybe. Trying to unmute. I'm hoping he can get there. Because, I mean, I think that the end so, Justin, you have not read show, stop, or it sounds like.
Speaker 4:No. Greg just, said he was gonna send me a copy, and I'm looking forward
Speaker 1:to that. Because it's and, you know, he he'll speak to this in a second here, but I think that, you know, part of of his process was as he said, I always wanna speak to, people that know the people I'm talking to. So family members. And so he interviewed family members extensively in this book. And the, and and as a result tells these, like, incredibly personal stories.
Speaker 1:I mean, Adam, I don't know. What were some of the ones that that, that stuck out for you?
Speaker 2:I think the the, I can't remember her name, but going home to her, to her family in Montreal, leaving her husband behind, not missing him, the, the erosion of the marriage, sort of consumed by the work and sort of not doing the work to like rebuild those pieces. I don't know like that. I I think, you know, in the industry as as, like, the pressures ebb and flow, I think we all kind of see those commitments either met personally or with friends or not, and that one really spoke to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the and did you make it all I mean, I I feel that, like, I I'm gonna give a well, it's kind of a spoiler. Did you make it all the way through the the the acknowledgments? One of the people that that resonated with me. And, Justin, so this this story will definitely resonate with you.
Speaker 1:They they the folks there are not able to to leave. And I I wanna talk about that in a bit too because there have been a lot of technological changes, since this this, this is written. But people couldn't leave. They they weren't leaving the office. They were staying at the office until literally all hours, until 1 in the morning, 2 in the morning, and then coming back kinda 8 in the morning.
Speaker 1:And so you had, the the and you had one guy in particular who, who actually had a a new bride, and, and he goes by by s Somasagar, and, he has his wife.
Speaker 6:Hey. Hey.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can hear
Speaker 6:you. Yes. Brian?
Speaker 1:We can hear you now.
Speaker 6:Alright. Let let me just say one thing in response to miss West. Of course, I had read Soul of the New Machine.
Speaker 1:Okay. You are muting yourself, it looks like. So I think you might be accidentally muting yourself. Okay.
Speaker 2:Hey. Yeah. Greg, are you there? You can there's the button in the bottom left if you're still there.
Speaker 1:That that's done. You know, it's because my expectations were so high. Of course, we're gonna be beset with every possible technical difficulty.
Speaker 2:That's what you get for believing in anything.
Speaker 1:That is what you get for believing. I do love spaces. I do love spaces. I just I That's right. I I would I want to be a little bit more usable.
Speaker 5:This is where the phone lacks in accessibility. I'm always hitting the wrong thing on the phone.
Speaker 1:And amusingly enough, like, Justin actually bounced out. It was it was disconnected as well for all
Speaker 4:that. I'm back.
Speaker 1:You're back. Sorry. So the and and I I I trust that that that Greg's gonna be able to get back here. The so his he is from Madras, from India, and goes back home and marries, basically. She follows him back to, to Seattle, and the and she decides that, like, well, you're not gonna come home, so I'm just gonna come to the office.
Speaker 1:So she just basically sits in the office with him while he works. And I I I felt it was like I don't know. It was this really endearing moment I felt where you had someone who was in a new country and with someone she probably didn't know that well. And really and it just trying to take on, you know, take some agency of the situation. And then what I was just gutted to read that she, died.
Speaker 1:She was killed in a car crash shortly after the the the book was written, which was just I don't know. I felt that was, like, pretty upsetting, honestly.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Greg, we can hear
Speaker 6:you. I'm back, Brian. I'm going to change the location I'm in, but I can you hear me again?
Speaker 1:We can hear you again.
Speaker 6:Well, what I was gonna say was when I'm immersed in this team, I'm struck by how traumatized everyone is. And there were a couple of reasons. Obviously, Gates
Speaker 1:Man, we cannot catch a break over here. I assume he's disappeared to everybody.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Ugh.
Speaker 2:Gates is what? Gates is what? Gates is what?
Speaker 3:I mean, that it's like the ultimate cliff hanger. You're about to drop a Bill g story on us and then it's like, oh, disconnected.
Speaker 1:You you know what Twitter Spaces needs is a dial in number where people can just dial in actually. And
Speaker 2:We can call these webinars.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good idea.
Speaker 5:So it was very fun.
Speaker 1:Or or
Speaker 6:Oh, there
Speaker 7:you go. Software quality control.
Speaker 1:Greg, we take your back.
Speaker 3:In and out. There's in
Speaker 1:and out.
Speaker 3:In and out. Not not
Speaker 1:on a good connection. Maybe try, try disabling WiFi or try turning WiFi on. Try doing whatever you're not doing. So the okay. So I what what's while we're waiting for him to get back, I did one of the things I I definitely wanna make sure we're talking about is because I do feel this is a time capsule, this book.
Speaker 1:This does the it it does not feel like modern software development at all. And I think that there are a couple of major major changes. I think this book is actually interesting because it is kind of the last, maybe, major software project before a couple of megatrends hit. One of which is clearly the Internet, and the other is open source. I mean, they are rewriting everything from scratch every time, which is a bad idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, Adam, I don't know if that struck you as well.
Speaker 2:No. Absolutely. The the rewriting from scratch and then, as you had mentioned, I think the, like source code control, like modern forms of source code control, you know, really, you know, that felt very antiquated in a lot of respects.
Speaker 1:Well, so yeah. That I feel and I I would love to get Zach's take on this, but they've got, like, this they they are trying to build the software, and they've got, like, the build lab where the building of the software takes place. And people have to go to the build lab to build their software. And then if it doesn't boot but, I mean, a big part of the reason that these guys have to stay late and and they don't know their schedule and they don't know what the impact is gonna be on their family is because they don't know if this thing's gonna boot or not. And if it doesn't boot, they need to find a developer to fix it.
Speaker 1:And and it's like, wow. That is not the way software is done at all. The whole the the dawn of this is definitely before the dawn of bring over, modify, merge, or distributed version control, whatever you wanna call it. And I Adam, I mean, you and I never had to live in this world. And boy, I do I appreciate not having had to live in it.
Speaker 2:Well, you've never had to live in it, but
Speaker 1:I actually
Speaker 2:did. Like, when I when I when I went to my last, it's a couple of companies ago, they were using subversion and, like, you could only check-in as root on a particular machine, and I swear I'm not making that up. And this was in in 2010. So, yeah, I mean, it it it felt it felt like a time capsule then, but you're right. I think we we were sort of fortunate, Sun, to get the, the the benefits of of modern day, version control pretty early.
Speaker 1:Well, you
Speaker 3:guys had Larry McPhoy doing that for you, which was nice.
Speaker 1:That's right. And we had I mean, it came out of kind of the the pain of having to of of trying to, make this more traditional model work. And Larry was the one who kind of broke that with NSE lite. And that, definitely ended up inspiring, obviously Teamware. Teamware, I feel like Adam is like this forgotten software innovation.
Speaker 1:Like, it is Yeah. I mean
Speaker 2:but I don't know how broadly it was used. But, Greg, are you back? I see that you're you're you're, you know
Speaker 6:Yes. I've tried to get on again. I'm embarrassed, but I'm puzzled also. Well, we've got you now. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But no. Keep going. I I don't want to
Speaker 3:No. No. Tell the gate story. Tell the gate story.
Speaker 6:The point is Microsoft was kind of a joke software company at the early nineties. It it had mimic, Windows. DOS Windows was cobbled together. Gates had stolen DOS. Windows was a complete rip off of Apple.
Speaker 6:And IBM, they were riding the wave of IBM. And so even after standardizing on Windows in the early nineties, Microsoft wasn't considered a robust, software company. So NT meant a lot to everyone involved. And unfortunately, for Gates and Ballmer, Dave Cutler was a force of nature. He did not if you were back then in the early nineties, you didn't disagree with Gates.
Speaker 6:You didn't tell him to go take a hike. So Gates inserts a guy named Paul Moritz, who I've gotten to know very well since, and Paul was extremely polished. He had been the, manager of the Intel relationship with Microsoft, and Paul was from Zimbabwe, a white south southern African who was extremely disciplined. And he could witness a tirade, a rage from Cutler and just sort of shrug and say something like, well, so what should we do then? Whereas Gates, at the time I don't know if any of you sucked your thumb when you grew up, but Gates walked in his chair.
Speaker 6:I had maybe 50 meetings with Gates in the in the starting in 89, and he would furiously rock if he was upset, and he would rock more rhythmically and slowly if he was happy. Now, interpreting his rocking, this was not something Dave Cutler was going to do because Dave Cutler was a real man, and, real men don't rock in a chair. And so the whole project was, also different because Microsoft didn't build products at the time from the ground up in a sustained way. So when I immersed myself initially for the Wall Street Journal, I found a lot of people who were traumatized. And, also, I had been very influenced as a reader by Fred Brooks, the mythical man month.
Speaker 6:And so I was struck by 2 things that, 1, from a management standpoint, no one understood why someone was good at coding. It was a mystery to everyone why there was such a wide stratification of coders in their output. And then, second, this systematic, the the the second, Fred Brooks had a way of conceptualizing bugs, that was very influential. You created bugs, and you fixed them. And the specter was that you introduce new bugs when you fix them.
Speaker 6:And there were projects that never saw the light of day. I had kind of infamously done a profile about Ashton Tate, and a verb had come out called esberize. People didn't wanna be esberized by me because the CEO of Ashton Taint had gotten into this problem. They couldn't get out d base 4 because they kept having iterative bugs, and it just got stalled. And in a in a fit of lunacy, the CEO of Ashland Tate admitted to me he didn't even know how to use dBase.
Speaker 6:So it was kind of hard for him to figure out what really was slowing the, completion down.
Speaker 1:Did did he tell tell you that in, like, in in a whisper? Did he tell you, like, look, I don't know how to use my own product? I mean, it seems like that's
Speaker 6:I I was pestering him in his office, and he was alone with me. He never disputed. He told me this, and the game, the front page story came out in the Wall Street Journal. He was fired. So, he was, you know, was playing with it that day.
Speaker 6:And, you know, so you have to go back to a different era where there were not a few expensive software projects, obviously, many for the federal government, some in the private sector, that were abandoned because people got into this, you know, iterative problem where they kept introducing new bugs. And so there was a sense, from Cutler, Lou Perazzoli, that leadership of the team, that these guys And, in any case, I was struck by the personal cost of people. And I also am not an engineer, and I was socially oriented. And I was interested in this psychosocial cost of the project.
Speaker 2:Now, Greg, was was this surprising to you? Because you I mean, you also are in a hard charging field here where you must have seen lots of folks, you know, putting more time than was warranted into their job and less time that was warranted in their families. But was it surprising to you, or did you do you have an inkling of what you're getting into?
Speaker 6:Well, I think the level of, anguish did surprise me. And but it was a team of 250 people, and I maybe met, consistently about 50 of them. So I did think that, the cost wasn't unusual, but the, emphasis on the part of people on the cost, you know, was. And and so I I think that, I was struck by it. Also, I had a concept that was a bit different than Soul of the New Machine where the machine was the star.
Speaker 6:And the premise was that the machine people you know, Kidder Kidder doesn't know a lot about computing in the first place. And, also, he's coming up in Boston where, you know, the, Minsky, the MIT, Weiner, that whole tradition in Boston was, hey. You don't wanna end up as slaves to the machine. The machine was the system, the system you served. But on the West Coast, of course, that whole thing gets stood on its head.
Speaker 6:Personal computers were supposed to help you actualize your countercultural values. And so it made a lot of sense to Kitter, I think, to see the computer as the real star, the hero, and people served it.
Speaker 4:That is such an important distinction. I think the East Coast, West Coast difference is Yeah.
Speaker 6:Huge. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. And I have a chapter on that because Cutler's experience at at digital where, of course, he was a acolyte and and of Ken Olsen.
Speaker 6:Ken Olsen was this mammoth guy because, remember, until Olsen comes along, computing is the is equivalent with IBM. How does even the software industry start? Because there was no software industry so long as IBM gave all the software away for free.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 6:And until the US government forces IBM to begin selling software and at a minimum verifying that Gene Amdahl's software would work on its mainframes, there couldn't be a software industry. Nobody thought they were a software person. They were just working for a hardware company, basically. And so Kotner brings a whole different mentality. The other thing was crashes.
Speaker 6:So in the PC world I mean, if you talk to somebody the of the computing field. You know, Joe ends up in Vegas as a door greeter, and Wozniak's a great guy, but a lot of people miss miss his real significance. You know, one day in the eighties, I heard Wozniak talking about how when he was 20, all he dreamed of was not buying a house, but was buying his own PDP computer because it costs like as much as a house. And he just thought, you know, if I could get my own PDP computer, I'd be happy. So he was aware of the level of robustness of the minicomputer and, by contrast, the puny power of a personal computer, right, at the time, in your earliest days, especially.
Speaker 6:And so this idea that MT could could crash one program and have another one running, what we thought of back then as multitasking was very, very important because big organizations wanted multitasking. You know, you could reboot as an individual, and maybe during that time, you could get stoned or you might have a vision. You know?
Speaker 4:You might decide, you know what?
Speaker 6:I'm really a Native American, and and while my computer is rebooting, I will sing. I will chant or maybe hear a Buddhist bell. But, you know, with the the minicomputer, you couldn't have the whole organization go down. So Dave had a constant battle that Gates and and the origin, you know, the original Microsoft tribe understand what robustness meant. And, in in any case and I think that that culture clash between the East and the West part of the tension that was built into the story.
Speaker 6:So I rather than the computer being the hero in Showstopper, I tried to find an ensemble of characters that would move through time in the in the project. And I'm really glad that that the the there's a durable readership because it it was a bigger it was a bigger ensemble than, say, the the television show 30 something that was on at that same time. Or, another one you might be familiar with, the Big Chill.
Speaker 1:You know, I I
Speaker 6:I 7 characters, and you could stick with them. Because Dave Cutler was not cuddly. He was menacing. He could lose his temper a lot. And I tried not to get too close to him physically for that reason.
Speaker 6:He was very and so there were there were there were a looming father figure. There was a double father figure. There was Gates, and then there was Cutler, and both of them loomed over you. And I think it did create a lot of anxiety. The the other thing was I did include some, women in the project because there were women in the project, and it was they also had different different stresses.
Speaker 6:So, but I do think that the stakes for Microsoft were so high, the fear of ending up as a mythical, you know, ending up as the mythical man month. Because Gates would keep coming to them and saying, do you need more people? And Cutler kept answering, we don't. That the more people will slow us down. And so it really was a a watershed to me in the history of computing up to that point, but it it didn't presage where software or computing was going pretty clearly.
Speaker 6:It was more like the last battleship rather than the next frontier.
Speaker 1:I well, I think it it was. Yeah. And I think it's just interesting is the thing you mentioned about the East Coast, West Coast. Because, you know, you've got Tom Line here actually who is, Sun employee number 8 and was definitely on the West Coast with a West Coast disposition, but also just looking, I think, perplexed at some of what the the the the PC vendors, Microsoft in particular, what passed for kind of a robust system. And I was actually Tom, I don't know if you knew this.
Speaker 1:I did not realize this that Gates was arguing against memory protection with Cutler. I mean, it so Cutler is arguing in favor of memory protection, and Gates is arguing against it, which is just shocking to me.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, that that was one of the key differences between Sun and a bunch of contemporary startups is that we had a lot of people coming from VAX and mainframe worlds where we we knew what robustness was all about. And a lot of people just had no clue coming coming from the homebrew world.
Speaker 3:See, I I kinda don't understand this to some extent because Gates and Allen started out on a PDP 10 running tops 10 at Harvard. Or or at their their weird private high school had some, like, large PDP machine as well. I it it seems to me they were familiar with those concepts. It was just like the value of them just totally went over their heads or something.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They may have been presuming a lot of cost, which
Speaker 2:That's right. Gates kept on hitting the, the performance, that that the performance was critical and above all else.
Speaker 1:And, you know, for those of you who are and, Greg, for those of you who are not domain expert, from our perspective, shipping an operating system without memory protection and an era when memory protection existed in the microprocessor is malpractice. And we have had memory protection for a very long time in the microprocessor. And the I mean, I'd always viewed Bill Gates as robbing me of my childhood because I didn't know that you could run multiple processes concurrently until I got to college. And and, you know, then as, like, I was getting older, I'm like, well, you know, my my position on this was softening. I'm like, Bill Gates, you know, Bill Gates didn't personally rob me of my childhood.
Speaker 1:And then I go back and reach Toast Harbor. I'm like, actually, no. No. He did rob me of my childhood. Bill Gates actually it it mean this is like arguing against airbags because it's gonna affect the 0 to 60 of the car or the fuel economy of the car.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay. These are not really related. Not that much anyway. Like, we can have airbags in a car that also has fuel economy or also has performance. So I
Speaker 5:I There's there's there's definitely a hardware cost to MMUs, and it it took a while for the microprocessor vendors to get on board and realize that UNIX really, really wanted those things.
Speaker 1:Well, the other thing that I thought was surprising and and, Greg, maybe you can speak to this because I didn't realize the personal vendetta that Cutler had against UNIX in particular. I mean, I you know, I it it's just amazing. It it feels like and correct me if this is incorrect, but anger seems to be the the fuel for color. Anger and resentment seem to really form a lot of his motivation. Anger and he is so angry at deck in particular.
Speaker 1:Is that a fair read?
Speaker 6:Well, I think, you know, I tried to put it that conflict was at the heart of the concept of innovation and advance in Microsoft at that time. And I think that, the more cooperative corporate approaches, in the east were seen as too, you know, too free of conflict. And so that that that's one thing is that, again, it's very difficult for people today who are I was born the same year as Gates, the same year as Jobs. Mitch Kapoor, his mother was my Hebrew teacher in Long Island.
Speaker 2:I mean That's awesome.
Speaker 6:Yeah. He's a couple of few years older. I mean, the point is you cannot realize that these folks were dismissed and sometimes humiliated by mainstream big iron people of the sixties and seventies. I mean, after all, we had put somebody on the moon, and we had seen photo you know, movies coming back, video streams. This had all been done with computers.
Speaker 6:And, it seemed like the PC was a toy and that people weren't serious who were doing it. The other thing was the individual centric, value. You know, Gates, even Internet. He doesn't he sees computing, like many of his contemporaries, as an individual experience, and it's a mind amplifier in domain. They're very caught up with this idea that personal computers are tools for liberation and that the individual would realize themselves in some way through, hacking around with with computers.
Speaker 6:And and, you know, I I have another book that I was working on at the same time on on Vannevar Bush, the author of As We May Think and his concepts of associative trails and, mind amplification, his concept of memex, memory extender.
Speaker 4:Well, and the originator of the hyperlink idea. Right? I mean, that was his whole thing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And Ted Nelson gives him all this credit in the mid seventies. So we have to remember that computers were, you know, on the West Coast were seen as extensions of your creativity and a tool for liberation. And for a long time, that dominated the horizons. And so organizations were a lower priority for the Microsoft and Apple and and others of that era.
Speaker 6:Can you square that with
Speaker 1:the NT effort? The NT effort does not feel like it's on a path to self actualization. I mean, at no time did I have the urge to get stoned while reading about the NT development process.
Speaker 6:No. No. But you're you're right, though, because as the field is changing and as computers become more central to organizations and personal computers, the need for many of the traits of this older corporate computing world, and I'm and by corporate, I mean that you didn't have your own computer. You
Speaker 1:Right. More industrial. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You accessed it. You know, there was a collision in an attempt to transform, personal computing into something that that again happened. I mean, it's very interesting that 10 years later, 2005, Gates and Ballmer don't wanna do cloud computing. Who's gonna wanna put their stuff in the cloud?
Speaker 6:Everybody wanted to control their own stuff. Isn't there privacy things? Don't you just wanna put it on a disk drive? Blah blah blah. And yet it's astonishing that cloud computing is the apotheosis of corporate collective computing.
Speaker 6:And we have, again, found that computing is really a collective technology, a collective to grips with that. And I think NT, looking now, to grips with that. And I think NT looking now, you know, 20 it's 27 years since I I work I wrote that book. That is a major transition.
Speaker 7:It's it's interesting that I mean, in your book, you mentioned how enamored they were with email as as a core part of their business activities to to then also still have that individual view of the computer.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:No.
Speaker 1:And you you do get some of this disposition towards the end when they wanna test a chat program. What was the name of the chat program they wanted to and and Cutler goes
Speaker 7:to WinChat.
Speaker 1:WinChat, which Cutler views as basically like solitaire. I mean, this is like a complete waste of time. I I I wonder if, like, maybe behind the scenes of Microsoft, did Cutler take out his anger on Microsoft Teams? Is this why it does Teams reflect this worldview maybe?
Speaker 2:That's messed up.
Speaker 4:Sure feels like it.
Speaker 5:It does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but that was very, like, you know, where I think that that that kind of that tension between collaborative computing, networked computing, computing, and and truly personalized computing. Because, Tom, you're on the other end of that at Sun with the network being the computer. And really
Speaker 5:Right. Right.
Speaker 1:Really thinking about only in terms of the network first.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Look at the difference between Sunray and PCs.
Speaker 1:Totally. Would die diametric post.
Speaker 3:Like, if you go back to the original UNIX paper where Dennis Ritchie talks about how they came to realize that the essence of remote access time sharing computers wasn't just a, you know, type programs and on terminals of this close collaboration. When UNIX was an experiment in collaboration, and it sounds like NT was the antithesis of that, which I find so bizarre because, you know, if you look at systems that Cutler did before that, there was RSX 11 m for the bb 11, which is basically a real time system okay, but they didn't need a VMS for the VAX. And VMS was very there was a time sharing system very much in the same lines as UNIX. And yet he was like so opposed to UNIX. And by the way, that attitude carries forward to Microsofties today.
Speaker 3:You know, like on my last project at Google, we had some folks who were former Microsoft people, and they would they would very much look down the bridge of their nose at Unix and Linux and be like, You know, the undesigned academic system that just sort of, like, gee, how did that ever, you know, succeed? And it it I always found that very, very interesting.
Speaker 1:Oh, so, Dan, this is very interesting. Have you read the book? Because you've not read the book super recently. Right? I mean, it's been a couple years since you read the book.
Speaker 3:It's been a couple years.
Speaker 1:So so what you just described is exactly, like, almost word for word what Greg describes as Cutler's attitude towards Unix, as a bunch of PhDs that are it's not actually
Speaker 3:designed. And, you know, like, read a byte, read a byte, read a byte byte byte thing. I mean, which is very clever, by the way. I just just wanna point that out. But, you know, it's it's it's like that attitude has carried forward, you know, into the modern era, like, 30 years after the development of NT.
Speaker 3:You know, it's like those guys still and I I find that fascinating because we as sort of UNIX people, you know, it's kind of the opposite.
Speaker 1:Like, it kinda looks like the opposite. And it's also like learning to, like, what do you mean there's an anti penicillin demographic? That doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 3:So the anti vaxx are proud of computer design.
Speaker 1:You could you could you It is. You can forgive you
Speaker 5:you can forgive Cutler though because UNIX pretty much stole the thunder out of VMS by the time the eighties were over.
Speaker 3:Well, but but I mean, you know, like
Speaker 5:Beginning of the eighties, it was all VMS.
Speaker 3:But they were they were kinda too late. Right? I mean, you know, UNIX had been out of the bag and then universities for, you know, 5, 6 years by the time they even started development of VMS. So I
Speaker 5:Well, no. VAC You
Speaker 3:know, the the VAX was 1978 and, like, 6th edition UNIX was 74 or something. I mean, you know, they they were
Speaker 5:Yeah. But not not really units didn't really get going until 7 79 with certain stuff.
Speaker 3:Well, I you would definitely you you know way more about the history of that than I do,
Speaker 1:but for sure. And so, Greg, one question I wanted to ask you just because you do have how many interviews did you conduct? You talk you must have spoken with so many people. And how did you because you clearly are speaking to, like, family members. So you talking to these engineers being like, hey.
Speaker 1:Do you, like, you seem interesting, but I, actually, I need to talk to, like, you know, your husband or your mother or your I mean, how how were you having these interviews with the the family members? Is am I gone or is Greg?
Speaker 2:You're still here.
Speaker 1:Alright. Greg wants to be gone. Here. Oh, dear. We're gonna try to clean it all up in post.
Speaker 1:But those are so, Jasmine, I I I am really eager to get your take on this book at some point just because I feel like it almost is that other extreme where I mean, and there are I mean, I wonder how many, relationships were adversely affected by publishing the book because there there are some people whose work behavior, is and I can see Greg trying to reconnect. The but there, Mark Lipovsky in particular, who is honestly just not a very pleasant person to does not sound very pleasant at all. And his wife, who Greg interviews, says if he acted this way at home, I would divorce him, which I mean, it tells you that, like, you just wonder how many people had spouses that read this book and be like, like, hey, you know, I read this book and you're kind of an asshole at work. Like, what is going on?
Speaker 3:Sounds like my drill instructors.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Well
Speaker 4:and that can be, like, a positive or a negative. Right? Like, do they call my father Darth Vader at work? You know? Like, that's rude.
Speaker 4:But at work, it was the thing that had him moving up the corporate food chain, you know, and eventually becoming sort of chief technologist, whatever the heck he was there. And I think that's another big difference between when Soul of the New Machine came out and when Showstoppers came out is that gender politics really started to change. So, like, with the, you know, Hardy Boys and the Wiz Kids, it was all you know, people's partners were primarily women
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:With the exception of Betty Shanahan, the only woman who was an active awards theoretically from itself to the long suffering partners of all of the people that worked on the project. My mom got one for, like, you know, the solo nights at home, and Betty Shanahan's husband actually got an award for having to do his own laundry. Like, what kind
Speaker 6:of a growth? You know what I mean? Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4:You're you're so years old, and it's horrifying now. But, like There
Speaker 2:there was sort of a a Mad Men almost, affect to it, whereas Showstoppers, you know, you you get the Hoppers coming in and and really holding up a mirror to some of this really inappropriate behavior by a bunch of the guys in the book.
Speaker 1:But I got so many questions. So Betty Shanahan's husband, was he like, you know, thank we thank you for someone recognizing me for doing my own laundry. I would also like an an award for wiping my own ass. I mean, it's like it's like look. Look.
Speaker 1:Like I mean, I hope that he was just like, this is offensive. I mean, I
Speaker 4:He is not on record, and, you know, Shanahan's been really outspoken for I think she was working with, like, IEEE to help, you know, find better positions for women in you know, engineering, computing, etcetera, etcetera. She's gone in a really amazing, interesting direction. But, yeah, who knows about she and Anne's husband? I'll go look that up.
Speaker 1:Well, Amy, can you speak a little bit to telling her story? Because you've got a great blog entry where you told her story and kinda and and which Robbie's gonna link to. But how is how did you kind of come across that and tell her story?
Speaker 4:Well, it actually you know, you guys were talking about the space program, and, you know, a lot of people talk about the women who did a lot of the programming in some of the early space programming stuff, you know, back when a computer was a woman, basically. And, you know, Shanahan was a young woman who got hired, I believe it was right out of college. And, you know, you can look at the pictures from the early, you know, Eagle projects. She was the only woman on either team, and then, you know, these two teams pitted against each other, forms the the core conflict of this book and, you know, race against time. And, you know, this was kinda like bell bottoms and long hair, but, like, you know, the guys were all sort of guy guys, and so we didn't even have almost at the time, you know, women have to be twice as good to be considered half as good.
Speaker 4:Fortunately, this isn't difficult. Like, that wasn't even in the zeitgeist quite yet. It was more like keep your head down, and I believe the award she got was, like, putting up with a bunch of creepy dudes basically.
Speaker 1:Oh my god.
Speaker 4:Oh my god.
Speaker 6:Seriously. Again, look,
Speaker 4:she, you know, was a really active person in that project, but I don't believe and I may be wrong about this. It's been a while since I was looking this up. I don't think she stayed at Data General. You know? And, of course, Data General, you know, DG.com is now the Dollar General website, not the Data General website.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 1:I have
Speaker 4:to go look things up on the Internet archive. Oh, I know. It's so sad.
Speaker 1:Like, I
Speaker 4:was like Tom at dg.com. Right?
Speaker 1:Right. It's like, could it it could have been anyone other than Dollar General. Just can we just can can DG have a little death at dignity, please? Well, so that and I I have to tell you one thing that I found myself myself doing over and over and over again in this book is and and when I was talking to Greg about, like, you know, he's like, what would a kind of an update look like? One of the things I wanna know is what happened to these folks?
Speaker 1:And, Jasmine, I'll tell you that there are there are a a bunch of women that are are interviewed the book both as engineers and spouses, but a lot of engineers. And Sure. Googling them, they are broadly no longer engineers, which is really troubling. You know, they they are now this is true, I would say, of the male engineers too, unfortunately. I mean, one of the things that I the one of the the side effects of having run this project this way is that clearly it burned people out, and they they left engineering altogether.
Speaker 6:And yep. What Brian? One one thing I might point to is the character Joanne Caron. So Joanne, who was from Montreal and bilingual, was the most prominent, woman on the project that I encountered. And she, you know, again, saw her, challenge as an individual one because it was the early nineties.
Speaker 6:And now she might have viewed it as more collective. She had a nickname, karate kid. She was very tough and one in the respect. Interestingly, Cutler let her use his off
Speaker 1:Oh, you're breaking up a little bit. Get better reception for hanging out every word.
Speaker 6:Time, and that got people to meet her. Oh, okay. I'll try. But so Joanne Caron is, someone we might try to figure out what what happened to her.
Speaker 1:Okay. Great. Could you just repeat that anecdote? You were breaking up while you after Karate Kid, you're breaking up a bit.
Speaker 6:Oh, okay. Well, in there's a chapter that I open with Joanne Caron. That's the death march chap chapter. And at the in the early nineties, a woman of high attainment tried to do the opposite of today. Today, young women are seeking solidarity and form alliances with other women.
Speaker 6:And back then, that was not how successful women in science and technology tended to respond to their challenges.
Speaker 1:Are you
Speaker 6:following me? Yeah. Yeah. And so from the vantage point of today, you see very few women, and the women are, you know, in Nietzschean terms, they're Ubermensch. They're they're they're transcending their problems.
Speaker 6:They're not and so they're riding above them. And so she was a very prominent character, and I think I tried to describe how she responded to the challenges rather than, the sociological
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know. It was very interesting. And so maybe you could take say, one of the things I was asking about that you I I think we kinda lost you on the you did so many interviews with people's families. How did you approach them?
Speaker 1:How did you because I think Joanne too. You you spoke with their family. I thought it was really interesting.
Speaker 6:Well, unlike, I think, Kidder's book where he was embedded in a fly on the wall the whole time. And one thing that does he's he's always very sympathetic to the people he's writing about. And part of it is he's part of the situation. I had to both reconstruct as well as observe in real time. And what you find when you do reconstructions is, people people don't wanna tell you what actually happened.
Speaker 1:It's all Rashomon.
Speaker 6:Yeah. They may be embarrassed, or they may wanna put present it in remember it differently and shed a different perspective. So with me, that I couldn't do the hermetically sealed fly on the wall that Kidder did. You know? And and it does have shortcomings because, you know, again, since the computer is the main character, you you learn nothing about Data General really in the book.
Speaker 6:You don't learn whether it's gonna survive or where this fits in in anything. But with by by the time I was doing it, that landscape was was important. The the other thing I wanna say was that Cutler got to bring a group of people to Microsoft from digital. It was kind of a new lease on life for him. He was transplanting, and then they got a space of their own.
Speaker 6:They were separated in a different building. So the attraction for Cutler was he got to run his own show on his own terms with a with a mothership that was clearly on the rise. And while Ken Olsen is not alive now to answer any questions. You know, Ken Olsen are you still guys with me?
Speaker 2:We're here. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Ken Olsen was like the LBJ of the computer industry. I get it. You know? He's waist deep in the big money. Right?
Speaker 6:And the big fool keeps pushing them up. So, you know, it was, hey. One way or another, we're gonna defeat personal computing, and, you know, we're just seeing what's going on in Afghanistan. Right? Delusion, denial, and dumb.
Speaker 6:And and Olson sadly ends up in that same situation. So Cutler was trying to free himself from that, and yet he never really, you know, he didn't understand the roots of, you know, Gates as a college dropout. Paul Allen was not even a college dropout. Steve Ballmer didn't know anything about computing or software, you know, so that you had you know, Paul Maritz came from Intel. He knew something about micro processors.
Speaker 6:So, you know, it's a very different environment that he's in, but it's a fresh start. They have resources. They were getting stock options that were enormously valuable quickly. I mean, that was underpinning the psychology frontline programmers were getting $1,000,000 by the end of the project in their stock options. And so they were financially rewarded, to personally
Speaker 1:And how how much did that factor into their calculus? Because I think that, you know, one of the things that is, you know, whether it is kid or taking a kind of literary license or not, the, you know, one of the, to me, one of the kind of the themes of Soul is that the team is persevering for one another. And I you don't get that real sense of camaraderie. Yeah. It's like No.
Speaker 6:No. No. You know, again, whether this was myth or reality, it was very much a part of the button down culture of the Cambridge area. You know, after all, I I spent a great deal more time writing a biography of Vannevar Bush who was out of Massachusetts. And that Massachusetts, that Boston area culture was very status oriented, and and, and and quite restrained.
Speaker 6:You go out to the West Coast and at Microsoft, there were people that were just good code writers. And that guy, Steve Wood, in the book, he was a a hotshot. He was somebody that fixed stuff, solved problems. Nobody asked anybody where they went to college at micros in that team. And so I think you just you just had a different environment more, contemporary, you know, Doris Goodwin's team of rivals.
Speaker 6:They weren't trying to like They weren't trying to become
Speaker 1:And hence the the the threats of violence.
Speaker 6:They were hotshots. Yeah. And it was a cult of the hotshots. And, also, the bug fixers were a a a second level status. So, hey.
Speaker 6:You You delivered code. It worked under different circumstances. You were happy, and you didn't have to fix up your mess. It was not like today. So you you know, and I I I just think when I read, you know, that corporate approach is just not like, now.
Speaker 6:There was one guy on the team, by the way, that I was unaware of, and he might have been one of the very few, black people on the team. He was Patrick Owuwa, who I would meet in Ghana in early 2000 because he left Microsoft to form a university, somewhat inspired by, Bill Gates. Ashesi is a university. But the the team was a lot of people like Cutler who saw themselves as renegades, as rebels, as difficult people.
Speaker 3:The cult of the hero programmer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Oh, most definitely. And I was swept up in that. You know, there's one metaphor I use where I say it's like hitting a baseball. You know, again, if you're from big companies, they want to be able to circumscribe what's a top performer, what are their traits. Well, nobody had any idea why somebody was a better programmer than somebody else in that sense.
Speaker 1:We still don't even somebody consolation.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Well, yeah. I know. And and and I I believe that. It's it's one of the majesty of of code writing and the mystery of it that there's such a wide range of performance and often from the same educational route. And so there was something about that heroic these heroic code warriors that, you know, were doing their best, fighting the good fight.
Speaker 6:You know? But but the team itself was large and fractious, and, you know, that made it that made it more difficult when the book came out because a lot of people within the team were
Speaker 1:Yes. So what was the reaction? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:For instance, the the n well, the NT team had an had a, reunion, not too many year you know, 25. Oh, I wasn't invited. I mean, they, you know, they they they were embarrassed. They were embarrassed. I wasn't invited at all.
Speaker 6:2 things happened, though. 1 is I went to Africa and lived there in the early 2000 pretty much continuously. I married an African. And I'm in Accra, Ghana, and Paul Moritz shows up. And Paul is born in Africa, and we rediscovered ourselves.
Speaker 6:And Paul, being the head of the project, organizationally, we became good friends. We got involved in a lot of, efforts to essentially, elevate and energize and educate computer scientists and programmers in East and West Africa, and we have some modest projects even now. And that did, give me some glimpse into some members of the team who had assisted me a lot and and others, who who didn't. But, it it it was nice for that reason. Cutler, I believe part of his legend was enhanced.
Speaker 6:You know, he has won many awards in recent years, and he still has an office in Microsoft. And he seems to maintain his personal style, oh, through through through the years. But part of what I was just gonna say is that it was I didn't see myself as someone seeking anyone's approval within the team. And I it was kind of an over my dead body situation where, I was you know, because these companies had gotten much richer. And and remember, sold the new machine was very flattering to the company and its practitioners and its its participants.
Speaker 6:But by the mid nineties, that boat wasn't gonna float anymore. These were not saintly engineers that were suppressing their desires for fame and fortune. That boat was not floating anymore. You know, as we would learn, they were criminals, part time. Steve Jobs backdated stock options in violation of clear federal laws.
Speaker 6:Bill Gates repeatedly stole things. People at Microsoft would routinely invite you up for a meeting and say, we'd like to buy your company, so we're thinking about it. Show us your stuff. You'd never hear from them again, and they would actually make a rival product. That's a world that is much worse than selling out to Google, the world of today, or selling out to And,
Speaker 2:Greg, how did you how did they let you in the door? Like, how how did what was the pitch that let We
Speaker 6:had more leverage then.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 6:We had more leverage then. And what you have to understand is the happiest, the individuals, the geeks, they were running out of market. And for Gates, especially in Microsoft, they felt that corporate business was important. And, you know, so I was a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal assigned to cover Microsoft as well as at the same time I was and my background, my temperament and background, I was interested in money and power. So these were vehicles to achieve money and power.
Speaker 6:Now I must say, intellectually, software is very, very captivating, as, both from the creation side and the conceptualization, meaning the the creating code, but but the architecture, the conceptualization of it. And I think that we now live in a world where, you know, some years ago, in IEEE, I wrote an essay calling software the invisible technology and because it's everywhere. And where we used to relate to programs, we now relate to services, but those services are animated and defined by programs. Amazon's environment is a piece of software. They don't say we're a software company.
Speaker 6:You know, so so you you just have this. I think there needs to be a greater literature of software. I thought that Eric Raymond, the cathedral essay
Speaker 1:Oh, boy.
Speaker 6:And that volume of essays was something that many others should try, because we don't have enough literature about software, about the making of it, about its purpose, about its vulnerabilities, about, you know, how, you build in values to into it.
Speaker 5:It's because practitioners are too embarrassed about it all.
Speaker 3:You can say that again.
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 4:Well and you start interrogating it and realizing people can make choices
Speaker 5:Reading reading once
Speaker 4:you start thinking about
Speaker 5:it.
Speaker 3:Reading reading the book, I I definitely there are a
Speaker 7:lot of, technological, and development values that I think that I shared that you would see in these people. Like, you know, you've got to shorten the feedback cycles to to from making changes to seeing if they work and everybody should be running the software and using it as much as they can while they're also working on it. Things like that are very important and, and a focus on correctness and quality, but then just the, the, the mercenary nature of the specific organization and the, and the, the catastrophic level to which the whole miniature society seemed to be based chiefly around shouting. I mean, was was and abuse. I mean, it is it's interesting.
Speaker 3:The the the totally bizarre devotion to this, like, pecking order pecking order hierarchy with even within the engineering ranks. You know, this idea that coders don't have to test their own stuff.
Speaker 1:Oh, god.
Speaker 3:It's like, well, we have we have, like, the second stringers to go do that. I mean, this is like the Bush league people who couldn't make it as real, you know, engineers. They're gonna go test your code for you. Don't worry about it. You just write great software.
Speaker 3:It's like, well, I mean, my god. You know? Like, we don't we don't do that anymore. But I can totally remember in the nineties
Speaker 6:that that was there is a evolution that might be charted. You know? And and and there's a there's a I I would encourage people to try to write more about, how software is created and how this is Wait. What exactly is funny
Speaker 1:is sorry to go. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Alright. I mean, I was just just a total aside, but it's so funny you say that because the first startup I ever worked at in 1999 was a failed.com. And we had one of these death march projects that, you know, ran the entire team into the ground and a 100% turnover in the development organization over the over 12 months. And, you know, I remember at one point telling the CTO, this isn't how you write software. And the guy looks at me and says, we're not here to write software.
Speaker 3:We're here to run business. And it's like, yeah. But your business is totally defined by the software that we write. It didn't make any sense. Right.
Speaker 6:There by the way, to to the to the group of you, I told this to Brian, as an aside. I wrote and partly PBS in 98 or 99, and that's a the the director, David Winton, had read showstopper. And that was a that's a different take on and a little later take, it was their their release the first time they released a free browser. I the Mozilla maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. With with JB, we're watching that.
Speaker 3:I saw that film.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Called Code Rush, and I'm in it a little bit, but I actually wrote it and kinda created the structure for how Dave went about his filming. So but then I lost you know, I got off track. But I'm very, very interested in trying to, you know, to to reach the public more about the importance of software, what's the life of the code writer, and how it's changed over Well, so I'll tell
Speaker 1:you one way in which it's changed, a very big way that it's changed, since the book was written is the rise of open source. So even, you know, in in, you know, we're at a company where we're we're taking a pretty from scratch approach, and we still use lots and lots and lots and lots of software that was written years ago, decades ago, multiple decades ago. And we the the software one of the peculiar aspects of software is that it's able to persist in perpetuity. There's no cost of actually of when when we talk about software maintenance, but you don't need to main maintain software any more than you have needed to maintain Showstopper. It is it that once you've written software, it's written, and someone else can build on top of it.
Speaker 1:And that's what Microsoft wasn't doing at all. And to a certain degree, that's part of why what you've chronicled is the kind of this last in, like, the siege mentality software where we are gonna write the whole thing. We are gonna do it come hell or high water. We are and then and no artifacts of this are gonna be open sourced. So, by the way, anyone who if we fail, if we're canceled, someone else is gonna have to start over again.
Speaker 1:And and Right. That doesn't really exist anymore in a ways that are really important. I mean, I and, you know, Tom is here. Tom, he he he probably maybe he disagrees, but AWS is not possible without open source. Google is not possible without open source.
Speaker 1:Netflix is not possible without open source. They literally could not build these companies if they were building them on proprietary software. So that is a very, very and that and the Internet and and distributed source code control are 3, like, absolute mega trends that that completely change software development in the decade after the book is written. I No. Justin, I wanna get back to your comment.
Speaker 1:You had a I guess a quick comment in there that people can make choices. What did you mean
Speaker 4:by that? Well, the whole deal I mean, for I teach novice users now mostly how to use computers. Right? That's like what I do for a job. I'm a librarian.
Speaker 4:I had to choose between tech and librarianship, and there's more women in librarianship, and people are nicer. So I just moved on
Speaker 6:and no. No worries.
Speaker 4:But, like, I no. I just I worked in tech. I worked for an Internet service provider in Seattle in the nineties, and, I like it, but I just I'm a service oriented person. You know? And so I work with a lot of people who are struggling with technology, and they take, you know, software as a given, right, that they just have to kind of figure it out.
Speaker 4:And, you know, one of the things that's very effective to me in my work is being like, no. No. No. Somebody chose that. And, you know, I'm sorry.
Speaker 4:I'm sorry that's hard for you. Let's figure out how to make it work for you. But the reason all those little triangles on Facebook are so hard to click is because the average age of somebody that works at Facebook is 30 or 31, and they don't wear glasses. They've got perfect vision, and their hands don't shake. Those could be different.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, on Facebook, on mobile is what I tell a lot of sort of older users to use if they have mobile devices because it's easier to poke than it is to click on a tiny target that is very hard to see and or manipulate. And all of those are choices, every single one of them. And it can help novice users with agency, you know, feeling that they have a little bit more control over their situation if they can understand the why. And, you know, I also work with a lot of accessibility topics. I, you know, help print disabled users get access to ebooks, and, oh my gosh, that's a journey.
Speaker 4:And part of it is because, you know, the accessibility market in many cases isn't huge. You don't make a lot of extra money making your software, you know, 2% different so that, you know, blind users, print disabled users, deaf users can interact with it. You know, the market drives so much of that.
Speaker 6:The the mass market. Important.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly. The
Speaker 4:mass market, and it's very important to understand that, again, outside of the government and, you know, libraries need to make our stuff accessible for legal reasons in addition to just ethic reasons. It's important to understand that human beings are making choices. And if that's not accessible, somebody either made a decision because of, you know, mass market or they made a anti decision by not thinking about this, group of users. And you need to understand that in order to understand how to affect it and how to improve it both for users and as well as future users. Right?
Speaker 4:Because at least when I bought Microsoft Word out of the box, when there was a box, It was what it was, but it wasn't gonna change on you, you know, or not quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's a really different environment for people in the, you know, in the mobile world dealing with browsers that update. I mean, we saw that wacky Chrome update, right, where they changed a thing with how JavaScript worked and how suddenly, you know, the websites you didn't have to maintain maybe broke. People made choices about that. Maintain maybe broke. People made choices about that and they can unmake them but, you know, in order to make the world as just and as fair and as ethical as you want it to, in a world that has moved primarily online and digital, you have to understand that there's humans behind the software that you can influence in order to make the world the way you want it to be?
Speaker 4:I guess, kind of long answer, short question.
Speaker 1:No. That's a great question.
Speaker 7:I feel like the anthropology of software is something that we don't really address very broadly or very often.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think Well, yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's all anthropology.
Speaker 1:Right? Right.
Speaker 4:And it's all made by people. And and AI, I think we talk about it the most in the AI environment.
Speaker 1:Oh, gosh.
Speaker 4:Right? Right? Why can't your camera see, you know, huge swaths of people? Oh, because you didn't test on any of those. Why?
Speaker 4:Because, oh, you don't have any friends that are like that. Or, oh, because we tested our, you know, neural net on Wikipedia because it's free instead of an actual corpus of how people, you know, talk and interact in a lot more different spaces, not just the sort of young men of Wikipedia spaces.
Speaker 1:Well, it it Complicated. Yeah. I think you're making such a good point. And again, because getting to that that that point about agency and, Greg, to your point about kind of this this software being this kinda the this invisible machine that people can't see. Because, Justin, what you're really trying to do is is connect people to the decisions that have been made that affect them.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that just in terms on that point of agency, I I'm I'm not being euphemistic. I really did not know about memory protection until I got to college. And I was upset because I thought about the number the number of times I lost work. The number of times and and we don't live in this era now. Thank God.
Speaker 1:Where your machine would just reset when and you would literally lose work. You could lose hours of work. And I remember communicating this to my mom and like, mom, I've got a very important message for you. Like when the computer reboots, it's not your fault. It's because we don't have we actually have the technology.
Speaker 1:We have airbags. We have seat belts, and we're not deploying them. And I know for her, that really that gave her agency to know that, like, no. This is a bug somewhere that someone needs to be to go fix. And it I did find it galling when you have dates arguing against memory protection.
Speaker 1:Because, Jasmine, this is the this is your person at the other end who is about to make a decision that is gonna affect lots and lots and lots and lots of people's lives, but they're not connected to that at all. And it's
Speaker 4:Well, and I I always ask, like, when I'm dealing with something with software that seems counterintuitive to me, what was the problem the person who was building this was trying to solve? Is it the same as a problem I would be having? Also, you know, thank you open source world. Can I fix it? Right?
Speaker 4:Right. Is there a way that I, an end user, can do something that will make the thing I don't want different? Whereas with you, memory protection, whatever that is, you know, it seems like
Speaker 1:Seems like you're upset about it anyway. That's right.
Speaker 4:Well, but it also seems like you did not you couldn't fix it because of the way software used to be.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. I mean, so and and just to to describe it very briefly, this is the thing that would protect one application from destroying another. And a single before this was deployed, and this is what Cutler and Gates are arguing about in the book. Before this is deployed, one bad application would cause the computer to reboot.
Speaker 1:And it was really, really, really frustrating. And so it it's it's one of these things. It's like this this total unseen detail that has all of these ramifications. And I do want I mean, I and, Justin, I wonder with with some of your accessibility that some of the things you're working on with accessibility, does open source help address some of that because of its resilience? Or open source can't be killed.
Speaker 1:Open source
Speaker 4:Oh my gosh. Totally. And I, you know, have a sort of caveat about this. But, basically, like, people who use desktop computers, right, desktop or laptop computers, you know, have access to tools, right, in a different way than people that use mobile devices, although Android is better on this. You know, Apple is terrible.
Speaker 4:But, like, you know, I tell people like, oh, you know, you can just block the ads in Firefox on your desktop, or you can use this JavaScript plug in, you know, this Grease Monkey plug in for Firefox that'll do this or that. Or there's a whole bunch of plug ins for basically all the browsers now in a desktop environment that you can use to manipulate. And maybe you can't code. I can't code. But I can use somebody else's code so that I don't have to see, you know, who to follow on Twitter because I don't like it.
Speaker 4:You know what I mean? It's like, oh, here's some, you know, young tech men you may not have heard of. And I just oh, Twitter. Why? Why?
Speaker 1:Why with the men? Why with the young men? Twitter.
Speaker 4:Well, don't get me wrong. I love men. But, like, Twitter
Speaker 1:is tends
Speaker 4:to think I am 1 as near as I can tell. And and and that I have affinity for a different group of users than I do. And so I just have a, you know, Grease Monkey script that means I don't see that because I don't wanna see it, and it's not helpful for me. But in the world of mobile, you know, we see so many people or we did, you know, be like, roar. You know?
Speaker 4:Everybody's using their phones now. We've solved the digital divide. We've solved the you know, computers are expensive. We've solved all these problems. But what we really did was we gave over more control to the people who run our devices where it's a lot harder to manipulate even Firefox, like, on my phone in order to make the online world go through a filter that makes it more appealing or palatable to me.
Speaker 4:And that can also include accessibility stuff, you know, making things easier to view, making things easier to touch, making things easier like, my home button on my phone is broken because I've still got a phone that's old enough to have a button. And, you know, so I use an accessibility feature. Now I've got one I can tap on my screen. I appreciate that. You know?
Speaker 4:But you have to know that that's possible. Know that it's within your grasp. Every time I talk about Greasemonkey scripts, the people I work with are like, where are blah blah Ginger this stuff? And I'm like, no. No.
Speaker 4:No. Watch me do it. And, you know, we'll literally click through something on a screen. It's like you click this, and then you click that, and then you click this. Anyone can do it, even you.
Speaker 4:Let's get your ads off of Yahoo Mail because it's pernicious, and we move forward. You know? And that's my question. How do I help people move forward? And open source really helps with that.
Speaker 4:Being able to get under the hood, the right to repair, the right to, you know, access code.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:All of that helps us move forward. It doesn't just put us where someone else wants us to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's first of all, god bless you for making a far side reference in such a bad thing.
Speaker 4:The I'm so happy Gary Larson is back.
Speaker 1:Oh, I the I feel like the I mean, at this point, like, I'm definitely, like, a bullseye exer, but I've worked with millennials for so long that I have purged, like, the far side references from my vocabulary. But the I just love the fact that, like, the blah blah ginger reference and just, like, not waiting for anybody to get it or explain it. We're moving on, which is just, you know, god bless you. I actually made a far side reference because you and yesterday, as recently as yesterday, because the, and, Greg, this is where all this became very apropos, interestingly enough. And, Jess, I'm sure you saw this obviously yesterday as well because I know, you had tweeted about it, about the anniversary the 25th anniversary of IE 3.
Speaker 1:Like okay. And a, not well thought out tweet storm by someone who worked there who was really trying to say, this was a special time for me. And, I
Speaker 4:Sure. Families fell apart, but we created great value for shareholders.
Speaker 3:80 hours a week and loving Eddie.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He really Brian. Brian,
Speaker 6:let me make one this is a fascinating conversation, and I I've never heard, from readers like this of about Showstopper. And so I'd love to hear from more readers. Brian knows how to reach me. I'm just gonna close with with one with one, thought and and then exit. But and and Jess has been fascinating to listen to as well.
Speaker 6:I I'm very grateful for your interest in the book, and, I've learned a lot. And the service versus artifacts, You know, the people on the NT team, they thought they were creating something like a sculpture. It was a thing, and they had to worry about where to get all the discs because they sent it out on discs. You know? And like, the d the Data General Computer, it was an artifact.
Speaker 6:And so the transformation of software from artifact into service is both fabulous and and also scary because you it changes all the time. It's not a thing anymore. And much of the premise of NT was it was a thing that had to be done, quote, unquote, done by a certain date, and then it was released. And then you sat back and waited to hear how people liked it. And then after a period of time, you would have a new version.
Speaker 6:This is just a totally different world today.
Speaker 1:It it is. And I would say that while things are broadly, I think, much better for family. Software's a much better domain than the I mean, I feel, I mean, all of the folks that you captured, so many of them loved software and were more or less terrorized out of it, which is heartbreaking to me. I think it's a much better domain. I do think that one, the dark that darker side that still exists does exist now differently because in this service model, you get people that now need to attend to the software whenever and wherever it breaks.
Speaker 1:And it's not the the kind of the crunch mode to ship a giant release. It is more I'm being I keep being woken up over and overnight in the over and over in the middle of the night to go address to a software bug that I didn't create.
Speaker 2:It's the death march with no end.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 6:Wow. Wow. I didn't think of that.
Speaker 1:It is. And or at least it can be. And I I I think that's part of what, you know, all of us are trying to have a world where that's where that's not the case. But what but when you see that dark dark side today, that's how you see it.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, thanks, Brian, for including me, and I really hope I hear from some of you individually and because I I'm also interested in why people continue to turn to showstopper and find some value in it. Thanks so much to Brian and Adam for including me in this. I apologize for my technical difficulties.
Speaker 1:Well, you you should take a page from Justin, and you should not be blaming yourself. You should take some agency and know that Twitter Spaces still has lots of room for improvement, so don't blame yourself.
Speaker 6:That's kind of you to say. And, Brian and Adam, thank you so much. Fascinating community you've got. And I keep encouraging you to think of the literary aspects of software and to share with me because I think it's valuable for society and civilization, for our culture, because software really is the artistic side. You know, a lot of artistic, artisanal side to software, and, you guys are all participating in that.
Speaker 6:So thanks again for including me.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you. And I and I think that, you know, that I think I I can't think of a better kinda closing remark than that one. So thank you very much for joining us. Thank you everyone for joining us.
Speaker 1:Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:This was I really appreciate it. We will be we are trying to do this doing this Monday evenings, and a little more regularly. So I hope we will see everyone next Monday. But thank you very much.
Speaker 6:Well, and I I see you next week.
Speaker 1:Thank you again. You bet. Take care. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye.