I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.
Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.
As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
> As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
Well, I wasn't even close to the technology nexus that you describe, neither in time nor in place, but this really resonates with me.
I RELIABLY manage to "not get" stuff in my own bubble, not because I'm too far away from it or because I don't understand it, but the exact opposite.
For example, I clearly remember how in the early 2000s I thought/felt "well, of course Amazon/eBay/Google is a great business, but everyone is already using them anyway, so what's the upside" and similiar other Thoughts Of Great Wisdom And Foresight.
You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper from my lispm. It only supported the image format since that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.
Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).
Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.
I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.
Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.
As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.