 I've been reading Dealers of Lightning, learning about the story of Xerox PARC, I went in expecting an uplifting story about a supporting environment fostering creative indepen- I was already impressed by the work that came out of that place, but I think now I'm even more impressed that anything at all came out of there despite all the bullshit they were dealing with under Xerox which are the fucking worst. 6 comments
 @neauoire Thanks for the recommendation. Added to my (not short) to-get list. Neither of the online book stores I usually use (Blackwell's and Waterstones) has this but amazon.co.uk does. But this from their synopsis: “This brilliant group created … and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet)”. What? @edavies the Ethernet story is pretty interesting too, another thing that xerox didn't want.. @neauoire Xerox was my first job straight out of uni in 1981 when we were first bringing Star to market. I worked in the Pilot team (OS kernel) and it was indeed a wonderful place. The environment for a techie like me (uninvolved in all the higher level machinations) was indeed a supportive one that fostered innovation. At the time, many of us naively believed that having the best technology would win the day. It was beneficial to me to unlearn this early in my career. @bitsplusatoms Oh wow, that must have been something to be there first hand. I'm just past the point where a competing IBM computer that had a basic green and black screen basically stole the market, by being cheaper. Were you there also during the creation of the Dorado? @neauoire Dorado was up and running when I arrived. During my new-hire orientation (or whatever they called it), I got my first demo of smalltalk running on a Dorado. It blew my mind. It was the now-classic demo of going into the smalltalk source, making a simple change to the selection highlighting method, hitting “accept”, and having the new selection model work immediately. It was so fast and so seamless that it seemed like magic. |
Gregory's Server
@neauoire yeah I think that dealers of lightning and the soul of a new machine are, at best, celebrations of creativity and craft in spite of dysfunction if not just portraits of it