Gordon Letwin went on to troll OS/2 users in the early 1990's on Usenet. He had some sort of bet that Windows would have a specific feature (multitasking?) before OS/2. The bet was the loser would fly the winner to any city the winner desired (probably US) for dinner.
Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
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Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#12I have one of the pictured terminals (the adds regent 20) set up for my daughters to play hunt the wumpus on a raspberry pi (mounted inside the voluminous case, it even gets decent wifi with a usb dongle)
Oh, were there people in the pictures? The hardware overshadows them!
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#13And this is what these folks are up to now. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o... Some of them have done reasonably well.
After that, it doesn't look like she did much else. She raised her children and became a volunteer
Not a great way to phrase things...
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#14I love the giant banner font used in the printouts on Matt McConaughey's desk. And the Trash-80s.
It's fascinating just how much printed material there is in these photos. How much of the work they were doing back then was not digital. It's an interesting contrast to the modern era where a very high percentage of the work in software development is done using a computer.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#15I like how every office has a cork board instead of a whiteboard.
Also, there are no post-it notes.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#16So much paper.
Those noisy line printers must have been running constantly all day long.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#17Towards the bottom of the page, there are two pictures of the mainframe that they used. The desktop computers in the other pictures were probably just terminals that were connected to it. It was a DECSYSTEM 2020. It ran the TOPS-20 operating system.
The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found called it a mainframe.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/digital/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20
The fans of TOPS-20 were nearly as anti-Unix as the ITS partisans. This may help explain why Microsoft has not been so fond of Unix and the Unix way of doing things. At least in its early days.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#18If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that era, would they have any usable or employable skills in such an environment? (besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#19One of the guys (white shirt and brown corduroys) is Mike Courtney. He and I worked together at Seattle's Retail Computer Store, alongside Bob Wallace (Quickwrite & Shareware) and Tim Paterson (MS-DOS).
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#20If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that era, would they have any usable or employable skills in such an environment? (besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)
Of course they would have usable skills - general understanding of computing, superb analytical minds, 36 years of advancement in education, excellent problem solving ability.
At most they would have to learn a new lexicon of programming languages and operating systems which are FAR less complicated than the current range of languages and design patterns software engineers must master today.
A few weeks (days?) of studying and figuring out how to pre-optimize for much smaller workloads and they'd be able to keep pace easily.