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Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

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Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#341

Post by JoeAltmaier »

tinkerteller wrote: post #330
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school at the time, and Gate's interpreter was buggy and lame. I could have done better, and knew it at the time. Fortunately the quality of his software had nothing to do with his success. It was about marketing and business timing.

People took his code and re-distributed en-mass. BASIC paid the Microsoft bills for almost 4 years. Are you saying people stole and/or paid for unusable code?

Buggy, lame code still let you do something with your shiny new computing device. Early adopters will put up with anything. Which Gates understood very well. It was about timing, not quality.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#342

Post by tim333 »

Sytten wrote: post #325
vonmoltke wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Someone with a Bachelors (or less) who builds systems by writing code is not a computer scientist. That is a less appropriate title than engineer. > Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma. Yes, we know Canada is almost uniquely psychotic about this. I,…

I mostly agree with you, but I still think it makes no sense to not have a regulated title. I mean you can't become a civil engineer if you don't study civil engineering, why is it different for software will remain a mystery to me.

I think the field is too new and fast changing to have fixed standards to examine people on. Civil engineering has been going on for at least 2000 years on the other hand.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#343

Post by not_real_acct »

gonehome wrote: post #311
not_real_acct wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Abrash paved the way for Carmack. Carmack is great, no doubt, but Abrash wrote the book (literally.)

I think they both work together now at Oculus.

Yep! IIRC, Carmack learned a lot from Abrash, and then eventually hired him at ID Software. They've been working together for ages.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#344

Post by herdrick »

mnsc wrote: post #21

>there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to be unhappy because then we'll go buy “solutions” for our unhappiness. I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.

What industry is he talking about?

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#345

Post by a7776f88862 »

slededit wrote: post #317
tinkerteller wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not…

He wrote his interpreter on a larger machine (PDP-11 I think), and tested it on an emulator they wrote. When they got to MITS to show off their code that was the first time it ever ran on real hardware. They did not develop BASIC by flipping switches.

It was a PDP-10 at Harvard, and it was not just Gates, it was Gates and Paul Allen working on it together. Another interesting thing is that the PDP-10 was being paid for by Department of Defense grants, and when an auditor discovered how much computer time Gates and Allen (who was not even affiliated with Harvard) had used up, there was a disciplinary hearing, after which Gates left Harvard.[1] In his "Open Letter to Hobbyists"[2] Gates claims they used $40,000 worth of computer time. So basically Microsoft started with $40,000 stolen from the government.

[1] This is documented by Noam Cohen in The Know-It Alls. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#346

Post by slededit »

a7776f88862 wrote: post #345
slededit wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote his interpreter on a larger machine (PDP-11 I think), and tested it on an emulator they wrote. When they got to MITS to show off their code that was the first time it ever ran on real hardware. They did not develop BASIC by flipping switches.

It was a PDP-10 at Harvard, and it was not just Gates, it was Gates and Paul Allen working on it together. Another interesting thing is that the PDP-10 was being paid for by Department of Defense grants, and when an auditor discovered how much computer time Gates and Allen (who was not even affiliated with Harvard) had used up, there was a disciplinary hearing, after which Gates left Harvard.[1] In his "Open Letter t…

BillG claims Paul did most of the emulator work and he worked on the interpreter core. With the floating point routines by Monte Davidoff who they hired. It was a team effort of course, but BillG was adamant to take credit for the interpreter specifically.

From the source code itself:

  PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF.
  BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF.
  MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#347

Post by alexb7c4 »

sulam wrote: post #128

His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it. My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to…

I converted from mouse&click guy to command-line&scripting guy thanks to my employer who made my workstation a vm I had to rdp to over slow network.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#348

Post by a7776f88862 »

bsaul wrote: post #66
nl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already done so much more than either of those. Bell Labs delivered a fair bit of tech, but Xerox PARC did great demos. Xerox PARC == Magic Leap or something like that.

Don’t know why you were downvoted. Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. But they got great tech which got ripped off, unlike magic leap maybe ?

> Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc.

Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#349

Post by scroot »

a7776f88862 wrote: post #348
bsaul wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t know why you were downvoted. Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. But they got great tech which got ripped off, unlike magic leap maybe ?

> Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.

Don't forget the laser printer, postscript, etc

Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

#350

Post by a7776f88862 »

nostrademons wrote: post #271
twblalock wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho. How long do we have to wait until the lack of a killer app stops being interesting, and simply means the technology is not useful?

Bitcoin is coming up on its 9-year anniversary. The equivalent point in the web's history was 1998. How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying…

> it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.

I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.

You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)

PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:

"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-killed-payp...

The real value of PayPal turned out to be fraud prevention and consumer protection, something that hash chain schemes lack by design.

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