Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
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Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#2I was living in Texas at the time of Flight 191. I was no fan of the IBM PC but it was still gut-wrenching to hear that the father of the machine had been killed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191
This was the crash that brought the term "microburst" into the national consciousness.
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#3It's rare that a tech story brings me to tears, but I couldn't help feel one swelling up when reading the final paragraphs.
> Eventually, it was Wilkie who made the first move. Overwhelmed with emotion, his eyes red and swollen with grief, he stepped forward and detached the red rosette from the lapel of his suit jacket. It was the same one Don had given him years before. Leaning down, he gently placed the rosette on the casket.
It feels like there should be a movie made about this story...
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#4For people who are interested in this era, Halt and Catch Fire is a terrific portrayal of the sorts of characters and battles that defined it, albeit from more of a startup perspective.
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#5There is a "high tech middle school" with his namesake in Boca Raton, FL, next to the former 1960s IBM R&D complex.
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#6I was living in Texas at the time of Flight 191. I was no fan of the IBM PC but it was still gut-wrenching to hear that the father of the machine had been killed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191 This was the crash that brought the term "microburst" into the national consciousness.
A fascinating training video provided to American Airlines pilots discussing windshear and microbursts. Flight 191 is an example used https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxXwqAm1a-Y
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#7For people who are interested in this era, Halt and Catch Fire is a terrific portrayal of the sorts of characters and battles that defined it, albeit from more of a startup perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A
Fantastic show, highly recommend.
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#8I grew up in South Florida in the 80s and 90s. I was familiar with the IBM office in Boca Raton, nicknamed T-Rex, and had a few school friends who worked at IBM on the IBM PC. From what I can remember, the Boca campus was like garden leave. IBM sent you there when they didn't want you but couldn't fire you. So it was full of IBM misfits who were thrown out of HQ. I never made the connection to Flight 191, and assumed it was because of Hurricane Andrew. But once the PC market took off IBM wanted that team brought back into the veil. A lot of my friends moved to Cary, NC, more famously known as Research Triangle.
Miami, and South Florida overall, is kind of a crazy place to be. Every couple of decades people out west or from up north rediscover we actually exist. There are good engineers here but the West and Northeast have loads of money. So once CS/SWE really took off as a career the companies down here couldn't/wouldn't compete. Trust me, if you were an Asian/Indian kid in Florida in the 90s and told your parents you wanted to work in software they were going to beat some sense into you.
I've watched money flood into the area and then get carried back out when the financial tides changed. I always imagined Miami could have been kind of like a Silicon Valley but the politics, money, geography will work against it.
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#9I grew up in South Florida in the 80s and 90s. I was familiar with the IBM office in Boca Raton, nicknamed T-Rex, and had a few school friends who worked at IBM on the IBM PC. From what I can remember, the Boca campus was like garden leave. IBM sent you there when they didn't want you but couldn't fire you. So it was full of IBM misfits who were thrown out of HQ. I never made the connection to Flight 191, and assumed…
I always console myself one day that New Orleans will be Miami with drinking water.
Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
#10I grew up in South Florida in the 80s and 90s. I was familiar with the IBM office in Boca Raton, nicknamed T-Rex, and had a few school friends who worked at IBM on the IBM PC. From what I can remember, the Boca campus was like garden leave. IBM sent you there when they didn't want you but couldn't fire you. So it was full of IBM misfits who were thrown out of HQ. I never made the connection to Flight 191, and assumed…
The IBM PC in particular was probably never especially significant to IBM as a whole whatever its effect on the computer industry generally.
As someone who had IBM as a client for a number of years, we observed that there seemed to be a lot of IBM folks who basically ended up in some Siberia in one form or another.