I was fairly active in the mid-1990s with a Bay Area group called the Software Entrepreneurs' Forum (SEF, later called the Software Forum, and still later the S

I was fairly active in the mid-1990s with a Bay Area group called the Software Entrepreneurs' Forum (SEF, later called the Software Forum, and still later the Software Developers' Forum). Alan Cooper [1] was running the group at the time, and two of their events stand out in my mind. Bill Gates spoke at a dinner meeting. Fran Finnegan [2] and Alan and I sat at a front table. In the question and answer period, Fran started heckling Bill about undocumented APIs that Microsoft used in their own apps. Bill said "there are no undocumented APIs in DOS or Windows, and if there were, there's this thing called the publishing industry that would find them and write about them." I was a regular contributor to Microsoft Systems Journal at the time, so as we were walking to the buffet line after the talk, I introduced myself to Bill. He said, "Michael Geary? I read all your articles!" Will Hearst [3] spoke at another meeting about marketing your product and company. As part of his talk he showed some TV commercials and commented on them. The most memorable was "Points of View" from The Guardian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU Besides being part of a newspaper publishing family, Will is also a mathematician and at the time was an AWK programmer. (I don't know if he's kept with it, but it wouldn't surprise me.) Will's interest in math and programming was fairly well known in the SEF community. After the meeting I overheard someone say, "I thought he was going to talk about technical stuff, but it was just marketing." After all, why would you want to hear about marketing in a Software Entrepreneurs' Forum meeting? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190507180438/http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190507180438/http://www.cooper... [2] http://www.secinfo.com/ http://www.secinfo.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III