About a decade ago I worked for a very senior and highly respected guy who was near the end of his career. After working closely with him for over a year he dec

About a decade ago I worked for a very senior and highly respected guy who was near the end of his career. After working closely with him for over a year he decided it was finally time to retire and he left. Recently, many years later, I'm reading an interesting history of Xerox Parc during that "golden era" where a small group created all the stuff that rocked Steve Jobs world during the legendary 70s demo that led to those concepts ending up in the Lisa and Mac (ie GUI, mouse, etc), and I see that my former boss was on that team and wrote key parts of that stuff early in his career. I look on YouTube and he's one of the people demoing on stage at that big event where the original team got all that code working again on restored original hardware to recreate 'the mother of all demos' so it could be recorded for posterity. I reached out to him and said, "Dude, I worked with you all that time and you never thought to even mention in all those conversations we had about interface design that you were one of the people who invented a lot of what became computer interaction as we know it?" He replied, "Oh, that. I didn't think it was important." It just says a lot about the character and class of these guys, especially in an era where I see too many people who go out of their way to ensure everyone they work with knows they were "one of the first 50 employees at..." (some recent unicorn startup).