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Great read! Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the

Great read! Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end resulted in the 6502 becoming the basis for so many early microcomputers, including the Apple II. I'm sure there are many similar stories that illustrate the wisdom of this, otherwise counterintuitive, approach.

vram22 6y ago
I did a fair amount of hobbyist programming on the Commodore 64 and BBC micros in their respective BASIC dialects and 6502 assembly language, and loved it. Only a bit later did I get to know of higher-level languages like Pascal and then C (though C is a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily negative ways*).
- vram22 6y ago
  > a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily negative ways). Meant "a somewhat lower-level language than Pascal" Early on, I read in some book or mag that "C is a version of Pascal that is not afraid to get its hands dirty". Enthused, I immediately started exploring C (although came back to Pascal sometime later via Delphi). Did a good amount of work with it over time, including some successful product development work (that was deployed in multiple client-server projects as database middleware) and some interesting business projects.