Amjad's tribute is touching, and also be sure to read the Wikipedia page he links to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedi

Amjad's tribute is touching, and also be sure to read the Wikipedia page he links to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos I met Doug in the late 1970s when we worked in the same Tymshare office at 20705 Valley Green Drive in Cupertino. He had a little cubicle like the rest of us, in the far corner of the building behind the pine tree in the middle of this Street View image: https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A https://goo.gl/maps/JEZAqS6vqVAAfjP6A We only talked a few times, but I could always see the sadness in his eyes from the shabby treatment Tymshare gave him. No real team, and not much encouragement to continue his mission. Tymshare was quite a land of lost opportunities. Earlier in the 1970s they had a "programmable terminal" in a side office. I think it may have been a Datapoint 2200? I found the programming manual and saw that I could write code to respond to the cursor keys, put characters on the screen where I wanted them, and then run Conway's Game of Life! In my years of working there coding on Teletype machines, I'd never experienced anything like this. Eventually my manager saw me working on my GoL program, and kindly but firmly said, "Mike, this looks like fun and all, but no one is ever going to want to do something like this. We have important business problems to solve. Back to work now!" At one point they did consider doing something to take advantage of these newfangled "microcomputers". But they didn't pursue it very far, because they figured it might be a threat to their established timesharing business. And they were right!