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I love these first hand accounts from the 80s. My very small related story is in '89 I was in Dallas and got a contracting gig from Aldus to work on Persuasion
by dingosity 4y ago
I love these first hand accounts from the 80s.
My very small related story is in '89 I was in Dallas and got a contracting gig from Aldus to work on Persuasion (Aldus' competitor to PowerPoint) for the Mac. I showed up for my first day, but the guy I was supposed to work for wasn't there yet so the office manager got me a desk and a notepad and IT came and made sure the Mac on my desk was properly connected to the network. After an hour or two of twiddling my thumbs and trying to look like I was doing something productive, my boss came in to say "oh. looks like a lot of us were laid off today and we're canceling your contract."
The Aldus guys were reasonable about it and gave me 2 weeks severance just for holding down the chair for two hours.
It has to be the shortest professional gig I've ever had.
- devinegan 4y agoAlso recommend https://www.folklore.org/index.py https://www.folklore.org/index.py if you like 80s tech stories.
- dingosity 4y agoI think I'm mentioned in one or two of the folklore.org stories.
- ahmed_ds 4y ago> I love these first hand accounts from the 80s. Have you checked out Dave's Garage? [0] He was a Microsoft engineer dating all the way back to the MS DOS days, and he has plenty of stories like this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/c/DavesGarage https://www.youtube.com/c/DavesGarage
- IntelMiner 4y agoDave had like three or four good stories but then realized it was easier to farm clicks by thumping his credentials while making absolutely trite content Going from "I invented Task Manager and got Microsoft to send me the XP era source code" To "M1 VERSUS RASPBERRY PI DRAAAAAG RACE WHICH IS FASTER?"
- II2II 4y agoI've enjoyed his series on the KIM-1, something that he wasn't personally involved with but is interesting nevertheless. As for the trite content, only he knows the motivation behind that. I agree that thumping his credentials does take away from what would, in some cases, be interesting topics. Heck, someone with the right background could probably make that Pi/M1 "drag race" interesting (i.e. deep enough to contrast the architecture of the processors, rather than presenting numbers with a faux sportscaster voice).
- r12343a_19 4y agoOften... people also have personal and professional interests. They do not provide uni-dimensional entertainment for ages.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoMuch better return on labor than what the Tesla people got.