Thirty years ago was 1992. I was an employee of Apple Computer. I had spent a year or two working on a knowledge-based machine-control application that Apple u

Thirty years ago was 1992. I was an employee of Apple Computer. I had spent a year or two working on a knowledge-based machine-control application that Apple used to test prerelease system software for application-compatibility problems. A colleague wrote it in Common Lisp, building it on top of a frame language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence...) written by another colleague. The application did its job, using knowledge-based automation to significantly amplify the reach and effectiveness of a small number of human operators, and finding and reporting thousands of issues. Despite that success, the group that we belonged to underwent some unrelated organizational turmoil that resulted in the project being canceled. I interviewed with a software startup in San Diego that was working on a publishing app for the NeXT platform. I had bought a NeXT machine for learning and pleasure, and had been tinkering with software development on it. A bit later, another developer from the same organization at Apple left and founded his own small startup, and, knowing that I had a NeXT cube and was writing hobby projects on it, he contracted with me to deliver a small productivity app on NeXT. In the course of that work I somehow found out about the San Diego group and started corresponding with them. They invited me to interview for a job with them. I liked San Diego, and I really liked the guys at the startup, and was very close to packing up and moving down there, but then the Newton group at Apple approached me to work for them. The Pages deal was better financially, and, as I say, I really liked the people there, but in the end I couldn't pass up the chance to work on a wild new hardware-software platform from Apple. In the end, Newton was not a great success, of course, but it was still among the most fulfilling work I've ever done. Before I was done, I had the opportunity to work on a team with brilliant and well-known programmers and computer scientists on promising and novel ideas and see many of them brought to life. On the other hand, I also overworked myself terribly, seduced by my own hopes and dreams, and the ridiculous lengths that I went to may have contributed to serious health problems that took me out of the workforce for a couple of years a decade later. But 1992 was a great year, and one that I look back on with great fondness.