Never thought I'd get a chance to tell this story. Early 1990s, college internship. The company did presentations for clients, like many do. They had an unusua

Never thought I'd get a chance to tell this story. Early 1990s, college internship. The company did presentations for clients, like many do. They had an unusual way of presenting data that required using actual protractors to draw circles and curves, with pencil, on otherwise computer-generated charts. They read numbers from Excel spreadsheets and plotted them on paper. I was shocked, to say the least. I proposed writing a program that read Excel spreadsheets and emitted the graphics. They loved the idea, especially from a summer intern. So I wrote a letter to Microsoft asking for documentation of the Excel file format. A week later I got a thick envelope with a photocopied manual completely describing the format. I remember the word BIFF throughout. I wrote the program, it worked great, and I even negotiated a hefty lump-sum payment to sell it to them at the end of the summer. It left me with a very positive impression of Microsoft as a developer-friendly company. Makes sense; developers are their platform's customers, and they're good at serving their customers.