The story told to you was clearly an adaptation of Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better". Amusingly, in "Worse in Better" Stanford and MIT are actually on the sam

The story told to you was clearly an adaptation of Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better". Amusingly, in "Worse in Better" Stanford and MIT are actually on the same side while the "get X out quickly" mentality is attributed to Berkeley/New Jersey (where Bell Labs was). In the original story the "New Jersey" guy (but from Berkeley) was Bill Joy and the MIT guy was Daniel Weinreb (who was an HN user). If you're interested, you should see his blog post about it: http://web.archive.org/web/20121107034606/http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-future-of-lisp http://web.archive.org/web/20121107034606/http://danweinreb.... EDIT: Changed second paragraph for clarification.