That was fun. Let's do it again :-) [That same B-tree code was powering our source code control system, IIRC. Every time we hit the next power of two on the da

That was fun. Let's do it again :-) [That same B-tree code was powering our source code control system, IIRC. Every time we hit the next power of two on the database size something else would explode. Wheee.] Patching the mask ROMs was fun. Nope, you can't change those things, but we had a bunch of bugs to fix between the time the ROMs taped out and we actually shipped. We couldn't afford a full ROM jump table (the newt had 4MB of ROM, 512K of RAM, and we ran the heaps mostly full and had essentially no memory left), so we randomized the jump table and played aliasing games with page mapping to get our patch budget down to 20K or so. It helped to have really good engineers -- people who really got into the swing of twisted, devious code -- write the patches. I wrote a couple of fixes, and had done a pretty good job, I thought, then handed them to Andy S. who always came back with something about five instructions long that worked better and maybe fixed another bug, too, with a bonus cackle of maniac laughter. When I started, Newton was an expensive researchy pipe-dream. A year later we'd done a complete reset and shipped product it. I don't know how we did that.