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I worked for Pointcast :) The data was specifically for the individual, you could customize the data you were pushed using the client. It wasn't just a screens

I worked for Pointcast :) The data was specifically for the individual, you could customize the data you were pushed using the client. It wasn't just a screensaver. That wikipedia pages misses a lot of the fun back then. Dave Dorman was a really bad choice of CEO, he didn't even have a computer and his first priority seemed to be picking the type of Walnut to have his personal carpenter make his desk from. Ah, the good old days of spending $80m...

mrshoe 17y ago
Very cool! It must have been fun to watch that all play out first hand. I was in High School still, unfortunately. I was definitely a PointCast user, though. Although it didn't turn out to be revolutionary, I certainly found it useful.
- sfphotoarts 17y ago
  It was fun, except, had the board (Chris mostly) accepted the offer of $450m then I would not have had to work any longer. Alas. I also turned down an offer to join Nutscrape way back too. All fabulous examples of great career choices I've made... The thing that probably had the biggest negative impact was rewriting the client in COM (who remembers that?), this gave us absolutely no new features and bogged down client development for six months, meanwhile portals became the new hotness. There were some interesting developer issues that we tackled back then, like using the i/o completion ports model (rather than the more traditional BSD sockets model). Since the servers were all NT the i/o completion ports made the code hard to debug but resulted in very high performance. I think (if memory serves) MSFT got that from their VMS roots. Some of the kernel guys on NT were bigshots at DEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg)
  - initself 17y ago
    Ugh, this sounds like a very very bad dream.
sown 17y ago
I loved point cast!
Perceval 17y ago
As a Wikipedia admin, I'd love to have you update the article for Pointcast, especially if you have sources you can reference while filling in the gaps & correcting information.
- xiaoma 17y ago
  Since he actually worked there and experienced what they were doing, wouldn't he be a first-hand source?
  - Ras_ 17y ago
    It's not enough for Wikipedia. References need to exist in some form of media, so if necessary, readers are able to check them. Wikipedia Policy: Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

mrshoe 17y ago

Very cool! It must have been fun to watch that all play out first hand. I was in High School still, unfortunately. I was definitely a PointCast user, though. Although it didn't turn out to be revolutionary, I certainly found it useful.

sfphotoarts 17y ago
It was fun, except, had the board (Chris mostly) accepted the offer of $450m then I would not have had to work any longer. Alas. I also turned down an offer to join Nutscrape way back too. All fabulous examples of great career choices I've made... The thing that probably had the biggest negative impact was rewriting the client in COM (who remembers that?), this gave us absolutely no new features and bogged down client development for six months, meanwhile portals became the new hotness. There were some interesting developer issues that we tackled back then, like using the i/o completion ports model (rather than the more traditional BSD sockets model). Since the servers were all NT the i/o completion ports made the code hard to debug but resulted in very high performance. I think (if memory serves) MSFT got that from their VMS roots. Some of the kernel guys on NT were bigshots at DEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg)
- initself 17y ago
  Ugh, this sounds like a very very bad dream.

sown 17y ago

I loved point cast!

Perceval 17y ago

As a Wikipedia admin, I'd love to have you update the article for Pointcast, especially if you have sources you can reference while filling in the gaps & correcting information.

xiaoma 17y ago
Since he actually worked there and experienced what they were doing, wouldn't he be a first-hand source?
- Ras_ 17y ago
  It's not enough for Wikipedia. References need to exist in some form of media, so if necessary, readers are able to check them. Wikipedia Policy: Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability