present at history
I've been fortunate in my career to have worked in places where, as they say, history was made (though, I hasten to add, I had no role in that history).
I started as a tech writer in August of 82 at Digital Research in Pacific Grove. My first high tech workplace was a beautiful Victorian on Lighthouse Avenue, about two blocks west of the P.G. post office. (I walked two city blocks to work.) The other DRI "office" was another Victorian, a block or two further west, on the other side of Lighthouse. The latter house was actually the birthplace of DRI.
For those not schooled in the history of computer science, Digital Research was founded by Gary Kildall, who developed the first operating system for microcomputers. DRI made CP/M (Control Program/Microprocessor) and, later, MP/M and Concurrent CP/M-86. I'll write more on DRI another day.
After DRI, I spent three years (85-88) at Xerox, at Geng Road, in Palo Alto, and, later, Sunnyvale. Xerox PARC, up on Hillview in Palo Alto, was the glamour location in those days, but we got up there enough to feel like some of the PARC brilliance rubbed off on us. By 1985, Xerox's glory days were over. Nonetheless a handful of the significant contributors were still around and, even more fun, the amazing, ground-breaking machines and software were everywhere. In this entry, I won't attempt to do justice to the seminal creations in user interface, networking, debugging environments, languages... For a computer science geek, or for anyone who has an interest in history and culture, you got the feeling like, "Wow. This is where it all begins..."
In Feb. 88, I started at Sun. NFS had been invented here and was being refined. I believe the X window system had been developed here, as well as the Yellow Pages (later, NIS) directory service (which, I believe, owed a debt to Xerox's Clearinghouse service). We had a Kerberos-like security mechanism, whose name escapes me. The word was that the industry settled on MIT's Kerberos rather than Sun's security architecture for reasons other than technical merit. But, again, the facts of the case are fuzzy.
I worked in the OSI group. At the time, Sun boxes were often used as TCP/IP routers. (Then [I believe it's still the case] if you added a network interface to a Sun machine, the default was that it behaved as a router.) Cisco started up around this time. Sun had a decision to make as to whether to further develop the OS as a routing platform or concede that ground to Cisco. My recollection--and it would be illuminating to get the authentic word on this--is that we (Sun) said, in effect, let Cisco take care of the routing. If true, one might be tempted to say what an egregious blunder we made. I tend to be more philosophical--the people responsible made the best decision they were capable of with the info they had at the time. These were the early days of that segment of the industry and it was really hard to predict how networking would evolve.
I started as a tech writer in August of 82 at Digital Research in Pacific Grove. My first high tech workplace was a beautiful Victorian on Lighthouse Avenue, about two blocks west of the P.G. post office. (I walked two city blocks to work.) The other DRI "office" was another Victorian, a block or two further west, on the other side of Lighthouse. The latter house was actually the birthplace of DRI.
For those not schooled in the history of computer science, Digital Research was founded by Gary Kildall, who developed the first operating system for microcomputers. DRI made CP/M (Control Program/Microprocessor) and, later, MP/M and Concurrent CP/M-86. I'll write more on DRI another day.
After DRI, I spent three years (85-88) at Xerox, at Geng Road, in Palo Alto, and, later, Sunnyvale. Xerox PARC, up on Hillview in Palo Alto, was the glamour location in those days, but we got up there enough to feel like some of the PARC brilliance rubbed off on us. By 1985, Xerox's glory days were over. Nonetheless a handful of the significant contributors were still around and, even more fun, the amazing, ground-breaking machines and software were everywhere. In this entry, I won't attempt to do justice to the seminal creations in user interface, networking, debugging environments, languages... For a computer science geek, or for anyone who has an interest in history and culture, you got the feeling like, "Wow. This is where it all begins..."
In Feb. 88, I started at Sun. NFS had been invented here and was being refined. I believe the X window system had been developed here, as well as the Yellow Pages (later, NIS) directory service (which, I believe, owed a debt to Xerox's Clearinghouse service). We had a Kerberos-like security mechanism, whose name escapes me. The word was that the industry settled on MIT's Kerberos rather than Sun's security architecture for reasons other than technical merit. But, again, the facts of the case are fuzzy.
I worked in the OSI group. At the time, Sun boxes were often used as TCP/IP routers. (Then [I believe it's still the case] if you added a network interface to a Sun machine, the default was that it behaved as a router.) Cisco started up around this time. Sun had a decision to make as to whether to further develop the OS as a routing platform or concede that ground to Cisco. My recollection--and it would be illuminating to get the authentic word on this--is that we (Sun) said, in effect, let Cisco take care of the routing. If true, one might be tempted to say what an egregious blunder we made. I tend to be more philosophical--the people responsible made the best decision they were capable of with the info they had at the time. These were the early days of that segment of the industry and it was really hard to predict how networking would evolve.
