Monday, January 03, 2005
Didja hear about the wired article about the guy who pretended to work at apple?
(i can't find the story at wired anymore but have linked to the same story told elsewhere.)((oh! i guess i couldn't find it at wired was because i'd read it at slashdot.))
hmm, actually it sounds better when he tells it:
One August night, after dinner, two guys showed up to announce that they would camp out in my office until the modification was done. The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code. The work was delicate surgery requiring arcane knowledge of the MacOS, the PowerPC, and my own software. It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone.
At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again.... The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo)
Because I had a "job" like that once. It was 1981, and I'd gotten hooked on this computer network thingy. It was user-friendly, had email and anonymous discussion groups and notesfiles that were like early versions of listservs. My roommate was all excited one day because they'd built a chat room and gotten 6 people into it.
As a mere student, I didn't have much access to the good stuff, so I applied for a job at the media library. Didn't get it, but then they offered me a job as an economics programmer. I was torn - with the job, I would have the access I wanted. And I was an economist; I even had a fancy certificate in economics from the Henry George School at SUNY. But I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag. Still can't. I took the job. It took them about a semester to catch on that I wasn't actually doing anything. If I had it to do over, I would have outsourced the work to my computer-able buddies, made it an open-source software development gig and harvested the credit, but I didn't have that together then. The software I was working on, or not working on, was cool - a test bank of questions about supply and demand. By working through the questions, a college student or bright junior high kid could learn the basic insight of microeconomics. How prices and sales are determined by the intersection of supply and demand curves, and the damage that results when that gets interfered with.
I don't know if the software project ever got done - I wasn't a key bottleneck, they had other people working on it. In those days, the mainframe hardware was too expensive to support a mass market,and they never successfully ported the whole package over to the apple II's that were transforming the industry. A few years later they lost their funding and shut down. But in 1980-1982, we had this vision of how education and news and science and philosophy could be done on a computer, replacing the whole kludge of the university that was our local environment. Because I never did learn to program, and there wasn't a big market for non-coder software developers, I spent the rest of the eighties offline, working odd jobs, learning to survive on my own, but knowing there was this glorious future out there just waiting.
I slowly pulled myself up by my bootstraps, with moral support from my girlfriend,
being a diswasher, janitor, realtor, teamster, law student, law clerk, warehouse worker, snow lion headwaiter, daytrader, lawyer, but then it all fell apart.
I'll probably go back to working in a warehouse later this year, while I put the lawyer thing back together slowly. My niche as a lawyer is that I fight for anonymous free speech online - as a non-programmer, it's what I can do to do my part to grow this vision we had back then - a vision where journalists could take their stories right to the people, without a media conglomerate getting in the way.
(i can't find the story at wired anymore but have linked to the same story told elsewhere.)((oh! i guess i couldn't find it at wired was because i'd read it at slashdot.))
hmm, actually it sounds better when he tells it:
One August night, after dinner, two guys showed up to announce that they would camp out in my office until the modification was done. The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code. The work was delicate surgery requiring arcane knowledge of the MacOS, the PowerPC, and my own software. It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone.
At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again.... The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo)
Because I had a "job" like that once. It was 1981, and I'd gotten hooked on this computer network thingy. It was user-friendly, had email and anonymous discussion groups and notesfiles that were like early versions of listservs. My roommate was all excited one day because they'd built a chat room and gotten 6 people into it.
As a mere student, I didn't have much access to the good stuff, so I applied for a job at the media library. Didn't get it, but then they offered me a job as an economics programmer. I was torn - with the job, I would have the access I wanted. And I was an economist; I even had a fancy certificate in economics from the Henry George School at SUNY. But I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag. Still can't. I took the job. It took them about a semester to catch on that I wasn't actually doing anything. If I had it to do over, I would have outsourced the work to my computer-able buddies, made it an open-source software development gig and harvested the credit, but I didn't have that together then. The software I was working on, or not working on, was cool - a test bank of questions about supply and demand. By working through the questions, a college student or bright junior high kid could learn the basic insight of microeconomics. How prices and sales are determined by the intersection of supply and demand curves, and the damage that results when that gets interfered with.
I don't know if the software project ever got done - I wasn't a key bottleneck, they had other people working on it. In those days, the mainframe hardware was too expensive to support a mass market,and they never successfully ported the whole package over to the apple II's that were transforming the industry. A few years later they lost their funding and shut down. But in 1980-1982, we had this vision of how education and news and science and philosophy could be done on a computer, replacing the whole kludge of the university that was our local environment. Because I never did learn to program, and there wasn't a big market for non-coder software developers, I spent the rest of the eighties offline, working odd jobs, learning to survive on my own, but knowing there was this glorious future out there just waiting.
I slowly pulled myself up by my bootstraps, with moral support from my girlfriend,
being a diswasher, janitor, realtor, teamster, law student, law clerk, warehouse worker, snow lion headwaiter, daytrader, lawyer, but then it all fell apart.
I'll probably go back to working in a warehouse later this year, while I put the lawyer thing back together slowly. My niche as a lawyer is that I fight for anonymous free speech online - as a non-programmer, it's what I can do to do my part to grow this vision we had back then - a vision where journalists could take their stories right to the people, without a media conglomerate getting in the way.
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