Posted on 04/17/2017 10:17:26 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Solitaire has been a staple for office distraction since Microsoft first included the game in Windows 3.0 in 1990. But the digital adaptation wasn’t made by an iconic coder or just one of the company’s many full-time employees. It was programmed by an intern.
Great Big Story has an interview with Wes Cherry, who was an intern at Microsoft in 1988. He describes the experience as “all-encompassing,” but even internships at Microsoft have lulls. He put the downtime to good use. “I came up with the idea to write Solitaire for Windows out of boredom, really,” Cherry said. “There weren’t many games at the time, so we had to make them.”
In the digital version of this classic card game, players use a mouse to drag and drop cards by suit. If you successfully complete a game, your prize is a cascade of cards.
Cherry’s game got an official blessing from Bill Gates himself (though Gates’ “biggest complaint was that Solitaire was too hard to win”), and it became a staple of Microsoft’s operating system. “Microsoft officially said that Solitaire was there to teach people how to use the mouse, but in reality it was just something to have fun with,” he said. Cherry even had added a special “boss key” that would pop up a fake spreadsheet for crafty office workers slacking, but Microsoft nixed it.
The real kicker of this story is that, despite its long-standing success, Cherry said he “was not paid a single cent.” He’s since moved on from computer work to owning a cidery.
Maybe Microsoft was special enough to get college students to work unpaid internships, but anyone in a technical degree program typically got paid around double the minimum wage at the time for co-op or other intern type jobs. It's not like journalism or grievance studies majors having to work for free.
For years I had a solitaire program on my computer at work. Never once clicked on it.
Then one day I stumbled across this website
It’s a great site. It lets you reload the game and play it again, it lets you back up and find out where you went wrong. It has many different solitaire games and it has a series of challenge games, easy to hard, and they’re all guaranteed to be winnable. It’s a really good learning site.
I had thought solitaire was a dumb game of chance. Boy was I wrong.
I confess...I am addicted to Spider Solitaire, and only play the 4 suit version. I win about 3% of the games I play.
I still use the original version that came with XP, which is by far the best. It still runs on Windoze 7, but the graphics get flaky sometimes.
There is no installation required-it doesn’t use the registry. All you need is the spider.exe file.
yup that’s the one i use- I do the 4 suits too- 3%? That seems kinda low- playing regular card solitaire- i can usually win sorta often- The linux one wins a bit more- but ya really gotta do some unintuitive moves at times to make it work-
That is about what Microsoft's version of solitaire is worth.
The author, not the subject...
Even if it wasn’t a paid internship, it paid in experience. Also, having programmed through the 90s, nearly every employer mimicked Microsoft’s policy that if you developed it on their machines, or their time, it was their property. He would have signed it away before he ever created it.
At all, or for Solitaire specifically?
“Also, having programmed through the 90s, nearly every employer mimicked Microsoft’s policy that if you developed it on their machines, or their time, it was their property. He would have signed it away before he ever created it.”
Every employer I’ve ever worked for had the same policy. If you created an idea or invention while in their employ, they owned it.
Not on 4 suits. If it was that easy, I would have kicked the habit long ago.
Unless a work for hire provision or an assignment is embedded in a contract that binds the employee (and a company policy signed off by the employee may be such a contract), an employee still owns the copyrights of his work and is an inventor of a patentable items.
“Unless a work for hire provision or an assignment is embedded in a contract that binds the employee (and a company policy signed off by the employee may be such a contract), an employee still owns the copyrights of his work and is an inventor of a patentable items.”
While employed I secured a patent for an invention. The company automatically obtained the rights to the invention. All new hires signed an agreement the company owned any inventions or ideas the employee produced while on payroll. In addition the employee handbook reinforced the policy.
I had the boss key for some program but now I can’t remember. And yes, it had a spreadsheet.
Well, that I what I said. You signed your rights away.
I have a few things I've learned over the years.
Now, the worst scenario is getting stiffed on the final deal after you make a good setup. THAT always annoys me.
What I shoot for these days is making an 1100+ on the four suit. :)
It’s not nice to taunt old people....but I guess I had that coming for throwing that post up there.
One of these days, I’d like to see a Jimmy Cannonesque thread titled, “Nobody asked me, but.......” }:^)
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