Posted on 11/15/2006 2:27:00 PM PST by woofie
Here's how you can tell the real computer geeks from the rest of us.
Ask about the first time they used a computer. If they get a glassy smile and their voice quickens with the memory, they're branded. They're geeks.
That's what Trevor Anthony did Tuesday afternoon as he led a group of visitors through "Startup: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution," an expansive new permanent exhibit opening this weekend at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
For Anthony, it was a Radio Shack TRS-80. He was in junior high school, visiting family friends. It had a Star Wars game. He was hooked.
Funded by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, the exhibit tells the story of the company's founding in 1970s Albuquerque. But it also reaches far beyond. Poking into the heart of the computing revolution of the past three decades, it is a lovingly packaged homage to the generation of tinkerers whose enthusiasm changed the world.
Saturday morning's public opening caps a week of festivities, including the installation of a plaque Thursday on the fairground neighborhood building where Microsoft began and a gala $250-a-plate fundraising dinner Thursday evening for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History Foundation.
Entrance to "Startup" is included in the museum admission price, but with big crowds expected, each ticket-holder will be given a specific admission time to help smooth the flow of people through the exhibit. Time-based admission to the exhibit will extend at least through New Year's Day, according to museum spokesman Tim Aydelott.
Anthony, the TRS-80 boy, is now the 39-year-old project manager for Allen's Vulcan Inc., responsible for helping bring the history and passion of those early days to life.
(Excerpt) Read more at abqjournal.com ...
A little Albuquerque /Bill Gates history:
At MITS corporate locale in Albuquerque, Paul Allen loaded the team's code onto the Altair. On the second try, the system booted and worked as planned. Gates and Allen moved to Albuquerque to help MITS with the Altar. In April, 1975, Gates and Allen founded the Microsoft Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Microsoft would sell its BASIC system to MITS, NCR and Intel. It was much cheaper for these companies to buy Microsoft's software than to write their own. Gates and Allen hired Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, both high school friends, to help with Microsoft's expansion.
On January 1, 1979, Bill Gates moved Microsoft and its sixteen employees from Albuquerque to Seattle, Washington. Gates thought that recruiting programmers would be easier from this site. Microsoft developed a standard for hiring new employees. Only the most gifted and intelligent new college graduates would be hired. Little job experience was considered positive from Microsoft's point of view. An employee with little experience would have no bias'.
The expansion of personnel lead to the development of a Microsoft spreadsheet program and Microsoft Word. Interests in graphical interfaces were realized. In 1981, Gates purchased the SCP-DOS operating system from Seattle Computer Products, later modifying the operating system to MS-DOS. Gates made a deal with IBM to write an operating system for its new line of personal computers, and in 1981, MS-DOS was shipped on all new IBM PC's. Microsoft made additional technological breakthroughs in the 1980's. In April, 1983, Microsoft introduced the "mouse" and in November 1983, a graphical user interface known as "Windows" was introduced.
On March 13, 1986, Microsoft went public on the Stock Exchange. The initial offering for a share of Microsoft stock was $21.00 per share. Bill Gates became an instant millionaire. At thirty-one, Gates joined the Gatesionaires club and became the richest man in the United States.
I was just a child but I understood the significance of this one.
No more punchcards! And it wasn't hidden behind a glass wall.
All somebody had to do was figure out an operating system to make it actually do something.
The first computer I ever used was an IBM 1160. I ran a programming language whose name I cannot now remember; it was a language made up by some EE types at MIT (which is where I was) as a very simple language for teaching purposes. The first real language I used was Fortran IV. This was on punch cards.
For me it was a VIC-20 as a preteen, followed by a Commodore 64. Storage via tape deck, BASIC programming, output to TV, fun!
The first PC I ever owned was an Atari 400 with 16K of RAM, no disk drives (a cassette tape drive was my storage) and no serial ports. It had a flat-panel keyboard. It ran a Motorola 6502 processor, the same as in the Apple II. I cabled in a regular keyboard and upgraded it (by hacking into it with a 3rd-party kit) to 64K of RAM. It had an 8K Basic Interpeter cartridge and an 8K 6502 Assembler cartridge.
The best $25,000 investment in modern history.
SCP sued because of the secret deal with IBM and settled for $1 million. If they had only known.
This 1978 photo taken in Albuquerque shows the 11 people who launched Microsoft here before the company moved to Washington: (top row, left to right) Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane, (second row) Bob O'Rear, Bob Greenberg, March McDonald, Gordon Letwin, (front) Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood and Paul Allen.
In Dec. 7, 1978, the entire work force of Microsoft Corp. got together for a group photo prior to moving the company from Albuquerque to the Seattle area. Of those 11 people, only one -- chairman Bill Gates -- is still with Microsoft. The rest went on to a variety of activities from cattle ranching to professional philanthropy. Many are still involved in high-tech ventures.
Despite the wildfire growth of Microsoft these past 25 years, only one other person in the photo, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is a billionaire. Still, most of the others became millionaires as the stock options they received from Microsoft has grown more and more valuable over the past 25 years.
Gates, of course, stayed with the company, while Allen left in 1983 after a successful battle with Hodgkin's disease. He remains on Microsoft's board of directors and has a variety of high-tech and cable TV investments. Allen also owns the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers and recently bought The Sporting News, the nation's oldest sporting publication.
Here's a look at what became of the rest of Microsoft's work force, circa 1978:
Bob Greenberg
Unlike most of Microsoft's other employees, Bob Greenberg didn't necessarily need the wealth that the company would potentially bring -- his family helped develop the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls that were all the craze in the 1980s.
Greenberg worked at Microsoft from 1977 to 1981, developing BASIC programming language. Today, Greenberg, whose wealth was recently estimated at $20 million, develops software for golf courses. He reportedly has homes in southern California, Connecticut and Florida.
Jim Lane
Jim Lane moved to Albuquerque from the Denver area in 1978 to join the fledgling Microsoft. Lane, a key project manager, was responsible for developing software for Intel's microprocessors, forging a partnership between Microsoft and the chip giant that came to be called "Wintel" for its ubiquity.
He left in 1985, saying at the time that "they beat the enthusiasm out of me." Today, Lane runs his own software company and consultancy and lives in a high-end neighborhood on Mercer Island, Wash., with his wife and three children. His personal wealth has been estimated at $20 million.
Gordon Letwin
Aside from Gates, Gordon Letwin had the longest tenure at Microsoft of any of the class of 1978. He developed a compiler for the BASIC computer language, a software tool that translated the programmer's code into commands that the computer hardware could understand.
Through the 1980s, Letwin was put in charge of a variety of projects, including development for the now-defunct OS/2 operating system. Gates called Letwin as good a programmer as himself.
Letwin took indefinite leave from the company in 1993 to, as he said at the time, "kick back with my wife." He lives in the Seattle area and has a ranch in Arizona. Letwin, worth about $20 million, has given substantially to environmental causes.
Andrea Lewis
When you write software, you need documentation to help make sense of it. Andrea Lewis was Microsoft's first technical writer, hired in 1978 to provide all the documentation necessary for the company's products.
After leaving the company in 1983 with two years of options worth about $2 million today, she became a freelance journalist and fiction writer. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.
Lewis recently helped build a literary center in the former Seattle home of poet Richard Hugo.
Marc McDonald
Marc McDonald has the distinction of being Microsoft's first full-time employee, brought on in 1977 to work on the BASIC programming language. McDonald left Microsoft in 1984, reportedly unhappy with the changing corporate culture. He then became the first person hired by Paul Allen for a new company, Asymetrix Corp. in nearby Bellevue.
Today, McDonald, who once said he was worth "less than $1 million" is the chief software scientist with Design Intelligence, a Seattle-based software startup company.
Bob O'Rear
Of all the people who joined Microsoft in the early days, Bob O'Rear was the oldest and most experienced. He had advanced degrees in mathematics and astrophysics, and had been present in the control room at NASA's Mission Control during the first moon landing in 1969.
He joined Microsoft as its chief mathematician and employee No. 7 in 1977 and helped bring the BASIC programming language to many different kinds of computers. O'Rear, now 59, left in 1983.
Today he runs a cattle ranch in his native Texas and also serves on the boards of several high-tech firms. He is said to be worth $100 million.
Bob Wallace
Bob Wallace, a graduate of the University of Washington, joined Microsoft as a production manager and software designer in 1978. He left in 1983 to form QuickSoft, another software company in nearby Bellevue, Wash., which later went out of business.
A BBC documentary made in 1995 featured Wallace as someone whose vision and achievements as a software pioneer were aided by the use of psychedelic drugs. Media reports have pegged his wealth at about $5 million.
Steve and Marla Wood
Steve Wood was one of Microsoft's programmers in the early days. His wife, Marla, was an administrative assistant and bookkeeper. The two left the company in 1980 after Marla Wood led the company's female workers in a sex discrimination complaint against the company, which Microsoft later settled. They were the first of these 11 to leave the company.
Steve Wood worked with Allen on a number of ventures in the 1980s, and today runs Wireless Corp., which provides Internet access software and services to cellular phones. Marla Wood became a "professional volunteer" and cares for the couple's two children. They live in Bellevue, Wash., and are said to be worth a combined $15 million. -
My first computer was a Radio Shack color computer, but at the time I was writing a Cobol program for a CPM-80 based machine at work. Later, I wrote an operating system for the Atari-ST (in the C language). I never got a penny for hundreds of hours of work as the company went down the tube. When Bill Gates went public with Microsoft, I ignored it because the Commodore Amiga was a better machine. Oh, and I bought a Sony BetaMax VCR because it was better than VHS. Ha, ha. Story of my life. Sometimes, let me tell you about my wife.....
One of the big success/ failure stories here in Albuquerque is that Bill Gates tried to borrow $20,000? from the local bank ....they turned him down and he move to Seattle....I think of what my property would be worth today if Micro- Soft was located here
"I think of what my property would be worth"
We all do that so many times. I had a chance to buy Microsoft stock. I just didn't think the guy would amount to anything. When I got married, my wife's grandmother offered to give us several acres of land for a wedding present. I said No, we wouldn't have any use for it. Twenty years later, a developer built a subdivison at that location. The land would have been worth about $100,000. Lord, those were the days, my friend....
A big chunk of MS-DOS also came (very obviously to those of us who have used both) from Gary Kildall's CP/M.
My first 'puter was an IBM quad 360 running DOS/Power VSE at IBM's Albany branch... I refused to invest in MSFT because Gates was a fraud , selling IBM a software product that he didn't own or have a right to sell/market ... despite his self promotion most of the early MSFT products were bought and only slightly modified ,, during the 80's MSFT flat out stole pieces from others OS's compression utilities and such ,, and after ruining the company they stole from they would offer a pittance of a settlement. Word was a rip-off and Excel is just "Visi-Calc" renamed.
Kaboom! I had forgotten about that rip-off.
Truthfully, I found Visi-Calc mush easier to use than Excel mainly because it wasn't overloaded with "bloatware".
Cheap memory chips and ever-faster processors have made our programmers very lazy and inefficient. Couldn't get by with that back in the days of 64K RAM and single-digit megahertz clock speed processors (Z-80, 8080, Motorola's 6502 and its series).
First computer?
Probably a TI-50 calculator. Got pretty good at programming the animal in their version of BASIC. Moon Lander and a couple of others. Early to mid 70's. At least $275.
Graduated to an IBM 360 to play Star Trek when the university admins were not around. Used punched cards and output printed a page at a time on the system console. Cost - a box of 14" greenbar paper for spending half the night winning a game.
Bought a TI-99, learned Forth and Assembly, and spent 10 years working out their bugs in the 99/a, 99/8 and another beast whose name I don't remember. Cost? Couple of thousand, at least. Even bought a 90K (SSSD) floppy for "only $200".
I have a graveyard of useless junk and useless knowledge around here. Very sad.
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