* * * * *
                                        
                                New Jersey Syle
                                        
> About a year later we hired a young kid from Pittsburgh named Jamie
> Zawinski. He was not much more than 20 years old and came highly
> recommended by Scott Fahlman. We called him “The Kid.” He was a lot of fun
> to have around: not a bad hacker and definitely in a demographic we didn't
> have much of at Lucid. He wanted to find out about the people at the
> company, particularly me since I had been the one to take a risk on him,
> including moving him to the West Coast. His way of finding out was to look
> through my computer directories - none of them were protected. He found the
> EuroPAL paper, and found the part about worse is better. He connected these
> ideas to those of Richard Stallman, whom I knew fairly well since I had
> been a spokesman for the League for Programming Freedom for a number of
> years. JWZ excerpted the worse-is-better sections and sent them to his
> friends at CMU, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, who sent them
> to their friends everywhere.
> 

Worse is Better [1]

This is the history of the rather famous Computer Science paper “Worse is
Better” and the context in which it was oringally intended.

And yes, it's that Jamie Zawinski. [2]

[1] http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
[2] http://www.jwz.org/

Email author at sean@conman.org

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