[HN Gopher] My journey into personal computer software developme...
___________________________________________________________________
My journey into personal computer software development in 1983
Author : saloama
Score : 149 points
Date : 2024-04-20 18:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (farrs.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (farrs.substack.com)
| orangesite wrote:
| There's an inverse relationship between how good folk think they
| are vs. how good they actually are.
|
| Anyone who's spent time in musician communities will be
| intimately familiar with the phenomenon.
|
| Anyone who's spent time in musician communities will also
| understand just how good you need to be if you're still doing it
| after two decades.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much the definition of the Dunning-Kruger
| effect?
|
| I was actually a pretty decent bassist, way back, when mullets
| were _en vogue_ , but I also knew that I wasn't good enough to
| stand out from the crowd.
| SaberTail wrote:
| It's a common misunderstanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
|
| In actuality, there's a direct relationship between how good
| a person thinks they are and how good they actually are. Not
| inverse. The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the people at the
| low end of the scale tend to rate themselves as slightly
| better than they are, and people at the high end of the scale
| tend to rate themselves as slightly worse than they are. The
| best people know they're good, but they tend to think they're
| not the best. The worst people know they're bad, but they
| tend to think they're not the worst.
| richrichie wrote:
| This is the best and most succinct explanation of DK.
|
| DK is the most abused pop psych in the world.
| YZF wrote:
| Good musicians know they're good though. I'm not sure the
| comparison holds that well for software people. With music you
| have a lot more immediate feedback. You can record yourself and
| play back. You can see how long it takes you to learn something
| technically complex (if you even can learn something very
| technical). With software sometimes the outcome of decisions
| can only be seen years later and there's really very little in
| terms of absolute metrics you can rely on for feedback. Music
| is a hobby for me but in my circle I haven't seen people that
| thought they were amazing musicians but really are terrible.
| abraae wrote:
| Say what you will about MS (and I said a lot when I worked at
| Lotus on the mainframe port of Lotus 1-2-3) but they knew what
| was important for success.
|
| A spreadsheet on it's own is a thing of technical beauty but for
| market domination you don't want to keep pouring resources into
| that one product, you want a suite of complimentary products.
|
| You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document,
| into a slide presentation. You want cutting and pasting to work
| sensibly between products. You want consistency in the menus and
| layouts.
|
| Bill Gates understood all of this from the beginning, the same as
| he understood that the strength of a PC operating system is not
| how reliable, memory safe and performant it is, it's in how
| flashy it looks and how important the windows paradigm is.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, however this story is from before that, the early DOS era.
| No standards for UI or drivers etc.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a
| document, into a slide presentation.
|
| I mean, MS made ActiveX and it was a security risk:
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/11/will-activex-threaten-national...
| mtmail wrote:
| If I recall being able to embed an Excel spreadsheet into a
| Word document was OLE
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
| tn1 wrote:
| It's still possible, even into places like WordPad. When
| it's rendered (i.e., when you're not currently editing the
| embedded item) it becomes a bitmap (at a usually not great
| resolution). So text in your spreadsheet isn't selectable
| kragen wrote:
| it got rebranded activex for browsers
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Please write a blog post about this - are you saying you had
| Lotus 1-2-3 working on a 3270 terminal and they sold it?
| electroly wrote:
| This product was publicly known; it was called Lotus
| "1-2-3/M" and you can find a little information (not a lot)
| by googling for that name. The Wikipedia article for 1-2-3
| also cites a few scanned articles from the time, although
| sadly they also have some broken citations here.
| abraae wrote:
| No blog posts coming but yes, a port of lotus 123 that worked
| beautifully on terminals of the day particularly3279 colour
| terminal.
|
| The premise was that people were already pushing the limits
| and building incredibly elaborate systems on spreadsheets, so
| why not go to the next level and leverage the huge processing
| power of big iron. Actually a very solid idea and I worked
| with a few progressive customers that bought into it.
|
| My job was as a sales engineer, helping customers adopt it in
| Europe, particularly Scandanavia. It's Tuesday so it must be
| Copenhagen. What a great job and a super team in lotus at the
| time.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Now that is awesome. I worked at a place that had the sun
| version of 1-2-3 running for a guy who had blown the memory
| limit of the MS-DOS version during that awkward period
| where windows still wasn't quite a thing. That spreadsheet
| gave us nightmares
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > the strength of a PC operating system is not how reliable,
| memory safe and performant it is
|
| Didn't OS/2 fail because it wasn't performant enough, compared
| to Windows/DOS which could run on pretty shitty PCs ?
| abraae wrote:
| As I remember it, OS/2 failed mainly because IBM were a day
| late and a dollar short with presentation manager, the gui
| for OS/2. Customers unfavourably compared the dull character
| mode appearance of OS/2 to the flashiness of Windows.
| Blackstrat wrote:
| OS/2 ran circles around Windows NT. It's API was one of the
| best defined that I had worked with. Certainly better than
| anything for Windows. I worked for an IBM subsidiary in the
| early 90s. IBM was just never sufficiently committed to OS/2
| IMO. Hence it ultimately went away. But programming on Warp
| was a great experience. And for a while at least, OS/2 was
| very well established in the banking industry.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| But wouldn't the banking industry have been able to afford
| the (relatively) powerful computers to run it well ?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| What you're describing there better fits Microsoft's
| competition than Windows itself. Microsoft don't even follow
| their own UI guidelines with regards to toolbars and menus (how
| often have they built bespoke widgets for Office rather than
| using their public APIs?).
|
| Bill Gates was a great businessman. Microsoft succeeded because
| Gates knew how to make deals with suppliers et al. Much has
| been written about the good (IBM bundling) and bad (threatening
| retailers who shipped PCs with alternative operating systems)
| already though.
|
| However if you want to talk about the UI consistency or
| flashiness of computers in the 80s and 90s, then you're better
| off looking at Apple Macs, Amiga, Acorn Electron, or even Atari
| before you look at Windows and DOS.
| wslh wrote:
| Microsoft success cannot be explained by the old story with
| IBM. Obviously Bill Gates has/had amazing skills, was lucky
| to born in a rich family, to be in the IBM deal, etc. All
| condiments that does not explain the Microsoft success until
| today. I think Microsoft has a record of unsuccessful
| projects while being successful as a business, as you say
| they don't use their own UI offerings and had zilliones but
| look at their balance sheet...
|
| If it were by the original IBM tale, Xerox and others dead
| companies were thriving. I recommend to read "Idea Man", Paul
| Allen (Microsoft cofounder) autobiography. You will realize
| there was an incredible Bill Gates before the IBM deal. Also
| check the non-official chronicles of Bill Gates in "Hard
| Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" [2]
| (1993).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-
| Empire/dp...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Every successful company has had unsuccessful products and
| of course people born into money are more likely to be
| successful themselves.
|
| You're also focusing too much on IBM specifically. I didn't
| say IBM made Microsoft successful, I said it was an example
| of a deal Gates successfully negotiated.
| wslh wrote:
| My main point is that Microsoft is a different company
| and probably people will understand Bill Gates genius^3
| in hindsight. I think Bill Gates is in another league of
| intelligence. I also think that Steve Jobs was in another
| league, different than the Bill one, and with more
| detours.
|
| I expected Google founders to lead Google but they quit.
| Jeff Bezos work was also amazing and he continued for
| long. We have Mark Zuckerberg in Meta, don't doubt he is
| really smart but the Oculus execution was completely
| wrong, it is in the business literature. I remember when
| Microsoft launched Xbox there were a lot of concerns
| about attracting AAA games like Sony or Nintendo. They
| did it. Mark launched and maintained the Oculus without a
| set of apps to play with. Basic mistake: you can show the
| device to your father and he will be amazed and forget
| about it next time.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I really don't understand how your point relates to my
| original comment.
|
| Also I'm old, so have far more experience with early
| Microsoft than most people. Some of the software I've
| written is probably older than a lot of people who chat
| on here.
|
| Edit: you've added a whole bunch more to your post. It's
| now sounding like you took issue that I said Gates was a
| a great businessman without acknowledging that there are
| other great business people. Weird thing correct someone
| on given the mere existence of other companies proves
| that there have been other great business people. But
| yeah, Gates isn't the only one. However we were talking
| about Microsoft's success not Facebook/Meta nor any other
| company.
| wslh wrote:
| I am following the thread that initiates with a parent
| comment. Please let me know where I am wrong or unfocused
| on the topic and we can continue from there.
| kragen wrote:
| a lot of good indian or indian-american programmers signed on
| at microsoft in the early 80s and didn't get whispering
| campaigns started about them in management and then didn't
| quit. retaining adept hackers (without strong morals, at least)
| was and is one of microsoft's strong points. imagine where
| visicorp could be if they'd been able to retain people like
| this
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Great story. Surprised that he had experience with C, but wanted
| to rewrite their product in assembly instead. The timeline given
| was understandably not very precise, but C and even Pascal
| compilers should have been starting to be available around this
| time.
| Animats wrote:
| Available, yes. Good, no. Nobody had enough memory space on PC-
| class machines to do a good compiler.
|
| (AutoCAD for the original MacOS was compiled on Sun machines,
| because the Apple compilers were so bad.)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the memory/storage resources and performance
| available on Sun machines had something to do with it also.
| Since this is pre-Sparc, they would have been running the
| same CPU architecture (Motorola 68k).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Were Borland Turbo-C and Turbo-Pascal not "good" compilers? I
| seem to recall they were pretty popular back in the early PC
| era.
| tyingq wrote:
| The most popular targets for Visicalc at the beginning were
| 6502 and z80 machines, where really no C compiler was ever
| good for those targets.
| eichin wrote:
| There were definitely pascal compilers though (you could
| boot p-system on the trs-80 model I even, though you
| needed at least 32k of RAM.)
| MikePlacid wrote:
| There was a Mini C (C subset) compiler written in Mini C
| and running on a Russian version of z80 in the beginning
| of 80's. It was small and very observable (I've changed
| the code generator there to produce code for IBM/370 -
| and so we've bootstrapped this compiler to a Russian
| IBM/370 to run some games written in Mini C))
|
| Not sure if such a thing is much better than assembly
| language in industrial context: it would speed coding up,
| but you would need to check the results thoroughly. Only
| the real test can tell if there is a time / quality
| benefit in sum.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Those were, a decade later on a 386+. Understandably, 1983
| with a 8080 and compiler version 0.9 was probably a lot
| dicier.
|
| It's hard to remember now, but the original PC was
| downright primitive, and most didn't have even the full
| 640k RAM installed!
|
| I assumed a decent lightweight compiler existed, but sounds
| like not.
| bruce511 wrote:
| As an anecdotal reference, in high school, 1985-1987, we
| used Turbo Pascal 3 on 8086 machines. 640k ram, but it
| was a pretty zippy compiler even then.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Precisely. I started high school in 1992 and the only two
| IBM-PC compatibles in the computer class (the rest being
| CP/M machines) were an XT-8086 and an AT-80286. The XT
| had a very fast Turbo Pascal compiler, I don't recall the
| exact version but could have been 3.0. AT machine had 5.0
| or something and was significantly slower although not to
| render it unusable. That's until someone wiped out 3.0
| from the XT machine and replaced it with the same 5.0.
| Compile time of a simple "hello world" program raised
| from under 1 second to at least a minute. Rendered
| unusable and worst part was that 3.0 was completely gone,
| no floppies to re-install it. They had it solely on the
| hard drive (probably 20Mb or so) but now was gone.
| tie-in wrote:
| The 1-min compile time for TP5 doesn't sound right to me.
| I used Turbo Pascal versions from 3 to 7 back in the day,
| and all of them were quite fast (one-pass compiler).
| Turbo C++ was another matter though. The same example
| programs compiled drastically slower (seconds vs
| minutes).
| theragra wrote:
| That is one thing I really miss. TP was defacto language
| to teach in exUSSR.
|
| In many cases,TP or later Delphi followed as IDE for real
| apps. Pascal had its issues, but compilation speed was
| insane. When most people switched to java or c#, we lost
| this. Authors of both could have not used language so
| similar to C, but it happened.
|
| I dunno, maybe I need to adjust and think before
| compiling, or switch to Go.
| kragen wrote:
| as i understand it, turbo pascal generated pretty bad code
| and i don't think turbo c existed yet. it isn't impossible
| to do an optimizing compiler in 64k data segments and half
| a mip but usually people used multiple tape drives to make
| that kind of thing feasible
| cmpalmer52 wrote:
| My first professional software development job was circa 1982-83.
| I was in high school, working part time for my step-brother. He'd
| just got a luggable PC like the one in the picture and he paid me
| like $20 to write a MS-BASIC program to calculate payroll
| withholdings.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Around the same time (maybe a bit earlier) I was in 7th grade
| and paid a few hundred dollars to port a Basic program to C.
| I'd never seen C before and had to buy the book, port the code
| on paper, then go to work with my mom on the graveyard shift to
| use computers in her lab to type it in and eventually compile
| it.
|
| A long way from the git push to CI/CD I did a few times
| today...
| shrubble wrote:
| Note that at the time many programmers were familiar with
| assembler, since even mainframe shops coded in assembler for some
| projects.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| There is a good underlying story here about what makes a "good"
| programmer.
|
| There are plenty of incredibly smart folk out there programming
| giant, indecipherable messes where somebody like me would write
| something very boring but did the job. My boring code can always
| be tizzied up, but you can't always fix an awesomely complex
| abstraction written in some niche language. What scratches your
| itch as a "super programmer" is often directly at odds with
| actually solving a problem.
|
| I am kinda tired of inheriting those kinds of messes - the guys
| that write code that ways inevitably leave when the bug list pile
| gets too high.
| spitfire wrote:
| Or even worse, they're CTO.
|
| Ask me how I know.
|
| Or even worse, that pile of indecipherable mess runs a good
| solid business.
|
| Ask me how I know.
|
| Edit: They were CTO, not CEO.
| richrichie wrote:
| How do you know?
| spitfire wrote:
| Well, I started a job at a small startup doing something
| relatively mathematically and technically complex.
|
| I missed a few red flags.
|
| The CTO had built a pile of indecipherable mess that runs a
| good solid business. And that's the rub, it was a good
| business. The CTO had build a steaming pile, but had it all
| in his head. If others couldn't wade through it, well, it
| was a good business.
|
| Being a good business, they could afford to run through
| bodies. I discovered my "coworkers" were all contract.
| Another red flag.
|
| So as my work extended out into the rest of the system I
| slowed down, and was eventually moved on. After all the CTO
| who wrote most of it could handle it, why couldn't I?
|
| I'll take the Lisp over 6502 assembly any day of the week.
| richrichie wrote:
| > I discovered my "coworkers" were all contract. Another
| red flag.
|
| Why is this a red flag?
| ralphc wrote:
| These comments are burying the lede, or burying the (lede).
|
| The author said that VisiCalc was written in Lisp and I said
| "wtf?
|
| Then I reread it and said "seriously, wtaf?"
|
| I've never heard that before. Was the original Apple ][ version
| written in Lisp?
| dang wrote:
| I wish! But no. It was written in 6502 assembly language:
|
| https://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc
|
| Edit: Oh - the OP is talking about a later version of VisiCalc.
| Bricklin and Frankston were both MIT CS grads, so it would make
| sense. But at what point did VisiCalc get ported to Lisp?
| You're right--this is burying the lede!
| ralphc wrote:
| I don't see it mentioned anywhere else. If someone gets a
| copy of VisiCalc and look at it in a hex editor, are there
| ways to tell that it's written in a Lisp?
| whartung wrote:
| Yes. Apply common sense. Especially considering the state
| of Lisp back in the day, not to mention the utter lack
| computational power that a 1MHz 6502 has.
|
| It's not even worth considering the concept of them writing
| in some high level proto-lisp that is cross compiled into
| 6502 from a larger machine.
|
| While a lot of software was cross assembled on larger
| hardware for microcomputers back in the day, almost nothing
| of note was written in a high level language. (To wit
| someone will mention things like the Canon Cat being
| written in a Forth dialect, which is why I said "almost".)
| eichin wrote:
| Or to hit more closely, in 1983 or so there was Grammatik
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatik , a grammar-
| checking tool for CP/M (on Z80 so it had a _little_ more
| power than the 6502) written entirely in Forth - I spent
| a bit of time prying an interpreter prompt out of it.
|
| Consider that the PDP-10 was effectively around 500khz,
| and the 704 that lisp was invented on (and gave us the
| CAR and CDR names) "could execute up to 12,000 floating-
| point additions per second".
|
| It was a couple of years before Pascal and C really
| caught on for micro development, but it really wasn't the
| barren wasteland of raw machine code that you seem to be
| suggesting...
| lispm wrote:
| the "version 2" of VisiCalc was written in IL, a "Lisp
| derivative"
|
| https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113026/oh.
| ..
| gilbetron wrote:
| "Ceruzzi: For legal reasons?
|
| Bricklin: Both. We couldn't afford to spend money on time-
| sharing. We could buy our own machine. In those days,
| development - a lot of people did development, as Bob
| explained, on another machine. And then from that other
| machine, you loaded to the micro because the development
| systems on the micros weren't up to it. That's how Microsoft
| Basic was done - that's how Microsoft ended up having a
| PDP-10 I think. They eventually used XENIX to do their
| development. We did the same thing. We developed all our own
| tools over the years. We improved the tools. We wrote our own
| implementation language, a higher level language. In fact,
| that's one of the issues that eventually came in, is that in
| the early days of the PC industry, there were so many
| different machines and you didn't know which was a winner.
| You sold to each manufacturer. So you had to port all over
| the place. That's what Digital Research was - a porting
| company. Microsoft was a porting company. That's what we did.
| We had to figure out ways to port the same product and cookie
| cutter it out. And everybody went a little different and you
| had to fight with them. Otherwise, the costs would go up. So
| we eventually moved things to a higher level language. We did
| our version 2 of VisiCalc, in a higher level language.
|
| Ceruzzi: What language?
|
| Bricklin: We wrote it in something we called IL, which is a
| Lisp derivative. It was like writing in Java or something
| like that today. An interpreter. Microsoft had a similar type
| of thing for Multiplan. They wrote in a language which let
| them use a cookie cutter to put it on many different
| machines. But the Apple II version of the VisiCalc II (VAV)
| was written in assembly code. We realized that to port that
| was going to be so expensive. When we ported from the Apple
| II and Apple III, doing the IIe was next, then to port to the
| IBM PC it's a different code base. The way we did the
| VisiCalc code base is, since we had our own tools, we hired
| Seth Steinberg, who had worked at the [MIT] Architectural
| Machine Group - Media Lab, real experience, real bright guy,
| helped bring a culture into our company. Free Cokes came from
| him. He ordered it and all that stuff. Lotus and others all
| copied this. It helped bring that type of environment from
| MIT into our company and spread hopefully to others. What
| Seth did is he said, "I'm going to do an idiomatic
| translation, basically, from the 6502 code to a Z80 code to
| do the TRS80." And what he did was he modified the compiler
| to list the two sources synced on labels. The compiler we
| used had macros and it had no 'go-to's in it. Basically it
| was all IF THEN ELSE and stuff. It was a macro assembler"
|
| https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113026/oh.
| ..
| rozzie wrote:
| At Software Arts I wrote or worked on the IL interpreter for
| the TRS 80 Model III, the DEC Rainbow, the Vector Graphic,
| the beginnings of the Apple Lisa port, as well as the IBM PC
| port. To put you into the state of mind at the time,
|
| - in the pre-PC era, the microcomputer ecosystem was
| extremely fragmented in terms of architectures, CPUs, and
| OS's. 6502, z80, 68K, z8000, 8088. DOS, CPM, CPM/86, etc. Our
| publisher (Personal Software) wanted as much breadth of
| coverage, as you might imagine
|
| - one strong positive benefit of porting from 6502 assembly
| to IL and using an interpreter was that it enabled the core
| code to remain the same while leaving the complex work of
| paging and/or memory mapping to the interpreter, enabling
| access to 'extended memory' without touching or needing to
| re-test the core VisiCalc code. Same goes for display
| architectures, printer support, file system I/O, etc.
|
| - another strong benefit was the fact that, as the author
| alludes to, the company was trying to transition to being
| more than a one hit wonder by creating a symbolic equation
| solver app - TK!Solver - that shared the interpreter.
|
| Of course, the unavoidable result is that the interpreter -
| without modern affordances such as JIT compilation - was far
| less snappy than native code. We optimized the hell out of it
| and it wasn't unusable, but it did feel laggy.
|
| Fast forward to when I left SoftArts and went across the
| street to work for my friend Jon Sachs who had just co-
| founded Lotus with Mitch Kapor. Mitch & Jon bet 100% that the
| PC would reset the ecosystem, and that the diversity of
| microcomputers would vanish.
|
| Jon single-handedly wrote 1-2-3 in hand-tuned assembly
| language. Yes, 1-2-3 was all about creating a killer app out
| of 1.spreadsheet+2.graphics+3.database. That was all Mitch.
| But, equally, a killer aspect of 1-2-3 was SPEED. It was
| mind-blowing. And this was all Jon. Jon's philosophy was that
| there is no 'killer feature' that was more important than
| speed.
|
| When things are moving fast and the industry is taking shape,
| you make the best decisions you can given hunches about the
| opportunities you spot, and the lay of the technical and
| market landscape at that moment. You need to make many key
| technical and business decisions in almost an instant, and in
| many ways that determines your fate.
|
| Even in retrospect, I think the IL port was the right
| decision by Dan & Bob given the microcomputing ecosystem at
| the time. But obviously Mitch & Jon also made the right
| decision for their own time - just a matter of months later.
| All of them changed the world.
| dang wrote:
| Thank you!--that fills out the story very nicely.
| dang wrote:
| Gosh, it's telling that as early as 1983 (!) the inventors of the
| spreadsheet thought that spreadsheets were 'done' and they needed
| to move to more important things. This is like Rickenbacker in
| 1938 deciding that electric guitars were 'done' and moving to, I
| don't know, Theremins or something.
| jetti wrote:
| I think the attitude is more the result of lack of competition.
| All of this was from before my time but doing a quick check on
| Wikipedia shows that VisiCalc came out in 1979 where 1-2-3 came
| out in 1983. I'm not familiar enough with the spreadsheet
| software landscape from the early 1980s but given that the
| article mentions 1-2-3 specifically I am going to assume there
| wasn't really any real competition for at least 4 years. It can
| be easy to think that the future is in a new product since they
| seemingly had little to no competition in their original market
| for 4 years
| whartung wrote:
| 1-2-3 was 3rd generation. VisiCalc, while groundbreaking, was
| quite crude. Its fundamental utility outweighs its lack of
| sophistication. It was quite 1.0, and once the cat was out of
| the bag, it was hardly secret tech.
|
| There was at least SuperCalc, and Multiplan from MS. But
| those were really still from the 8-bit world. Lotus was able
| to start again from scratch with the large memory potential
| of the PC.
|
| MS did a version of Multiplan for the Macintosh. It was
| amazing! Mice and spreadsheets were a match made in heaven.
| But it was just a pre-cursor for Excel, and did not last
| long.
| richrichie wrote:
| >Besides my educational background, at that time Indians weren't
| particularly considered to be suitable software material.
| (Amazing how the world turns, eh?)
|
| Has this really changed? Sheer size of the base (a billion plus
| _each_ from China and India) distorts and produces massive
| survivorship bias. Like soccer or tennis, are there countries
| that produce ridiculously great programming talent per capita?
| theragra wrote:
| Probably countries with strong math education, like Russia or
| China. Still, I guess top programmers from these will be great,
| but not average.
| kragen wrote:
| there are still dumb white proto-hackers who are convinced that
| they're better at everything than sanjay ghemawat, raj reddy,
| vinod khosla, and umesh vazirani, but almost all of us have at
| some point had indian coworkers who were much better than us by
| now. and it takes a special kind of racism to consider yourself
| smarter than all four of that list above just because you have
| less melanin; people _that_ bigoted are rare indeed
| zubairq wrote:
| Great article about a guy who gets loads of stuff fixed in
| Visicalc. I have seen many times when someones gets loads of
| productive tasks done for a company, instead of the coworkers
| thinking that the person is productive and encourage them, they
| think that the job is "easy" and try to find a way to get rid of
| the productive person!
| NeilSmith2048 wrote:
| Experienced veteran programmer, hats off to you!
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