Owen and the Mac
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Hey, I was browsing around after watching the documentary "Welcome to
Macintosh" and came across this old Rolling Stone interview photo of the early Mac team. Owen is having fun in the mid row. Cool! :-) http://myoldmac.net/cgi-data/gal/displayimage.php?album=8&pos=18 -S --- -. . ..-. .. ... .... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... .... [hidden email] (m) 505.577.5828 (o) 505.995.0206 redfish.com _ sfcomplex.org _ simtable.com _ ambientpixel.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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The ravages of age. Which one is he?
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote: Hey, I was browsing around after watching the documentary "Welcome to Macintosh" and came across this old Rolling Stone interview photo of the early Mac team. Owen is having fun in the mid row. Cool! :-) ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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I'm the baby.
.. oops .. no, the far right middle row, next to Bill. -- Owen On Nov 26, 2009, at 11:50 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote: The ravages of age. Which one is he? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Ah, the Gene Shallot look-alike!
--Doug On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Stephen Guerin
Cool, do you remember the time with Andy
Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson and Steve Jobs? Recently I read one of the biographies about Steve Jobs ("Icon" from Jeffrey Young and William L. Simon). Both Hertzfeld and Atkinson are mentioned in the book, but no word of Owen Densmore. They must have missed something... Have you been the "freshman in the team" responsible for import/export functions, language translations and printing programs? -J. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Guerin" <[hidden email]> To: "Friam Friam" <[hidden email]> Cc: <[hidden email]> Sent: Thursday, November 26, 2009 7:36 PM Subject: [FRIAM] Owen and the Mac > Hey, I was browsing around after watching the documentary "Welcome to > Macintosh" and came across this old Rolling Stone interview photo of > the early Mac team. Owen is having fun in the mid row. Cool! :-) > > http://myoldmac.net/cgi-data/gal/displayimage.php?album=8&pos=18 > > -S ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Stephen Guerin
Thanks for the heads up.
I will be sure not to mention those guys in my biography of Owen. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([hidden email]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] > [Original Message] > From: Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> > Date: 11/26/2009 4:23:43 PM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Owen and the Mac > > Cool, do you remember the time with Andy > Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson and Steve Jobs? Recently > I read one of the biographies about Steve Jobs > ("Icon" from Jeffrey Young and William L. Simon). > Both Hertzfeld and Atkinson are mentioned in the book, > but no word of Owen Densmore. They must have missed > something... Have you been the "freshman in the team" > responsible for import/export functions, language > translations and printing programs? > > -J. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Stephen Guerin" <[hidden email]> > To: "Friam Friam" <[hidden email]> > Cc: <[hidden email]> > Sent: Thursday, November 26, 2009 7:36 PM > Subject: [FRIAM] Owen and the Mac > > > > Hey, I was browsing around after watching the documentary "Welcome to > > Macintosh" and came across this old Rolling Stone interview photo of > > the early Mac team. Owen is having fun in the mid row. Cool! :-) > > > > http://myoldmac.net/cgi-data/gal/displayimage.php?album=8&pos=18 > > > > -S > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-4
On Nov 26, 2009, at 2:23 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Cool, do you remember the time with Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson > and Steve Jobs? Yup. Interesting history. Jobs goes to PARC and is blown away. Starts the Lisa project (precursor to Mac). Lots of Xerox folks went to Apple, me included (I was at WARC .. the Webster NY research center focusing on printer code). Larry Tessler found about my printing work and invited me for an interview. I had been bringing the Alto, Xerox's first personal computer, technology to Webster, even building a hardware lab so that we could add additional S-Registers to the micro-code system, thus multi-task printers: receiving networked documents and printing them. My first talk at Apple was why they could not solve the WYSIWYG problem especially with non-rational aspect ratios (i.e. h/w of printer not multiples of the screen). We had proven the problem to be "hard". But heuristics were fairly acceptable. But still computationally intense. Brought along a couple of engineers with me, most famous being Steve Capps the hero of the Newton. > Recently I read one of the biographies about Steve Jobs ("Icon" from > Jeffrey Young and William L. Simon). Both Hertzfeld and Atkinson are > mentioned in the book, but no word of Owen Densmore. I was one of the less well known guys 'cause I came over from the Lisa project to do the printing. I asked Andy and Bill what their approach to printing was going to be and it was to do screen dumps! Bad idea! We re-engineered QuickDraw so that there were "hooks" for all the graphics calls, and so printing could just give the application a large "window" that was the same size as a piece of paper. It was simple enough that the Mac "pirate" crew liked it. And Steve wanted a laser printer so this architecture worked really well. I ended up leading the PrintShop team that worked with Adobe. We built a PostScript interpreter of QuickDraw which we hooked up to the hooks above. Bloody hard. > They must have missed something... Have you been the "freshman in > the team" responsible for import/export functions, language > translations and printing programs? Printing, fonts, and a simple multi-processing stunt that let Microsoft print and use their applications at the same time. My name is inside the first casting of the Mac case which had the names of the other engineers. Around 12 of us, as I recall. To me, the two heros of the Mac were Bruce Horn (Resource forks and much much more) and Larry Kenyon, the OS guy. Both were under extreme pressure and had absurd conflicts with engineering management. Interesting how we all left within a year of the release of the Mac. The "carpet baggers" (outside managers with absolutely no understanding of the Mac and computing) came and made Apple absolutely hell. I spent 2 hours once with Jobs talking about building the "Big Mac", using Unix, PostScript, and TCP/IP networking. He listened. But also left, but then the NeXT machine was a lot like what I wanted. -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Here is another picture
http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&gallery=1 Somehow Steve Jobs got all the money, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson got all the glory, and you got all the hard work? What a distribution. My first task in my first job after university was working on printing procedures as well. Writing printing functions is not a very thankful task, there is always a printer, printer driver or paper size which does not work. And the system would work without them, they do not belong to the core of the system. In every software system there is a core and a shell - the core that's the part which gets, stores, and processes the data. It is the part which is encapsulated by the API. The shell consists of additional parts: localization and translation, import and export, and printing. The system would run without the shell, it would only be a bit less useful. If you join a software team late, your first work is often at this shell - if you would join Google as an engineer today, you would probably work on some Javascript problems in the calendar functions. Or printing functions for the calendar. I wonder what Software Wizard Andy Hertzfeld is doing at Google currently? -J. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Owen, that's absolutely fascinating. BTW, Larry Tessler and I go back to graduate school days. Yow!
"Whatever happens. Whatever what is, is what I want. Only that. But that." Galway Kinnell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-4
Right on! Your experiences resonate completely with mine.
The Apple story did get ugly. Starting with the Pirate Flag: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Pirate_Flag.txt things slowly degraded between the Lisa and Mac team. It culminated in a Lisa-Mac team meeting where Jobs eviscerated the Lisa project, and brow-beat the Lisa team into quitting or figuring out another place in the company. It was truly a black experience. Probably for the best, but it could be done without rage. It became a Russian novel. Fortunately for my group of 4, the PrintShop was doing double duty and was on both teams. And with the laser printer in sight, and other printers finally being able to come into the architecture (early inkjet, daisy wheels, and so on), Jobs saw the advantage of a sophisticated, non-pirate approach in that domain. But still, he once really badly ripped one of the PrintShop members in public. I flew into his office in a rage, and quit. I walked out with 20,000 shares of stock. So it went. It was tough to be at Apple and be at all formal in computer science. All in all, in my three companies, Sun was by far the best. I actually got paid to fail and even got dinged on a performance appraisal for not taking enough risks! That lead to going to the SFI Complex Systems Summer School and taking complexity into SunLabs. Now *that* is risky! But when we were done, a small group of us were starting in on some of Stephanie Forrest's ideas for self healing servers .. servers that "groomed" each other. Complexity rocks! And that's why I love this list, we're truly unique. -- Owen On Nov 27, 2009, at 12:20 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > Here is another picture > http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&gallery=1 > Somehow Steve Jobs got all the money, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill > Atkinson got all the glory, and you got all the hard work? What a > distribution. > > My first task in my first job after university was working on > printing procedures as well. Writing printing functions is not a > very thankful task, there is always a printer, printer driver or > paper size which does not work. And the system would work without > them, they do not belong to the core of the system. > > In every software system there is a core and a shell - the core > that's the part > which gets, stores, and processes the data. It is the part which is > encapsulated by the API. The shell consists of additional parts: > localization and translation, import and export, and printing. The > system would run without the shell, it would only be a bit less > useful. > > If you join a software team late, your first work is often at this > shell - if you would join Google as an engineer today, you would > probably work on some Javascript problems in the calendar functions. > Or printing functions for the calendar. I wonder what Software > Wizard Andy Hertzfeld is doing at Google currently? > > -J. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Good for you, Owen. A manager/corporate leader who rips his staff in public doesn't deserve to have good people working for him. I've heard a number of stories about Job's "asshole factor".
--Doug On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote: Right on! Your experiences resonate completely with mine. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Owen Densmore wrote:
> I'm the baby. > > .. oops .. no, the far right middle row, next to Bill. The one with the shaggy mane and the mustache? Wait, that is all of them except the baby and the woman! Looks more like the 70's than the 80's ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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