Alan Kay's praise of Bob Barton in this talk inspired me to do some googling, and I ran across an extraordinary thing: a transcript of an oral history conference from 1985 that reunited Barton and the team that built the Burroughs B5000. Here is what Kay says about Barton and the B5000 in his talk: "In history you can find really incredible geniuses like this man, who anticipated so strongly that we can only emulate his ideas in software today. Intel hasn't gotten around to understanding them yet." "The hardware of today is not as advanced as this machine was."
When not only Alan Kay but Chuck Moore as well describe your work as an epochal influence, it must really be something.
In 1985, some wise people got the B5000 team together and recorded them talking about it at length. The transcript exists online, and it is a remarkable document. Among many gems, Barton says: "I just thought of this morning a way of characterizing what I've been doing for 30-some years. I'm an industrial saboteur." Also: "I have never been able to work with devil's advocates". And here is something that is reminiscent of Kay:
"I was interested in small machines. In my view, the machine got too big too soon. All the experience we had from working with very small machines, particularly the 650, only indirectly with 205s, was in the direction of simplicity and operating systems and engineering out as much as possible all the incidental red tape that was very common in those days."
Also, it's noteworthy how frequently [Laughter] annotations appear in the transcript. I've long felt that the best teams are also the most fun ones.
When not only Alan Kay but Chuck Moore as well describe your work as an epochal influence, it must really be something.
In 1985, some wise people got the B5000 team together and recorded them talking about it at length. The transcript exists online, and it is a remarkable document. Among many gems, Barton says: "I just thought of this morning a way of characterizing what I've been doing for 30-some years. I'm an industrial saboteur." Also: "I have never been able to work with devil's advocates". And here is something that is reminiscent of Kay:
"I was interested in small machines. In my view, the machine got too big too soon. All the experience we had from working with very small machines, particularly the 650, only indirectly with 205s, was in the direction of simplicity and operating systems and engineering out as much as possible all the incidental red tape that was very common in those days."
Also, it's noteworthy how frequently [Laughter] annotations appear in the transcript. I've long felt that the best teams are also the most fun ones.
http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=21
Edit: it deserves its own post, so I put it up at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855508.