
Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979) - colinprince
http://www.sound-photo.com/microsoft/microsoft.htm
======
pcurve
And this is what these folks are up to now.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?op=1)

Some of them have done reasonably well.

~~~
alain94040
_After that, it doesn 't look like she did much else. She raised her children
and became a volunteer_

Not a great way to phrase things...

~~~
kbenson
Or we've all just become hypersensitive to something that doesn't necessarily
mean what you are implying.

...is what I was going to reply with, with examples of how replacing the
component parts of the sentence may change how it's interpreted. Then I looked
at the source article, and saw that it's a followup sentence after describing
how she sued Microsoft for sexual discrimination. Regardless of how it was
_meant_ to be interpreted, that's some pretty poor awareness of context on the
author's part.

------
jeffbarr
One of the guys (white shirt and brown corduroys) is Mike Courtney. He and I
worked together at Seattle's Retail Computer Store, alongside Bob Wallace
(Quickwrite & Shareware) and Tim Paterson (MS-DOS).

------
jameshart
For those of us who've spent our entire careers in the networked, computerized
office, it's interesting to realize that at the time Microsoft was setting the
goal of having a computer on every desk, there wasn't even a computer on every
desk _at Microsoft_.

~~~
gambiter
Given that we still haven't achieved the paperless offices that many want,
sometimes I start feeling like not much has changed over the last couple
decades, but this album really illustrates the difference. It is rather
humorous to look at just how much PAPER they used in development. Developers
using paper binders of documentation, tractor feed prints of code, etc... it's
nice that at least those days are mostly over!

------
thought_alarm
If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that
era, would they have _any_ usable or employable skills in such an environment?
(besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)

~~~
frozenport
Would they want to be _employed_ in such an environment?

Imagine spending long hours trying to fit your code into 128k?

~~~
kabdib
Try 64K on a PDP-11. Or writing assembly to fit into (say) 16K of ROM on a
Z-80 or 6502; that's terrifying, because ROM is forever and you do a 6-8 week
spin if you make a mistake. (EEPROMs? Sure, at about 8X the cost of a ROM).

Mostly you'd be up against:

\- No Intenet to look up reference material. For that you have books. I'm not
sure how much of a revolution the online Unix man pages were, but I'd not
worked on any other system that had that kind of documentation. Hope you have
lots of bookshelf space (I did :-) ).

\- No GUIs anywhere. There was Emacs, kind of. Mostly you got along with ed
and regexprs.

\- Frustrating toolchains; pre-ANSI C, with 7 characters of significant
symbols on earlier systems. I don't remember if any Unix debuggers had symbol
information, but they were all command-line driven at the assembly level, with
no source information. That's okay, you could pretty much tell where you were
by the assembly, because the optimizers were terrible.

\- Email? Hoo boy. Might as well just go across the hall to talk to somebody,
because unless you were on ARPANET that's about all the farther your email
would get.

It'd be frustrating, but kind of fun.

Nice things:

\- Tinier software. You've got skillz dealing with hundred thousand line
programs. Things were smaller back then, mostly.

\- No security worries. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but DES was
pretty controversial (the whole 56-bit key thing) and US citizens couldn't say
anything to foreigners about crypto. No network, no crypto, right? (Unix
passwords were encrypted with a rotor engine similar, and I think that salts
came later).

\- Boot times are about the same then as now. :-)

------
Bud
Ah, the good old days, when interacting with a computer often meant printing
out 20 pounds of paper and then laboriously going through said printouts.

------
melling
Gordon Letwin went on to troll OS/2 users in the early 1990's on Usenet. He
had some sort of bet that Windows would have a specific feature
(multitasking?) before OS/2\. The bet was the loser would fly the winner to
any city the winner desired (probably US) for dinner.

~~~
DonGateley
I was the one on the other side of that bet (not under this name.) It was
multiprocessing. I said OS/2 would be there first and he said NT would. I'm
not sure who won but we were pissed off at each other enough by the end of it,
with some weird threats having been made, that dinner was pretty much out of
the question.

Odd that you would remember that. I thought I was probably the only one who
did.

~~~
melling
I was there as the 'melling'. Trolling the Internet was more fun when you
didn't have to worry about down votes and karma. :-). I tried to stay
reasonable but the OS/2 guys were rapid. Those were the days before Microsoft
was "evil" and people rooted for them against IBM. It might be time to root
for Microsoft again.

------
salgernon
I have one of the pictured terminals (the adds regent 20) set up for my
daughters to play hunt the wumpus on a raspberry pi (mounted inside the
voluminous case, it even gets decent wifi with a usb dongle)

Oh, were there people in the pictures? The hardware overshadows them!

------
winestock
Towards the bottom of the page, there are two pictures of the mainframe that
they used. The desktop computers in the other pictures were probably just
terminals that were connected to it. It was a DECSYSTEM 2020. It ran the
TOPS-20 operating system.

The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found
called it a mainframe.

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/gbell/digital/...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/gbell/digital/timeline/1978-2.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20)

The fans of TOPS-20 were nearly as anti-Unix as the ITS partisans. This may
help explain why Microsoft has not been so fond of Unix and the Unix way of
doing things. At least in its early days.

~~~
adolfojp
If I'm not mistaken to create NT Microsoft hired a bunch of DEC people and put
Dave Cutler at the helm. Like you say, none of those people were particularly
fond of Unix.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
NT was the weird mutant love child of VMS and Windows.

There was a lot to like about VMS, including early sharding, solid security,
and an impressive file system.

NT managed to lose most of it, IMO.

------
jvolkman
A lot changed in 14 years, but this reminds me of the video of a visit to id
Software in 1993:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI)

------
Starwatcher2001
In one of the photos there's a shot of a TRS-80 model 1, level II, with
expansion interface and three drives. Microsoft did the BASIC ROM for that
machine in Z80, as they did with a number of Micros. Full floating point
version in 12k. I cut my programming teeth on that in 1979 in BASIC and
assembler.

They also did a cut down version of BASIC for the Model 1, Level 1 machine,
without floating point and single letter variables A-Z (!) It had just two
string variables A$ and B$. It had precisely three error messages: "How?",
"What?" and "Sorry". They squeezed that into a 4K ROM.

------
aswanson
I love the 70s computing aesthetic along with the fashion. So unapologetically
idiosyncratic.

~~~
pcurve
Just curious, what do you find idiosyncratic about the 70s computing
aesthetic?

~~~
blumkvist
He just likes to use idiosyncratic in a sentence.

~~~
aswanson
Bingo.

------
rbanffy
In case anyone gets curious about the big computer with a large tape drive,
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20)

------
jcurbo
Since the author is wanting to sell the original photos, you'd think someone
at Microsoft's corporate archives dept (I assume they have something like
that) or PR would snap these right up.

~~~
pcurve
Looks like that will happen now.

------
twerquie
So much paper.

~~~
thought_alarm
Those noisy line printers must have been running constantly all day long.

~~~
mark-r
Actual line printers were pretty quick and wouldn't have been running for long
periods of time, and were likely to be tucked away in a back room somewhere.
Now get a few 30-character-per-second DECWriters buzzing... And those were a
vast improvement over the 10-CPS Teletypes that were the rage before video
terminals were affordable.

~~~
RyJones
I sort-of miss nursing a flotilla of chain printers for IBMs now. Sort of.

~~~
mark-r
A former coworker had a story from when he used to service those things. He
was doing a cleaning and was tossing the solvent-soaked rags into a garbage
can on the other side of the printer door. Someone came by and tossed a
cigarette into the can - managed to blow out quite a few ceiling tiles. He was
always a bit hard of hearing but I never determined if it was connected to
this incident or not.

------
jedberg
I like how every office has a cork board instead of a whiteboard.

~~~
codemac
I like how every office is an office.

~~~
bbcbasic
I wonder... how did they collaborate?

~~~
thrownaway2424
99% of their dumb ideas died a natural death before they managed to utter them
to another human. The way work should be done.

------
humbertomn
It feels like a 'Mad Men' episode

~~~
billyhoffman
More like a Halt and Catch Fire episode

------
sehugg
I love the giant banner font used in the printouts on Matt McConaughey's desk.
And the Trash-80s.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's fascinating just how much printed material there is in these photos. How
much of the work they were doing back then was not digital. It's an
interesting contrast to the modern era where a very high percentage of the
work in software development is done using a computer.

------
nadams
Is it just me or are they not smiling in any of the pictures :(

~~~
kzhahou
That is true, but you can't infer they didn't enjoy their jobs.

------
tacone
So much paper.

------
throwaway_exer
The man with the bushiest beard is Gordon Letwin. He single-handedly cost IBM
a trillion dollars by making Windows do multi-tasking, killing OS/2 with less
than 100 lines of code.

I saw his photo in the 90s, and it still haunts me. I'm an ex-Windows API
programmer. I gave up when they changed their database access APIs too many
times.

~~~
DonGateley
Sorry man, but that's not even close to what happened.

