
Early Posts From Tech Founders Who Changed The World - carlcheo
http://carlcheo.com/fascinating-posts-from-tech-founders-who-changed-the-world
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pbreit
Fun read. Should add the Marc Andreessen message.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.wais/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.wais/fMl2xRqLvRk/58RdTW0v3n8J)

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OneOneOneOne
I want to highlight the crowd pleasing "Options for new window per document
(aka TurboGopher interface) -- always, or via middle mouse button."

Seriously though, it is easy to see why Marc has done so well.

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sixQuarks
I wonder who got the Amazon job, and what he's worth today. It says meaningful
equity, so let's say they gave him 1.5% equity. With dilution and stock
splits, let's say that equity got divided 20 times. So that guy now owns .075%
of Amazon. At $170 billion market cap, his stake would be worth $127 million

~~~
PublicEnemy111
[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-
empl...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-
employee-1/#shelp1)

~~~
sixQuarks
I don't think that's the guy. The ad said it was a well-funded startup. This
guy was literally the first employee.

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Swizec
This makes me feel so inadequate. I love it.

edit: I wonder how many similar postings exist from people who did not end up
changing the world.

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iamtimnuwin
Inadequate? I think this does the opposite for me showing that there's hope
for the common folk who are just passionate with their projects :P

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Swizec
Yeah but I'm older than all those guys already and the project I was
passionate about at 21 didn't do the thing.

~~~
PublicEnemy111
Jeff Bezos had a fairly long career on Wall Street before founding Amazon. I
believe he was ~30 when he first flew to Seattle to start it in his garage

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RandomBK
I like how the top comment in the Dropbox thread (#5) is someone criticizing
it. Ah HN... Never change.

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Mahn
[http://bradconte.com/files/misc/HackerNewsParodyThread/](http://bradconte.com/files/misc/HackerNewsParodyThread/)

Still spot on today :)

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MildlySerious
"No mention of Javascript. How is this still relevant today?"

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ohitsdom
Jeff Bezos' job post looking for talented engineers to "pioneer commerce on
the Internet"... A startup description that certainly delivered on that
promise.

~~~
blfr
Complete with semi-realistic requirements that people complain about nowadays.

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JamesSwift
I think I would have dismissed the amazon ad immediately without a second
thought. Reads like all the other low-quality postings I see today.

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corobo
Or maybe low-quality postings you see today read like the amazon ad :)

People copy what works

~~~
JamesSwift
You're right, that thought did cross my mind.

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27182818284
Google used to have a great list of these. I can't seem to find the link
anymore. Not only did it include ones like the Tim Berners Lee post, but also
the first posts they could find mentioning AIDS, Tiananmen Square and more.

~~~
cremno
They can be found here:
[https://support.google.com/groups/answer/6003482](https://support.google.com/groups/answer/6003482)

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shawnee_
Back when people typed two spaces after the end of a sentence. When the
convention changed is not clear, but 'tis been a tough thing for me to un-
learn.

~~~
geoelectric
When we went from predominantly fixed-width to predominantly variable-width
for both professional writing drafts and, more widely, email.

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andyidsinga
unsurprising - most smart people are out there, being curious, asking lots of
questions, trying to find or hire other smart + good performing people.

don't agree that WhatsApp and oculus rift have "changed the world" ...yet.

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namenotrequired
Ah, I had wondered who said "Apparently the Internet, Google, Amazon, and
other successful tech companies and products don’t come out of no where."
before. How could I forget, of course it was Lao Tzu.

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akhilcacharya
I'm a fan of WhatsApp's original idea..I didn't know they pivoted to such a
degree.

I was working on a project like that over winter break, but had to put it on
hiatus.

~~~
personlurking
I'm trying to figure out if I should kick myself or not. I also had the
WhatsApp original idea, but in the mid-2000s. ;)

~~~
nostrademons
Go back to the late 1990s and AOL had it. When I was in college (early 2000s)
away messages were all the rage.

~~~
akhilcacharya
True, but I guess theres's value in "legacy" means of communication in the
modern day - just take pager communication with Yo. Actually, Yo might not be
the best example, but nonetheless.

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mkesper
Linus' comment was tongue-in-cheek, though.

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MichaelCrawford
I wouldn't want anyone to see some of the code I was paid to write when I was
just starting out.

This article makes me sad, because it is easy to find posts by Chris Schefler,
who along with Thomas Leavitt founded Web Communications, the world's first
private web hosting service. Before WebCom, if you wanted to have a web page,
you needed your own server with an Internet connection - or a good friend with
those.

Chris and Thomas had lots of questions about the HTTP protocol, apache,
Solaris and so on.

They eventually sold WebCom to their direct competitor, Verio. Chris got
$4,500,000.00 out of it, and retired young. I only saw him once after that,
out in the Santa Cruz Mountains, riding a mountain bike with a friend.

Chris was later brought by the police - in handcuffs - to a psychiatric
hospital, but was turned away as "not sick enough to hospitalize". The very
next day he shot himself in the head.

I myself have quite a severe mental illness - Bipolar Type Schizoaffective
Disorder. It is somewhat like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the
same time.

There are all manner of social workers, case managers and the like who have
urged me to go on the disability check, get into subsidized housing and so on.
The specific reason I always refuse is that I am - for the most part - well
enough to take care of myself.

There are plenty of people who are not. I don't want to take the resources
away from them.

There is a case manager at my mental health clinic whose job it is to fetch
prescription medicine from the pharmacy then hand-deliver it to us clients. I
asked her not to do that and said "I don't want you to do for me what I can do
for myself". However she kept fetching my medicine for me; as a result I
request a written prescription from my shrink, so I can fill it myself, with
money I earn myself.

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MichaelCrawford
Dominic Giampaolo asked at at Be Developer's Conference, for a show of hands
as to whether we would prefer a case-sensitive, or a case-preserving but
-insensitive filesystem.

We overwhelming voted for case-sensitive, so that's what he implemented.

He later claimed that BFS did not need a filesystem consistently check tool;
with its journaling, he said it was simply not possible to screw up the
filesystem.

I owned two BeOS computers back then - one a PowerPC mac, the other a Pentium
II box that I built myself. I powered off one with the intention of removing
its external SCSI drive, but cluelessly detached the drive from the box that
was still powered on.

In a panic, I plugged the cable back on. Rather oddly, most of the filesystem
was just fine, but other parts were totally brain-damaged.

I reported this on the bedevtalk list. Dominic personally apologize. A few
months later, Be released a filesystem tool.

Good Times.

