
For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune (1997) - percept
http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/012197eudora.html
======
narrator
He did just fine:

[http://blog.fawny.org/2015/07/04/stevedorner/](http://blog.fawny.org/2015/07/04/stevedorner/)
"Qualcomm Contrary to rumour, Qualcomm, which had bought Eudora early on from
the University of Illinois, had always treated him well, he says. (“I am very
happy to correct that impression. I was not shafted by Qualcomm. Qualcomm did
very well by me.” And actually, Steve worked for that company for over 20
years.) He doesn’t have to work anymore – “and that is a blessing – it’s a
blessing, it really is. It’s nice not to have that pressure. On the other
hand, I’ve been retired now for little more than a year, and I do look around
and question why I’m not being productive.”"

------
tomhoward
My first job in tech was on an ISP helpdesk starting in 1999. The most common
setup for our customers was: Windows 98 or 95, Internet Explorer and Outlook
Express.

It became unofficial but conventional practice for most of the staff, that
after you'd spent enough time trying to help a customer get Outlook Express
working without success, to recommend they install Eudora.

It wasn't pretty, but it just worked.

Eudora was a perfect example of a product that did one thing but did it right.

Whilst Microsoft was building Windows, IE and OE to be deeply integrated with
one-another, Eudora just sat there minding its own business, doing a really
great job of handling your mail.

I still think about this now when building products.

It's so often tempting to think the answer to your product problem is to add
more features or integrate it with some other app or system.

But I always have Eudora as a reminder of the value of doing just one thing
but doing it really well.

~~~
percept
Woz liked it, too:

“Wozniak was a Eudora user for the longest time,” Steve says. People gave
Wozniak shit for it. He used Eudora, Steve says Woz replied, “because I can
put anything on the damn toolbar.” Eudora could put any menu item with any
modifier combination into a toolbar button. Now nothing else can or will. The
message from today’s software, Steve says, is “You do that a lot? Too darned
bad. Not gonna go on the toolbar.”

~~~
kps
‘Anything’ included scripts. I used this heavily when I was moderating mailing
lists — F5 Accept, F6 Reject.

------
mariuolo
Alas it happens all the time.

See Gary Kildall (MS-DOS originated from from his CP/M but he never saw a dime
of royalty) and Phil Katz (PKZIP, note how the Zip file format uses "PK" as
magic number).

I've always wondered if the bitterness of having lost their big occasion
caused them to die prematurely, the former in a biker bar brawl and the latter
of alcoholism at the age of 37.

~~~
computator
> _Alas it happens all the time._

In the field of computing, I think the greatest contribution to the world vs
least fame & fortune goes to the inventor of the World Wide Web.

It's sad that outside of the computing world, Tim Berners-Lee is unknown.
Asking your dentist, aunt, or barber about who they think invented the web
leads to some amusing replies.

I've actually done this and after telling them about Berners-Lee, I found the
following themes to be common:

(1) Incredulousness that it was one person. People either think it had to be a
big company or that it somehow "evolved" into existence (you know, the way
television or photography just kind of happened without any particular persons
being involved /irony).

(2) Belief that he chose to not accept the money. That is, he could have made
a fortune if he wanted to, but for unspecified reasons he didn't want the
money. I've tried to explain that the web wouldn't have succeeded if he tried
to charge for it (even assuming that CERN let him charge for it), but there's
a popular belief that great work always gets rewarded unless one explicitly
opts out of the reward.

AN ASIDE: I think that in all human endeavor, the record for _greatest
contribution to the world vs least fame & fortune_, where the inventor is
truly known, should go to Cai Lun (also spelt Ts'ai Lun), the inventor of
paper. He's a real person and historically well-documented as the actual
inventor of paper:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Lun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Lun)

~~~
chubot
What's even more a shame is that many people in the computer industry don't
respect TBL's invention and accomplishments either!

I'll borrow a phrase from Paul Graham and call it the "middlebrow critique" of
the web. Typically people think the design is naive and inefficient -- they
think it should involve a stateful protocol, a turing-complete VM, or be more
"statically typed". They also tend to believe in "global truth" and neglect
backward compatibility / graceful upgrades.

I've heard a variety of accomplished engineers -- including my coworkers at
Google, whose riches were built on the web -- express these kinds of
sentiments.

I think the real disconnect is that TBL thinks about people just as much as he
thinks about computers. He thinks about the ecosystem -- the whole rather than
the parts. The inventions and design principles were not an accident; you can
read about them in his book "Weaving the Web".

~~~
berntb
The whole stateful/stateless choice isn't intuitive unless you've at least
read discussions about a few protocol designs/implementations which made these
choices. It isn't about intelligence.

No wait, I might be wrong here -- this _ought_ to be obvious for people so
young that they grew up doing web programming? Do educated developers really
say that?

(I haven't followed the rfcs for quite a long time, so I probably do lots
Dunning–Krugers myself now. :-) )

Edit: I remember when WWW took over from Gopher. I thought "Damn, a superior
alternative that won't win because a first-come implementation already filled
the niche." Then came Mosaic which could show pictures -- and WWW took over. I
was happy and disgusted at the shallowness. :-)

~~~
drumdance
One of my favorite Internet artifacts is Marc Andreessen's proposal for the
IMG tag -- note he used all caps.

[http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q1/0182.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q1/0182.html)

------
fspeech
This article was written in 1997. In 1999 Qualcomm stock went up 26 times
(2600%). If he were still at Qualcomm (Edit: Wikipedia reports that he was
with Qualcomm till at least 2006)... Back then companies were still generous
with options and principal engineer at Qualcomm was quite senior.

~~~
jlarocco
That's a little misleading. Every tech stock in the world sky rocketed in
1999, and then they all tanked.

Qualcomm topped out at $88 a share in 1999, and was under $14 in 2002. Still
up 3.8x, but nowhere near 26. It's increased since then, but even right now
it's only $48.

~~~
lallysingh
You don't have to wait until retirement to sell shares.

~~~
jlarocco
Obviously. People also don't typically sell shares right at the top of a
bubble, either. Look at the graph on Yahoo. The shares were $88 for like a
day. Very unlikely he made 26x.

------
beefman
I've been using Eudora since 1995. Lack of UTF-8 support is causing problems
now... I'll be moving to another client soon. Recommendations more than
welcome!

~~~
toast0
If you're running Windows, try Pegasus Mail[1], it's a contemporary of Eudora,
but is still maintained, and supports UTF-8. Releases are pretty infrequent of
late, but email is still email, so things still work. :)

[1] [http://www.pmail.com/](http://www.pmail.com/)

~~~
keithpeter
I actually bought a copy of that years ago, or rather paid for a manual which
was the way you supported the author in those pre-Millennial days.

I tend to use sylpheed on Linux at home now when I need an off-line client.

------
porsupah
Alas! I used Eudora well into the OS X days, by which time it was abundantly
clear there would be no further development thereon. I still rather miss it -
I loved the way I could open a new window, and have it be completely ready
absolutely immediately, rather than first having to consult a lengthy
database.

Around 2002 or so, I finally conceded, and went with OS X's own Mail. Not
nearly the same, but - adequate, and viable for the future.

I was also touched to see mention of CUSeeMe. Ah, how we all nearly avoided
Skype!

------
nodesocket
Kudos to Eudora. Brings back memories. I am 33 years old, but it seems like
eons ago.

Anybody else remember:

    
    
        Kai's Power Tools (smear and smudge images)
        Hotline Communications (Warez)
        Real Player (Arrggg so much nerd rage)
        Claris Home Page (remember DHTML)
        ICQ (the original Slack)
        Winamp (awesome media player)
        3dMark (graphic card benchmark)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I'd add Napster to that list too. Pretty revolutionary for all the wrong
reasons!

Paint Shop Pro and WinRAR as well. :)

------
superplussed
I loved the quote by the founder of CU-SeeMe, good to see they are still
around (chuckle):

[http://www.wpine.com/](http://www.wpine.com/)

------
JudS
"Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk"

Always wondered if that was indirectly aimed at me....

~~~
kps
“Help stamp out flying e's”

And of course <x-eudora-setting:319=32>

------
hatmatrix
I started using Eudora when I first got to college. It was my way of keeping
in touch with my old friends who I moved far away from.

I can still remember the .wav file that played when I got mail (and spam was
not as common those days so it was always happy mail).

------
bane
I used to work for an ISP back when anybody could start one. We shipped new
customers a single 3.5" 1.44MB floppy with some shareware to get them started:
a dialer program, a browser and Eudora on it... _one_ floppy.

------
fensterblick
Thanks, Steve Dorner. I liked Eudora a lot.

And now I always remember what happens when you chop off a branch while
sitting on it (a question on Eudora's help menu).

------
hendekagon
Loved Eudora back in the day

