This story is (was?) taped to the side of the defender cabinet in a small arcade at the Googleplex. Something reminded me of it and made me smile, so I decided to share the smile with all of you :-)
I just told the guy who runs the site (my officemate) that he's at the top of HN though.
I really should spend some time reading the other top articles on your officemate's site. It appears that there may be many other gems on there.
BTW, they're in my old office, the one I was in from Feb-May. The Googleplex is not really all that big. (Andy Hertzfeld was two doors down when I joined in January, before they reshuffled evereyone.)
Not to denigrate Joshua's achievements, but I'm not really into web stuff like most of you guys. The big topics around here are python, ruby, erlang, myssql, rails, et al. If I were to learn a new language today, I'd pick something like Z80 assembler. That makes me less marketable, but that's what appeals to me.
Andy Hertzfeld did his best work in the severely constrained environment of the early Macintosh. I'm equally impressed by guys who were able to write games for the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision in 2K of ROM and a couple hundred bytes of RAM. That's the kind of stories I like to hear, for better or worse. Not surprisingly, I've read every story on folklore.org several times.
i've read most of the other entries in this genre as well. my favorite is "hackers" by steven levy.
I haven't read "Hackers," I'll check it out.