For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune (1997)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.”"
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.
“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.”
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.
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:
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".
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. :-)
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
There was a large amount of right place/right time to what he did. It wouldn't have been possible without the Internet infrastructure. He didn't invent networking or hypertext.
> Tim has received many, many honors.
The average person uses the web all the time but has never heard of Tim Berners-Lee or any of the awards you mention. But they know who won the Oscar for a movie they watched for 90 minutes.
> There was a large amount of right place/right time to what he did.
That's also true of (for example) Bill Gates, but he made a massive fortune and is well-known by the public.
> He didn't invent networking or hypertext.
You can make that kind of comment about everything ever invented in human history. Everyone builds on top of something.
He was in the opening ceremony of the last olympics, right alongside the pop stars. I don't think any other computer scientist has ever been honoured in such a public, pop-culture way.
Then I ask: Does the typical user of a mobile phone know who invented the frequency hopping that is used in modern mobile network standards (hint: it was an actress): https://goo.gl/fVYYbY
The same could be said of about lots of other major technical inventions.
I think this is just because most people don't understand what the "world wide web" is. They think it's synonymous with "internet", and so are understandably incredulous.
See also Clifford Cocks.
> Gary Kildall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
Gary was bitter about Bill Gates getting all the glory, but that's the opposite of what the original article is about
> Phil Katz
I'm not sure that CP/M was all that innovative or had crucial design properties.
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.
I tend to use sylpheed on Linux at home now when I need an off-line client.
If you're open to new approaches to email you should try Unibox. It's an email client for Mac (and soon iOS) that lets you browse through your emails by person, so you always have all messages and all attachments with a person in one place.
My mother is in the same boat right now, and looking for suggestions. UTF-8 and prevalence of HTML content are making it nearly impossible to keep using in this day and age.
Best features (not killer but very nice) are/were the storage format, and saving attachments externally, and not "in line" with the message.
Local storage in an accessible format (Eudora uses mbox) is table stakes; roach motels need not apply.
I'm still running OS X 10.6 largely because of Eudora, but some day this machine will fail, or I'll have some compelling need to ‘upgrade’, and by then I'd like to have a better option than Eudora in a VM.
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!
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)Paint Shop Pro and WinRAR as well. :)
Always wondered if that was indirectly aimed at me....
And of course <x-eudora-setting:319=32>
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).
And now I always remember what happens when you chop off a branch while sitting on it (a question on Eudora's help menu).