Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint (2012) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint (2012) [pdf]

robertgaskins.com

56 pointsj_s8 comments

This is a great read from a guy that was on the front lines at a really interesting time in computing history.

It is long though (500+ pages). If you want a shorter form version we interviewed Robert on some specific aspects of his work for our blog:

- How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint: https://wp.me/p20Qg-yH

- What it was like to run a startup in the 1980s: https://wp.me/p20Qg-F2

- Having Bill Gates as your boss: https://wp.me/p20Qg-IR

Ah, wasn't expecting a 500+ page pdf. All the words in the title trigger to think about presentations...

Actually I like the idea of full stories about the history of specific software. (Obviously haven't read this one just now, so can't say whether it's any good).

Does anyone know of other books (physical prints would be preferable to me) in this genre? Masters of Doom comes to mind, but it's a bit too much about the personal story maybe.

Edit: I see it's also available in print on Amazon

Stay Awhile and Listen is an interesting one on the development of Diablo

https://www.amazon.com/Stay-Awhile-Listen-Legendary-Video-Ga...

I'm just reading Masters of Doom right now. It's absolutely fantastic!

Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft' - G. Pascal Zachary

FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software by Kerry Nietz. It is about the development of FoxPro, the late 80s massively successful xBase clone that was acquired by Microsoft.

Programmers At Work by Susan Lammers is a series of interviews with programmers (Charles Simonoyi, Gary Kildall, Bill Gates, Daniel Ratliff and so on), in the 80s when Microsoft had just 160 employees, "multimedia" was a buzzword, and Bill Gates was trying to understand how CD-ROMs would change everything. The programmers talk about how they built their favorite software, and there are certain philosophical nuggets about computing that is unsullied by the complexity and sophistication that the field acquired later.

Coders At Work by Peter Seibel, written in the vein of Lammer's original work. This time it speaks to a different set of programmers including Joe Armstrong, Ken Thompson and other stalwarts.

>stories about the history of specific software. [...] Does anyone know of other books (physical prints would be preferable to me) in this genre?

The AutoCAD story[1] is interesting to read. Unlike Forethought/PowerPoint, Autodesk was never acquired and stayed independent. A popular excerpt from it is John Walker evaluating 3 different venture capital deals.[2]

The Wordperfect story[3] is interesting. Because their headquarters was in Utah and intertwined in Mormonism, the book mentions several management practices that many would consider strange and oppressive (can't go to dentist during company hours, etc). From a technical perspective, one of the takeaways was their ill-fated decision to stick with assembly language too long instead of using a higher level language like 'C Language'. This affected the time-to-market for new products like the Windows version of Wordperfect. This is eerily similar to FogCreek/FogBugz strategy to stay with their internal proprietary "Wasabi" programming language. That affected their ability to create new features to keep with competitor Atlassian. This doesn't mean companies should always go from low-level to higher-level language for productivity. Google Inc did the opposite: Larry Page wrote first Pagerank system in Java and Python and his first employees rewrote it in lower-level C++ for better cpu & memory utilization of their servers.

The Chandler (personal information manager) story chronicled in the book "Dreaming in Code"[4] is very good. Even though Chandler never got well-known like AutoCAD and Wordperfect, the book lets you see how a lot of smart people can get sidetracked by endless architectural debates which delays the release of usable software. (Basically, the opposite of Eric Ries' Lean Startup where you have a Minimum Viable Product and iterate fast with real customers.) It's also a lesson that having money (Mitch Kapor's generous funding) becomes a handicap. You'd think that not having the pressure of a limited runway and not running out of VC money would empower the developers but that didn't happen. Instead, it just prolonged a lot of software architecture debates. In contrast, when companies are starving and in near-death bankruptcy, it tends to focus the mind very intensely on how to create business value. (E.g. Airbnb's founders selling cereal boxes in order to live another day and build the lodging platform.)

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

[2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_32.html

[3] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcenden...

Which also reminds me of the problem of programs assuming that HWNDs are even, including the first version of Project using the low bit to do windowless controls in the days just before Windows 3.0 was released. PowerPoint decided to require protected-mode Windows 3.0 from the beginning instead, as you can see in the book. In retrospect, Windows 3.0 should have been delayed anyway because of DOS 5.0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com