For the delight of guests at the Literary Voices fundraising dinner this past May, the UW Libraries organizers asked Ms. Ahmed to bring her manual typewriter, small pieces of colored paper, and her creative wits. She sat at a table with a sign: heart-crafted poems. I walked up to her, and she asked me to give her…
I started working full-time on what became Internet Explorer 1.0 in early October, 1994, grew the engineering team to 67 individuals by the time we shipped IE 3.0 in August, 1996, and got very little sleep (I worked 80-100 hours/week for 17 of the 22 months I led the IE team). There were (naturally) a…
Gil Press posted a short article on Forbes on 8/13/2017 that included this section: August 15, 1994 Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka sends an email message suggesting to his colleagues that a World Wide Web browser should be bundled with the Windows 95 operating system. Released on August 16, 1995, Internet Explorer reached peak browser market share (95%)…
On Amazon.com: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) Due to an accident, author Eric Hoffer lost his eyesight at age 7, but it returned inexplicably at age 15. Not knowing if he would lose his eyesight again, he read voraciously for the rest of his life. Though he never attended college and…
On Amazon.com: Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation: How companies can seize opportunities in the face of technological change (1994) I started the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft in October, 1994. Without benefit of Google or Amazon.com, I found this book, which answered many strategic questions for me about how Microsoft should approach the Internet. The case studies and…
I’m a big fan of writing well. I read many books growing up (my mother was a librarian), and I took an Intermediate Composition course as an undergraduate engineering student. One of our textbooks was The Elements of Style, Third Edition, and the focus on concision by authors Strunk & White reinforced my experience writing “tight” code for computers. Over the…
On Amazon.com: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010) Author Matt Ridley provides a sweeping summary of human and technology evolution, going back roughly 200,000 years. He asserts that the development of trade led to specialization which led to agriculture which led to cities. I find this by far the most plausible theory, but it is at odds with the…
After I read the Ashlee Vance book on Elon Musk in early 2015, I was convinced human beings were going to Mars in the next 5-10 years. I kept meaning to write a blog post… A few days ago, this August 2015 post How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars by Tim Urban (Wait But Why) appeared on my…
Originally posted on NEUPERT ON HEALTH:
I went to the Personalized Medicine World conference to learn more about how genomics (and other ‘omics) are advancing drug discovery, molecular diagnostics, current cancer treatment paradigms and creating new sectors like ‘scientific wellness.’ My general observations are: The scope and pace of advancement is accelerating: it is no longer…
My experience with human-computer interaction starts with my hand-held HP 25C in 1976, flows through my punched-card FORTRAN IV green-bar paper days, on to Unix and MS-DOS command lines, Macintosh and Windows GUIs, and more recently to web and mobile applications. The web as we know it burst forth in 1994, and most of our computer interactions today…
