okay so Adele let's let's start all the way back you're from Chicago originally is that correct no I was born in Cleveland Ohio oh okay oh we moved to Chicago when I was 11 oh okay and then um and it was in Chicago then until I went to college and I went to uh the University of Michigan in Anna Arbor and then I went back to Chicago for graduate school at the University of Chicago what were you studying as an undergraduate so I I studied mathematics um and uh I was I was actually and I was actually at in an arbor for a total of three and a half years so the first half my senior year I was um I left in the spring to go to Europe I was accepted at the University in Munich and um and and the people who were wasn't junior year abroad but the people uh who were running the program were supposed to arrange housing and didn't so when I got there um I spent a couple weeks looking for housing and I said you know forget it I'm going to go enjoy Europe so um I went all over Europe and up to England and up you know Way North and ended up in Israel and then came back to the United States in the fall and so uh everywhere I went there was an IBM building and I had been pounding what was I going to do with it this math degree um because originally I was doing it to teach high school math which is what my mother was trained to do and um and I discovered when um at the University of Michigan to get a a teaching certificate you had to do a class public speaking class and I wouldn't do it it scared me so which is amazing but yeah well in those days I didn't think I had anything interesting to talk about it wasn't until you do something that's interesting to talk about that you can talk so uh I never got my certificate so I was thinking what was I going to do and I saw all those IBM buildings and I thought wow I could live anywhere in the world if I could learn to do something that is important to IBM and I had a cousin who was a statistician for them um in New York and he explained a little more and I had taken already a computer class um in those days you know we were punching cards remember them well it wasn't really computers you embraced but um I got it in my head that I should get my bachelor's and then go get a master's degree so I'd learn more about computers and I got a job at Michigan at the center for research on learning and teaching working with Carl Zin who is one of the Pioneers in computer aided instruction and um he hired me mostly because in those days I knew how to speak German and we were teaching German class and it was an IBM 1500 and very straightforward programming in my mind and I saw programming as the grandest world for problem solving you know it's just perfect for me and um so I applied for graduate school and um picked Chicago primarily to go home to see if I wanted to live in Chicago again so it was sort of this go get your master's degree in um and it was 1967 and in 1967 um I needed Fellowship women just were not going into those fields they were not getting fellowships um until the universities realize because they're businesses and they need students that they were going to be forced into bringing more women in because too many of the guys were getting drafted um years ago felma Estrin told me that she had the same experience in World War II that she got this wonderful job at UCLA running a lab there because the guys were all off on the war and I said it's too bad it takes a war for us to get in but um but I did very well and um and I was encouraged to take exams to go on for my PhD um and the only they ask you when you take your exams well what are you going to do your PhD in and what I knew about was educational technology that's what I learned um at the end in Michigan and it was still something interesting to me and um Chicago was had mostly atomic energy commission funding they were building um this was the the years of Bob Fab and Maurice wils used to visit and they were building a machine they called the magic engine machine something like that capability based Hardware um and they didn't really have funding for educational technology but one of the faculty Roman Wheel who's still there in the business school um asked Patrick supes who was visiting whether I could come visit him and Patrick supes is the one of the two directors of the institute for mathematical sciences and the social studies um that's not right mathematical studies in the social sciences right um and he said sure So I uh was at Chicago for two years got me Master's um and packed up to go to Stanford um not as a student but as a visiting student still a Chicago student and um after the first year Chicago had accepted a proposal with no strings attached you could be anywhere you just had five years to get it done and Stanford had offered me a research associate position so I didn't leave California so much for that yes so much for Chicago yes letting one a student go away well the alternative was going back to Chicago and te continuing to teach programming which would have ordinarily teaching programming class would be fun and we did it in an interesting way we did it as a comparative programming so the one class course I taught when I was there was um it was um snowball um pl1 and Bal oh okay so Assembly Language and the way we taught it was obviously to teach you how to build the elements of one language in the other so that in the end you could see what the language was designed for especially and then what it meant to um write a language unfortunately it was 1968 Chicago and those were not happy years at the University um nor in the city um because that was the the year of the democratic convention um and it was a big sit in and my students were sitting in at the ad building and I learned very early about the politics of unties trying to protect students from themselves because of course the University Chicago they didn't come to class they were supposed to be flunked so I negotiated to let them make up the course by a certain date and then they would be okay because otherwise he flunk a class at Chicago you might as well go home so it was an interesting experience yeah it was interesting and I'm not sure if if that turned me off from from working in University I know that when I finished my degree at Stanford my um I did teach for a short time visiting down in Rio de Janeiro but um but I was I I think it wasn't really a commercial versus University tradeoff it was more Alan Kay wants me to come play oh yeah sure yes I'm going so how did how did that hookup happen um so the the imss The Institute um had both people working in mathematics and in reading and then uh Richard ainson headed up who became the chancellor of the University of California um and um so there were a lot of graduate students doing some very interesting and novel work but on the big time share systems and Dexter Fletcher was one of them and he he said we need to get involved in the ACM and we need to get involved in the community around us interest we can't just be at the University so he and I um did two things we went to an ACM meeting down in Anaheim and we also uh got involved with more of a local user group that was looking at computer uses for kids and that that means you're not so insular you're not you've got to find ways not to just be in your own building and um because of our community work I met a number of people who were either going to were were already at Park John shock was one of them and um and so that I think that's how Allan became aware of what we were doing at Stanford okay and we we were doing um besides teaching um courses we were also I built a system in which students could study um first order predicate logic by essentially inventing their own axac system which is and just so they know how hard it was you know um but that's that's a way of programming and we were also teaching uh logo of the Seymour papet work and um and there was more of an Assembly Language level language I was called slogo that we were working on with kids just trying to understand different forms of bringing Computing into the classroom so um so Alan became aware of um of our work and as and and he had come to the conclusion that to understand the software for the dyab book you couldn't just start with adults you're you're going to have to bootstrap yourself you're going to have to start with the kids um and see if that applied to the adults okay so that got you over to park when was that down so that would been um the summer of 1973 okay so I had been spent most of 1972 in Brazil and to come back U finished my degree and um and and and went to park at that time and uh I went to park pregnant with my first daughter and so those bean bags were not as attractive to me as they were to other people Allan always said the purpose of the bean bag was so that you would sink into the bean bag and it would be hard to jump up and attack somebody when they're giv a talk oh great which funny what he didn't understand is once you sunk in and you were pregnant you couldn't jump up other people had to bring you up it was pretty funny um and I remember I remember my uh folks visiting and taking them there and they just were tising you know this isn't a workplace you know this is a playground which it was that's a good thing that okay so so talk about those first uh few years then in terms of what you got to play with well I I remember when I got there thinking this is too good to be true and um to be given such free license from a large corporation and by this time I had spent a couple Summers working for for IBM um you know while I was in school and I had a very clear sense of large corporations and how they organized and how they ran things and I didn't see Xerox as any different so I was impressed with the forward thinking that gave such free hand to so many people so many smart people but I also felt that it wasn't going to last because when you start with nothing and you you ask for a budget and with that budget you build something quite novel it's going to be hard to convince people that you've learned everything there is to learn with that novel piece of hardware and you need to recapitalize um and it it actually happened faster than I expected um that you started getting more of of the tension of resource tradeoffs but the first couple years you didn't feel that way um so small talk 72 had been designed and the challenge given to me was do you think children can learn this language how would you approach it again in those days the major influence I mean there was influenced from what I would call um the education world so Benjamin Bloom who I knew at the University of Chicago Jerome bruners uh was was somebody um whose work and approach to curriculum uh was very admired but the biggest influence was um Seymour paper and his group and they didn't believe in curriculum they believe that if you um gave somebody a toy that intrigued them they would learn something from it I I think the fallacy in that is that they actually expected their their students to learn something fundamental about mathematics and they made such claims but there wasn't if they were successful it would have been by the power of personality and that doesn't transfer if you're going to have broader impact in the school systems you're going to have to give be better guidelines and you're going to have to tie what you're doing to expectation more so now with accountability rules than back then but still you had the question was always in front of you what will the kids learn if they do this um and and since in early 70s programming uh little calculators were just in the schools you know computers were not something everybody had their hands on you couldn't argue the importance of just learning about what a computer is you had it had a tie to other curriculums so my challenge was to balance the um exploratory what we would call more of an inquiry approach which is how we think about it at the San Francisco Exploratorium where I'm where I'm involved with um at least a curriculum guideline and um and and as it turned out we were quite successful not so much because um I had a genius idea or anything but because the nature of the language gave us the answer which is if I give you something that you can play with and extend even a piece of paper with a paragraph and I say it's not written well rewrite it that's easier than giving you nothing and say make something you know including a blank sheet of paper and starting to write so the the lovely part that has proven true for professional programmers as well as kids is when you start with something an an object that does something and then you could put many objects like those together and have them interact or EX and then extend and make them behave a little differently you can take a very incremental approach to learning how to control a computer system um and we took a systems approach it wasn't just lines and lines and lines of code the way many projects teaching programming and basic uh found themselves you you really were mapping to their natural understanding of what were the actors in in the application they were trying to build so so so now some of that early work I assume was done on alos where where did the the dino book whole Dino book idea come from and and talk some more about when you thought that would happen and uh you know what you wanted that to be so so clearly um I went to Xerox to join Alan K's dream um having spent years and years doing educational work on time share systems have having spent many years uh working with the computers and tutoring in public schools including here in East paloalto the Ravenswood School District um I was not comfortable with this Ed when you're going to learn you go to a place to learn what I believed is is that you have to bring your tools of learning with you wherever you are obviously that starts with your brain but if computers were going to be successful in changing how we learn and we were going to deal with lifetime learning then they had to be with you and in walks this wonderful man with this cardboard mockup of a carry it with you computer which didn't look so strange you can put a calculator down but in the schools you know calculators were tethered they were locked to the desk right you didn't take them home you didn't carry them with you they cost too much money um but we could see where it was heading eventually and um so when I first learned about the din book dream it just mapped exactly into what was bothering me about the time share work um Allan had done work in his PhD dissertation at the University of Utah of course on the flex machine so he had been at it for many many years trying to figure out how to create um what I call this computation and communication multimedia um device and had been mocking up a whole series of them over the years I think there was one called the kitty comp um where the comp was a k um so but when I stepped in he'd already had this Dino book markup and and he'd go around giving talks and showing this computer and I think what people don't realize is when you give a talk with the enthusiasm with which he gave it people thought he was marketing something he he had product he had here and so we get letters to buy them and you know you couldn't some some you could hardly dissuade people that it wasn't real because we had it simulated on the elto and for people who understood what they were listening to it was very intriguing but many people as we've talked about in the past many people just thought he was crazy we were crazy and um that it would never happen it could never happen and nothing motivates a research team more than to be told you can't do it in fact it's a way in which you get your researchers to stop thinking about what's hard and just do it because you know it's like like telling somebody in sports you can't run that fast well wait I'll show you I can do that when it's the same obviously the same motivator for software people software and Hardware people um we took the alos we had the we built when I started at serox we were in a building uh up on Coyote Hill not the current building and there was a basement area not being used I think the polos the office group were down there but there was space so we carpeted it and put up and we put our groups elos down there so there was kind of an allotment of elos to different groups and um and then we had uh we brought students we we negotiated with the school system for for the MGM students mentally gifted minor students um to participate in this experience um interestingly one of those students parents lives on my street where I live now in paloalto and they said that that was the primary influence for him to go into Computing earlier which was I hope he wasn't shocked to find out in those days when that wasn't what it was like I'm sure he was um and we also arranged it so one of the students wanted to be the teacher and uh so she taught a class Miriam and um these kids were having a great time um because some of them love to paint some of them love to dream up ideas and if anything we learned is not everyone had a program but that it's a great way to teach kids how to collaborate with one another that everyone could have a different role we didn't use the word team we didn't use the word collaboration but they almost naturally fell into their role of saying well I don't really know how to do it but you do here's what I want to see and um and we did a lot of that eventually we open and and on weekend Saturdays we'd have class for xerox's employees kids and uh that was a great way for me to meet the people in the other Laboratories because of course we had two computer Laboratories but we also had three others chemists and physicists and um and their kids came for a class and that was fun and that allowed them to understand more about what we were doing cuz otherwise you sort of wonder what's the point what are they spending money on what's going on CU it was it didn't look like hardcore science which it wasn't so what what years was that going on W 1974 I'm going to date this you know for for several years um the way I'm dating this will you'll laugh cuz we ended up creating a resource center at Jordan Junior High School um and taking the alos there which was a bit of a bureaucratic struggle but I I'll leave that for some other day and um and I remember that I had a one-year-old and I took her with and we had snow in paloalto and the junior high school kids were having a snowball fight and that was like in the winter of 7475 so uh so from 74 to 76 um Small Talk 72 which is what we were teaching at the time was a very difficult language to teach I understand the motivation behind it but basically um it had the core idea of objects were sent messages but an object could decide to gobble up the message dream so depending on each token in the message dream something different Could Happen which meant that you really had to mentally think through the implementation to know what was being said in the code you just it wasn't easy to read the code and uh you know out of that experience I remember begging that we don't we don't allow that um because because you could gobble it up and evaluate gobble it up and take it as is I mean there were all different ways of gobbling it up and it depended on what the implementation of the message was and the go and you know adults professionals have problems with that kind of language it was beautiful cuz it was very iconic very and there was a lot of research going on at the time on iconic programming David Canfield Smith's Pig M was done was one of the first uh languages for for just expressing what you want to have happen with imagery um not not good solutions to the complexity of no screen space however yeah right so so then then I guess maybe talk about the the sort of the the changes that went on in small talk deriving from from that so the different versions there was a small 72 which had that characteristic um very small system uh and very all the graphics was very oriented to line drawing it was the turtle metaphor from logo we had Myrtle the Turtle and that was a little icon um and so that was fun for the kids for um for learning to draw but but limiting very limiting and um so in parallel to language design there was a lot of work on painting systems and animation systems and music systems to be integrated so kind of did them in parallel and figured out um how to merge 74 was a new implementation we started out on data General novas um programming bcpl so I think the alto initially what emulated bcpl so the small talk bike codes would then be interpreted um so there was a new implementation uh in 74 and then in 76 there was a new language which essentially did away with this gobbling um still had the the icons and um it was in Small Talk 76 that Dan Eagles did the first bitlit which is the block transfer of bits which is the underlying um system code for for making for being able to manipulate the bits on a bitmap display um that bitmap display was supposed to be a simulation of what we thought would happen in a flat panel display but it took a life of its own um things like that happen I I always say to people when they're fretting about some project they're going to do or some new job they're going to do quit worrying about failure failure is easy worry about if you're successful cuz then you have to deal with it um and and small talk 76 is where um there was some history but uh some very beautiful examples of Galley editing uh was done Diana Mary did some wonderful um implementations of a galy editor that mix the text and pictures and I remember we were going to have a big demo on a Dorado with some corporate people so we wrote a text that described essentially how paper flow through a copy or duplicator we were starting to get the idea that we better figure out how to explain what we're doing Less in educational terms and More in how it would benefit the corporation something I think would have been good to start with but hindsight is so smart um and and um and I did an animated sequence of the paper flowing so you you could actually see the still frame all labeled so look like a still one and we just shock them when we hit a run button and I think the one we surprised the most was was a park guy was Bob spinat you know he was quite surprised by it and um and that was very um that felt good you know to have a little surprise uh we did you mentioned Dorado in there why don't you talk about that a little bit when did that come in so basically after the alto there was a series of Hardware Designs done in the computer science lab uh Allen's group with me in it were in the system science lab and our manager was Bert southernland and then in the computer science lab the initial manager was Jerry alkine with um Bob Taylor as sort of associate head I I'm not sure what his title was exactly frankly given his history at arpa and funding at arpa I think everyone deferred to him more as the head and Jerry more as the Lea from corporate and Jerry had come from V bear Nick and Newman um and actually um so they built uh first a dolphin um and then uh then the Dorado and then the dandelion which became the hardware system for the star wark station which was announced in 1981 so that's a lot of machines being designed from 1972 up you know in the short amount of time um and and because we weren't getting recapitalized too easily one of the things we discovered is you could take all your alos and sell them to somebody else within Xerox and you didn't get real money you got credits and with that you could get the next machines and at the same at that same time frame because other divisions were getting the machines xero special Information Systems group down in Pasadena um had gotten Dolphins as well and were experimenting with small talk I didn't find that out until um more like 1980 1979 1980 and it plays a significant part of of the future of how things played out the other Hardware system that was a follow through was a notaker so this is where we collaborated with Doug Fairburn and designed um you could call it a portable I called it a luggable yeah and it wasn't physically that different you know in terms of size than the the Adam Osborne machines um you could carry it with you luglug put it under the seed in coach I understand that you couldn't do it in first class it was apparently too tight and Larry tesler did that it had batteries it had U dual process 68,000 in it uh one of them managing the bitmap display what we were trying to do was move closer and closer to the din idea while the other machines were getting bigger and bigger I mean a Dorado you needed a forget that air conditioning for that Echo machine and um and I remember um in 1977 uh in 1976 the small talk system really pushed more to have a a class hierarchy so objects were described in terms of a class of objects then you created instances of the class um those were the really the active objects but we were aiming towards a system that that was everything was an object which meant a class would be an object to when you could send messages to it um so that was the that would be um mostly information and act actions shared across all instances and um so there would be a class hierarchy where you would say oh I'm I'm a I'm a traveling vehicle just like that one except I'm Different in this following way and I can be different in how I Implement something or I can have more properties and and understand other things and you can imagine you know the typical business example would be there are accounts there are bank accounts but there are special bank accounts right um so we had this whole thing laid out and it was very compelling because it fit right into the curriculum ideas for how to teach kids give them a starting point and really help them learn how to how to refine it and we were really exploring this programming by refinement and really seeing a whole new software engineering process where you it programmed iteratively you started out with a prototype and you kept changing it and working it until it was what you wanted and then you started figuring out where performance uh could be improved um and in 1977 there was a great need to teach the executives top 10 Executives of Xerox about what we were doing at Park this was an initiative started by Bob Taylor I believe or someone in the computer science lab where the chairman and president and the top 10 guys were invited to spend a couple days at Park to learn and what we what they want what the idea of what they should learn is about modularity well I think the the powerful idea they were trying to be taught is a piece of Hardware changes depending on the software that's loaded into it it's a very obvious idea today but not in those days um the combination Hardware software that was the package that was the product um and instead of saying we built this general purpose piece of hardware and it could be whatever you whatever you want it to be and they had not been very successful I think in um getting enthusiasm for text editing the the chairman at the time mullik Peter mccullock had come to park for a big demo of the Bravo text editor that Charles Simone had done and when Bob fleo who worked for me saw saw mccullock the next week at corporate because he was there for some social service project and he said well what did you think and K said I don't think I've ever seen any I seen a man type so fast he missed the point and and and this this particular problem went on and on and on where where we didn't know enough about how how our customers internal customers thought and they didn't have a particular mission for us that they could grab their questions around so because there was no business plan it was it was hard I mean it was just hard how did how did Park get funded in the first place I mean that's pretty far away from corporate headquarters yeah I I think the um instigation was um Jack Goldman uh Dr gemman was the chief scientist and I believe he made the case for computer industry coming in um the Xerox Vision which was actually then and now perfectly reasonable one which is taking information from one form and turning it into another form basically the copy or duplicator distribution model where the origination could be paper it could be electronic um you know the office of the future and Jack had that idea he hired George P out of um the Washington University of Washington not Washington University St Louis Lou a renowned physicist they wanted to be near a university and they explored lots of them in pck Stanford at a time when Government funding was low and when quite a number of um respectable fabulous researchers who were used to getting arpa money were no longer uh able to get the money um coming out of Berkeley coming out of Stanford coming around and uh they hired Bob Taylor who knew them all from the aric community um but they didn't they didn't start a culture of teaching all those people what what Xerox was all about what they said which wasn't unreasonable but but but wasn't good for the company what they said was work on anything that you think in five years could have an impact on the company and they did and they were successful and they did did the the ethernet sure color copiers uh high-end printers all made a big difference in the company the problem is that the thing that everyone remembers the most was a computer and the company wasn't prepared to be in the Computing business they did buy a big computer company STDs um but no one at Park was involved in that and wanted to be involved in that um and um I don't if that was an issue because I wasn't involved in it um but I know in 1977 when we taught the class and they asked they asked Allen's group to do the Hands-On laboratory so I designed a um event driven simulation system where they could simulate copier or duplicator centers um putting in the data themselves and everyone could create something different and they could look at each other's machine and see something different going on and was that that class where I found out the president of Xerox had been at IBM and knew how to program so you know little different than we knew um and I think ultimately it was a it went over very well but they still didn't have a business plan in 1978 when the notaker was designed um again it was small talk 76 running on this smaller machine we had the idea that aha this is perfect because now by now we know two problems that Xerox has that we actually have a solution for and um Allan had gone on sabatical and I was acting manager and then he didn't come back and I became the manager and um and I remember going back east and meeting the people who were responsible for xerox's manuals and these guys were amazing what they were do doing because they drove the manual design from database inventory database and then they had mechanical translation into multiple languages where they essentially had negotiated what was French and what was Spanish to be useful in all South America Canadian French as well as the French French and they had a technique for idiomatic expression um um that allowed them to do the translations and so we said what what problem do the tech support guys have because Xerox was getting a quality um problem with the customers a tech support guy would go in to fix a copier and he wouldn't know how he need he needed to look something up in the manual and the only way he could do it was to go out to his car open his trunk and read this huge set of books that weren't up to date obviously weren't up to date but they had the database they knew they could have we said you can dynamically do that we can put all those books on a little computer you can he can carry it in he can lie on the floor looking at stuff and looking at the diagrams on our little computer we have this bitmat display and I'm afraid they thought we were crazy and we even said you could you know maybe somebody could help us and we hook it up to the by this time the duplicators had uh little ethernet inside of them we could just hook up and have a DI have a diagnostic uh tool either we didn't express ourselves very well or um or they just didn't understand it was a very big disappointment for what it's worth we had some similar experiences at Bell Labs about that same time with the same piece of the world yeah terms of manance yeah so that was one of our runs at the same time and Larry tesler and I did that and the other thing he and I did is for some reason we were invited onto uh a Planning Group of the Xerox publishing group and Larry recommended on demand publishing and this was a group that was really quite Innovative because they were looking to publish videos and they were doing all the sales support and I remember taking sales Xerox sales training at lesburg I mean we got ourselves involved we said we have to be more involved but um they too didn't think that on demand publishing was a very good idea and it's taken till now I mean it's taken a long time we were always so far ahead of you know the market we needed to figure out how to get to the market so in 19 so we had Small Talk 76 that still had unusual characters we had given lots of demos we were giving talks and xsis from Pasadena had brought the CIA in M and it turned out they were doing a project with them to invent a whole new approach uh workstation approach for analysts and they were doing it all in small talk and I remember going um it was a combination of people at Langley and at npic which is the national picture interpretation Center I and I remember meeting this gentleman who um was by profession of photographer and he showed me this prototype that they have been working on and the first thing that floored me was I thought they were supposed to tell us when they took our research and started doing something with it but the real thing that floored me was there were no books there was no documentation there were there were talks and in those talks we would say if you want to know how to do something you just look and read the code and it pretty much self s documents I mean we were so full of ourselves and you know he just interrupt and I said to him who wait a minute it was a different user interface um ultimately it was the very first spreadsheet where the spreadsheet was an object and all the cells were objects and therefore a cell could be a spreadsheet in those days they didn't have that and uh it was all hooked to a database and it was all getting you know CIA data coming down and um it was a remarkable tour to force and I said to him I don't understand how you did that I mean I just couldn't believe this nonprofessional he said well I'll show you and so I said okay hit control C which is how you then get into the code and interrupt it and I I remember saying to him that is the ugliest piece of code I've ever seen and he said oh that's okay because it does what I wanted to do and the professionals down at exercise are are going to rewrite it all this is the spec suddenly the Prototype became the spec and it didn't matter how What mattered was what and talk about learning from your customers you know that was the beginning of my getting interested in having customers Allan never wanted to have customers because you have to support them yes yes and if you support them you're going to do what they need and not what your vision is I'm sure to this day he is living angry with me um because I Mar mared down a software engineering row row and got customers but we were we weren't stuck we just needed more ideas we needed more participants and then uh so so then that's about the time Small Talk 80 time right yeah but small talk yes it was almost Small Talk 80 time it was time for the next language and the question was um how far how far would we push the uniformity I wanted to do more on nonproprietary Xerox processors I wanted to understand if you're going to have a language of this type did you need special Hardware there was actually an assumption that you did um and I just didn't feel that we would learn that unless we brought in outside computers this is also the time of the sun um microsystem startup yeah sure so Andy had done the work at Stanford in fact I was one of the earliest purchasers and I got the money by selling off all of our machines all of our you know Xerox machines and I know I mean I wasn't a pariah but I know cuz Bill Spencer who by this time was in charge of Park would come and tell me they're they're uh they're breathing down my neck again about my letting you buy those machines I said but you know the answer we we can't just let the world go by us we need to understand uh and we need to know if the software we're doing will run on these run well on these machines or whether we need to do special processors at the same time the uh small talk on a RIS machine the spark was was Dave Patterson and Dave at U Berkeley was going up so um I got it into my head that we should do the next round of small talk in a participatory manner more like what what you'd all know as as open source small talk in in the flavor of the code was always there is open source in that regard but um but it wasn't being built by a community sure yeah and uh Bert southernland was my manager and I said I don't want us to do all this work without permission because I think this time we need to publish everything um Allan had his hands slapped when in the early 70s um helped me with the name uh who did the whole earth catalog oh Stewart brand when Stuart brand came into park and um there was a book cybernetics 2 half of it was about the um the the secret company and he had pictures of Park in the and so there had been publicity that had guess hadn't been properly signed off on and so there had been a bit of uh you don't get to publish for a while period and um and I think Allan took it too seriously you know he didn't like having his hand slapped but um I we did start publishing again more in the 76 time frame uh including the personal Dynamic media paper that uh Allan and I did for I for the computer software i i e but um I wanted to go to corporate nest for permission and um it was a little risky because you didn't know what would come back there's no reason for them to say Yes um lucky for me between the time I suggested it and actually asking um xerox's Venture group had bought a lot of equity in a little fledgling computer company that wasn't doing very well called Apple computer oh and um and they had arranged for um the Apple Executives and then later the Lisa programming team team to come for a visit and I kind of parlay that into well you're willing to give give it away you're not interested and I wrote this motivator about why we should be able to publish it all and because we were planning to write a book MH and we were planning to have this community implementation um event and um I think it went to one of the princip ible at the Venture group who then asked Jeff rulon his opinion Jeff was on some special leave from Park to corporate and he wrote the oh sure publish all this so I had it on paper safe and uh and so then with Bert's help we enlisted tectronics huet Packard deck and apple but not Intel wanted to do it but the rule was you must have an internal software team MH that works with your Hardware team because the question we were asking wasn't do you like the language the question we were asking is is there anything about Hardware that would make for a better perform make for better performance and then we worked with um the folks at Berkeley and with Elliot Moss at UMass and Ralph Johnson at Illinois but basically the initial release then went out and um we ended up with a spec for the implementation of what was small talk 80 so of course we were forced into uh straight standard asking because not everyone was going to have uh control over their fonts who could have now they would but back then they didn't so that we could have all these special characters um and I don't know that the special characters were all that important they did give a a fun flavor kids but um Small Talk 80 then we tried to write as one book and it with the whole team and that didn't work but we had nice writeups on uh Steve wiers find it which was one of the very first efforts to explore can you find things browse and find things information on an electronic book versus a hard book he did that as his PhD in the education school at Stanford um we had all the work going on with constraint-based programming thing Lab at Al boring thesis um and we had uh later the alter alternate reality kit we were still still doing these Educational Systems Laura G and Bill fener fener were doing the uh rehearsal world where if you want to understand what an object did you had a stage and you rehearsed the objects and and and through the rehearsal essentially evolved yourself to the programming um constantly looking to see where the language wasn't strong enough where just adding objects to the library wasn't going to be strong enough because you'd have these trap doors into C programming or lower level programming um and we tried to write I think too much and um finally what we decided to do was that Dave Robson and I would write and we would split it up into three books four books four books three came out three came out a language book that Dave and I would do a user interface book that no one wanted to do so I did um because it was more like a user manual um a book on implementation the experience of all the everybody else so that was edited by Glenn ker and then there was going to be an applications level book which was basically the model view controller um metaphor and uh and in order to get the language book done we kind of organized ourselves so that Dan Les and I would make we we'd have an aspect of the system we need to agree on like what would be the collection classes how would you how would you provide Collections and um I had run a group at Park that did APL and I was fascinated by so we actually had a lot of APL stuff in it as a result but um we'd go to the group we'd have this plan we'd have a big debate and then if you thought you weren't heard you went to Dave as the ustan and he'd listen if he thought you had value he'd come to me and Dan and he'd say listen you guys you were screwing up you didn't you didn't listen it was a very interesting organizational Dynamics because Dave never came to us so at some point I said this is going too well nobody's complaining this is a group that has opinions not a lot of them but they have opinions are you what's going on are are you not telling us he said no no one comes to him I said why not he says because they know they'll never get through me the goal is to get done so this is like a very different model than our previous history where where um uh it was a it was a smaller effort this was a much bigger effort and uh and it got us involved with the world in in a really fun really fun way um and I think when the book the book came out in 19 1983 that's how long it took took a long time and um both as a seminal book and object oriented language the structure of the book which um I really feel good about the quality of that the the fun doing the artwork oh yeah sure which was great fun bob Fel and I did the artwork you know I I realize now when you're a uh you want to be an artist but you'll never be an artist but it's your book and you get your you do what you want you do what you want um you could you get to do that that um when it came out I think it took a lot of people by surprise and I think one of the reasons why we managed to do it was that Xerox had built the new building um which has you know it's like a three layer building with pods and there are there were three of them and they were going to add a fourth and and they asked John Sly Brown's group to go to a different building they essentially were pushing him out and I went and looked to see where they were pushing him to and I thought oh this is a great building who wants to hang around in all that noise so I said can I go too and um and I was advised not to do that it was politically not good but it meant we had quiet we were left alone and um and we could get it done Plus in lunchtime we had a little band and we we didn't play very well but there was no one there you know to complain so we got to play music and um and we so we were able to get it done and of course that was life-changing for me um when we got it done um we had a language now that other people were going to use other people had opinions about you know eventually it went to standards work eventually because it was commercialized um and but it was a great time to say okay we've plateaued we've been trying to solve this problem by personal Computing we made a contribution that wasn't the problem we were trying to solve and um and we turned to ask questions about the interpersonal Computing and that was when I asked um could we bu when by this time I was a research laboratory manager and I asked could I build the rest of the lab up in Portland Oregon cuz by this time we knew all these people oh sure all around around who were already iMed in the culture um and so we built the very first 24-hour essentially Virtual Lab with video conferencing which um which spur the cscw work uh in collaborative systems which has still intrigued me still to this day I mean those problems aren't solved yet either type stuff but it was it was the transition and then um by 1986 we had the CIA is such an important customer Xerox was not going to do anything to commercialize they were they wanted to deploy we had done implementations on 68,000 based machines we had a 68,000 based plugin to Xerox personal computers um that the guys down in Dallas Development Center had done and um and they weren't going to service it and I just thought you can't do this you can't do this to a research group yeah right you have to transfer it or not so we asked um is somebody going to do something with this and if not here's a business proposal for a spin out now I'm going to make it sound very simple because it took 13 months of negotiation but um at that point we decided a small group of us decided to spin out a separate company and that's how Parkplace systems came about with the deal I mean we had a business plan where the CIA would be less than 10% of our business and we were always able to maintain that and nobody nobody but me ever had clearances so it met everybody's needs because the government wanted commercial off the shelf so it was perfect you know there wasn't a problem there and they went to we started oopsa in 1986 in the ACM you know I was President AC I was going to ask you about that you should talk to him about the ACM involvement at some point there yeah and um and so they the CIA would come to the trade show and show everything they were doing was not black which you know people felt pretty good about and this is how I learned never think about what you're going to do in terms of God what will happen if we fail failure is easy the problem is if you succeed what have you what have you brought to support it yes you well but you have a big deal you know we we built a large company around the world and a big community of companies around the world and that's a lot it's a lot to take on well I I mean some of the folks who did some of the original Unix work had some of the same issues because um they love to see their stuff get used but they didn't really want to be in the the uh game of supporting it yes okay and see I think I think that's not possible I think that products are successful when um when there's passion around the product when you've done something that you're interested in you care about and to to just say somebody else should do it um it may be good it may be bad but might not be what you want but I don't think that is the message you want to give to the commercial sector they want to know that the people who were the inventors cared about it and I think that we had plenty of competition other small talk systems other companies um but I think that uh the fact that we carried that aura of we were the we were the core team we weren't all there were plenty who still stayed at Park they you know who really were more researchers um but we were a core team of people who who they could trust the ideas and and when you're doing libraries and this was true in the Unix world too when you're doing libraries that people depend on um they have to believe in you to have oh yeah sure yeah yeah and um you know and and of course there were very few people from from the research team who joined up it's just that the Dallas Development Center guys moved to Palo Alto uh Alan schiffman came from schlum uh we had 25 people in the company before we had finished the negotiation for exit because the president zero said yes you can do this get started yes so so now had there been previous spin-offs or there were certainly things that in effect became spin-offs but not real I'm thinking postcript there was no previous spin-off and there was no subsequent but let me say that more clearly there were no previous or subsequent Venture back spin-offs previously there had been some joint uh Ventures 5050 Spectra Spectra physics uh was one there were several more out of the physics group um what you're thinking about was the formation of adobe but that wasn't a spin-off that was people who just departed yeah and they based their technology on technology they licensed from Evans and southernland so postcript comes from there and not from this AA it's my understanding um and um uh there was there was a Company formed to to make the mouse there was uh a Company formed to make the alos in fact I was um going through materials recently in found a nice letter from the man who headed up that company when years later saw my picture in Forbes um so there were lots of these companies but they weren't Xerox companies um when we were trying to spin out Xerox had an innovation board that you went to and you presented to they were responsible for saying oh you have an idea we we would know if there's anyone in the company if not we'll make a decision so that's how we got such a quick decision um and we negotiated for that time period kind of the cost of zerox so that translated into Equity that the Venture group had but um after us they The Venture The zerox Venture group essentially was solely funded from Xerox and they were told no more what whatever they made they can reinvest but they it wasn't they weren't going to do anymore they had um they had funded things like shart that Xerox then bought and that was kind of a trade between Apple and shoard I think 100% sure um after that there were a bunch of companies that you would say well those are spin outs so um is my understanding every one of them Xerox retained an 80% ownership in so um there was a whiteboarding company M there was a virtual rooms company that uh eventually I think mic oft bought um and there were some ones that didn't make it um I guess the Whiteboard company didn't make it either although it's a great idea and there are other companies that do it and uh but those were not what I would call Venture back the employees didn't have enough equity for this Valley to keep them interested no it wouldn't work so we actually left serox in um I know the exact date would be March 18th 198 8 it was the day we signed all the papers with everybody and it was also complicated because the Fuji Xerox in Japan had rights to any commercialization so they became our partner in Japan and uh the reason I know the dates is I know the date that Apple Sued hula Packard and Microsoft that was March 17th the St Patrick's Day and I had a board member old friend of yours Ben wbite who said had said to me Adele when we finally exit um I think it's important that we have an article in the Washington Post and I said but Ben those are always little pictures of little birds and stuff you know he said no I you should have your picture in there and uh and he got his wish because there was an article about the lawsuit and how Zer said it was just a very coincidental situation but he got his wish for his little articles very funny you know you never know pleas people you don't even know you never know yeah okay so all right well so that was certainly a shift to running a company talk about that experience because that's different than hanging out having a good time in a research lab yeah and with some hindsight it may have not been the best thing to have done I mean no I'm just teasing um so I had number of options in the early 80s um um I had been the editor and I gotten myself involved in ACM and I had been on the special interest group governing board and that came about because when I was at Stanford one of my Stanford colleagues had encouraged getting involved with ACM as an obligation so I started out more with the the special interest group on computer uses and education I went to a meeting the chairman of the Sig board um I met him he and he was local here in paloalto and he asked me for lunch and asked me if I'd come on the board and I said I bet you you don't have any women on your board and he said that would be correct and I said and you're asking me because you want a woman on your board and he said that would be correct and I said I'm going to say yes because you were honest and uh and it was great fun cuz I met a lot of people in different fields you got to learn more about all the computer science Specialties that you don't unless you go out you don't always get to touch all right yeah and um and Addison Wesley there was they a lot of them had written books with Addison Wesley and he they used to take them all out to dinner and and wine and dine so I'd be invited and I'd say you know I'm not one of your authors I don't have to come but then when we went and did the books I knew the I knew the Publishers and they had it in they were smart um in 82 I became the national secretary oh no so in 79 I became the editor-in-chief of computing surve and off of the Sig board because I went onto the Publications board so I learned a lot about computer science academic politics reconfirming um how much more fun it was at Park um there's just so much more to being a professor than teaching a class and doing your research and um and then I um did that till 82 became the national secretary when the president was David Brandon he had been the chairman of the Sig board and then I um became president at a time when ACM was having Financial issues where what they were budgeting to spend was an excess of the revenue coming in and for some reason they didn't understand that's easy just don't spend it but um that they needed to relook at their finances and it's funny cuz I was the second female president before me was Jean samon a decade before she coped with exactly the same problem she came in really to to worry about cleaning up and I don't know why um you know why other people didn't do it or it's coincidental right um but we had brought a new executive director in and we we did some organizational changes so I got some Vol I learned what happens when you have a lot of people working for you who you can't fire because they're volunteers right right what you really have to do is figure out how to engage them in good projects how to get rid of projects that really were not going anywhere um and um you know how to leverage that positive so I was getting some very good organizational learning learning um I'd had some other offers start a research center for one of the computer companies um and I felt like the book was just coming out I was president that was enough and and we and I had this new lab when we were going to build the Portland lab that was a handful you know I had kids at home that was a lot and um but I think that ending up in business was not something I gave an you know gave deep thought to it was like I knew we had something important that was that met the goal of empowering people that we didn't understand enough about what this did to empower people and we really needed to learn and the only way was to just get out there commercially and it was kind of nice cuz I was ACM president in down years was uh a bunch of the guys who were part of this implementation Glenn ker who who became vice president of engineering at Park Place but was a uh engineering manager at Park and uh and people from tectronics and people from other companies they had lunch one day working on the implementation and said we should start a conference and so Glenn came to me and said we want to start this conference and I said well we have a little problem one problem is the budget side CLE for conferences is gone this should be a s plan conference and the budget cycle is over another problem is that the that ACM doesn't really have money to spare so we can't lose money so I'd have to watch over you very tightly that you didn't you didn't lose any money he said well that would be okay how do we do that I said well instead of your grand scheme of having 1,200 people at this first conference how about we plan for 600 and um and then if it looks like it's going to be more we'll you'll increment we'll just run double budgets so they they agreed to do that and I said well the president has a little slush fund so I can do this as an ACM not a not a Sig conference as long as you agree that the next year it becomes a Sig conference if the sigs Sig plan and Sig soft wanted to take it do which of course they did because there were 1,200 it was and it you know it's now transitioning into a a new kind of conference but it's still running and still very popular and it's been a a great Forum because from the outset it was a great mixture of commercial and academic academic you know and a nice way to share um so the O experience because we were educating the commercial sector had a really important relationship to the academic because you had to change what was being taught um you had to provide trainers tutors you know into the companies um we were targeting Cobalt programmers cuz they were the right ones they understood the business yeah yeah yeah right and we had to convince the companies to we train them and that was it was actually pretty straightforward in this country but in Asia it was really an exercise um you know you know to do that I I remember giving lots of talks on that topic alone um so the conference was was good I actually ended up chairing the 1987 one I was I was past president and I wasn't doing much as past president um you know professional societies are a really critical part of the um computer industry whether it's i e computer Society or ACM whether it's standards work or these conferences these foreigns for communication um it's all the journals and I was lucky I got to taste all of that so it taught me some things but it didn't teach me how to deal with venture capitalist it didn't you know raising the money that was hard that was a whole new thing um I was fortunate to have a good Mentor in um uh gentleman in the Xerox Venture group who basically believed in what we were doing unfortunately after the we started the business and a year later he he died son of so I think for me that was a bit of a loss cuz um he was one of the few people I felt pretty U pretty able to talk through all the politics with cuz he was kind of fascinated with the whole thing anyways and um you know in the end people ask me well was it because you were a woman was it harder and I go no no I don't think so I think it's just as hard for the guys um but I think they laugh it off faster so you just have to realize that the this the ridiculous questions you sometimes get asked not always but sometimes get asked as in what kind of car do you drive and as you will know thank goodness I was driving a 8 cylinder black T-top Mustang at the time uh was the right answer because it was fast it was powerful and somehow other that was the psychology they were looking for I mean it was kind of funny or they'd ask what were the conversations you had at the dinner table and I said thanks to my father I know everything there is to know about the Teamsters Union from Management's perspective but it's not the same as what they were expecting you know I mean they just they were trying to figure out what you knew uh type stuff but um but it's hard work to have a company it's day in day out and it's it's a lot and I think I could have I had a little easier time of it in the in the uh 80s and 90s if I had done that but at the same time I learned an awful lot so so so talk some more then about how that how Parkplace progressed and what sort of customers you found and uh you know what challenges you had then because that that is a big shift right from from in a a research comfy research lab to to running a company yeah it was but but um as I listened to what I've told you about the story unfolding because I've not done this before um I realized that a lot of what I was doing towards the end or in the 80s was trying to tie our work more and more to Xerox and its business needs and and first and foremost that's what you have to do you have a product you're trying to sell it you need to understand your customer's business and be able to uh understand their problems and be able to explain how your problem solves their problem and um so it's going in that direction clearly and I and um Jim Davis who was the initial sales guy at son was a u is a friend of mine and he he um he had said something uh that really sort of changed my whole marketing aspect because what what I thought was powerful what I think is powerful about object technology is the extensibility the flexibility of change and the ability to predict what's affected by the change so the entire reuse model where you can essentially firewall and understand what has to be retested gives you some Assurance um and some predictability in making changes to large systems and Building Systems that can change whether they're for educational reasons or big Financial you know insurance companies and investment bankers banks on Wall Street a lot of our customers um manufacturing operations car companies Chrysler BMW Mercedes um regardless they all have that as an issue and um but what Jim said to me was that won't work and it's not working and I said why not he said their problem is they can't get the systems done in the first place so they're not worrying about maintenance they can't get to maintenance so we had a switch cuz it's a two-phase problem to Rapid development and and that really Builds on your libraries M as I watched in horror as our marketing people started counting the number of class definitions in our library and selling to quantity which turned out to matter but yeah yeah sure th thud Factor but if you just want quantity you could build your libraries with quantity that that wasn't the point you know but understandability sales yeah yeah but remember these are the years where people were just learning to do graphical interfaces and um so as you watch and see what people do we had two big issues the back end and the front end so you have this system now you need to make it easy to construct the front end and we had a good metaphor U good set of objects for doing that and so we turned to graphical programming graphical construction kits to create your graphics and that's when uh the product which was called object Works which I remember hating when I first heard it and realizing now that Doug Pollock who was the Marketing sales guy at the time was a genius I it's really a good name um but they called it visual works because it allowed you to create the and that Bo we took off because you made the front end easy the backend problem was database hookup in research we we worried about database but we worried more about um object objects finding objects um an object oriented database in fact Bob Flo worked a lot on that and um but we didn't try to commercialize that there were other companies that were doing commercial object Ori databases but if you're going to sell into Legacy Worlds the thing they put them most designed behind the thing that the aspect of their systems that is the most critical is the design of their sequel um tables and I know that from the last um decade of work that I've done which has mostly been dealing with exactly that problem and we were fortunate that we had a a vendor who sold the kit for hooking things up there were several but we hadn't done that work ourselves um there was some ugly fighting going on too you think you were in the kindergarten not even not even in college the fights between the structured programming methodologists and the objectoriented methodologists um I finally realized that the structured guys thought we'd be putting them out of business and that was one of the reasons for the unbelievable emotions terrible emotions that was one the other fight was especially in the government sector uh I had somebody from one of the um government contractors tell me I was awful I was rooting their business and I said let me see if I can characterize your business for you we were down in Florida we were in the um the behind the scenes at Disney World where there are conference sites and we were in the hallway and this guy says this to me and I said here's what I think your business is I think you pitch to the government a 4-year project with 400 people that you know that you'll be able to fund for 4 years and you underbid it and you have to get more money but they're four years in so they give you the fifth and the sixth that's your business he said that would be correct I said then I'm going to ruin your business and he came into the meeting arguing that you can't use an aror approach because it means you're reusing and if you're reusing um you're not meeting their requirement this is intelligence Community to compartmentalize we just the names of the objects were part of the secret oh boy and fortunately the Man In Charge uh one of the group Chiefs said well we're just not going to do that anymore or we're Alias it but we're going to reuse we can't afford this any longer yeah yeah um so I mean those are the kinds of things you learn about is you know you have a customer issue going on but um the analyst workstation was a very important applications spreadsheets and text editors that were being done um one of the W Street guys built a whole framework for in which you could design financial instruments um I know from those two cases alone because I used to go they're spending Millions between software and training and uh Consultants helping them build um I sure hope this is worth it to them and every one of them told me 10 minutes deployment and they got back 10 times you know that was part talk about learning you know Millions mean nothing when what you're playing with is is really a lot more you know what's at stake is a lot more and some of it's qualitative there was a conference on the west coast that Steve Jobs gave a talk at and um he was pitching object technology and reuse and it was funny because I had been behind the scenes excruciatingly painfully teaching the uh magazine guys like business week what what this what the good example examples were and what objects cuz I couldn't afford to H even though the article wasn't about us I could not afford to have it be wrong yeah right right and um so Steve got up and he says um well you wouldn't take an existing system like you wouldn't take your existing payroll system and rewrite it all that mean that makes no sense it's going forward with new things and he gave his usual good fun talk the next speaker was one of our customers from Chrysler and he got up and he said we are rewriting our payroll system and the reason inflexibility basically you can watch the Chrysler as probably one of many examples having a bad relationship with the unions because the Unions would make what on some perspective with perfectly reasonable requests in terms of compensation changes and chrys would want to say yes but they knew they couldn't do it cuz they couldn't implement it could yeah change they couldn't implement it so what they wanted was to be able to say yes to the unions by having a flexible extensible system it was one of the best examples I had ever heard and that's what I meant by finding out what your stuff is good for right let your customers tell you you know type stuff um so we were all learning so in a sense it was still a learning learning environment I think that's what sustained me you know through all that um after visual works then we took off enough four quarters of profitability and we went public um I'd hired somebody else to run the company he and I didn't get along very well um so I left oh then we merged with um with one of our competitors with digit talk and I could see the company was not was going in a direction that wasn't going to be fun for me um so it was time to leave so so how long were you how long was Park Place for you I think um I think I stayed on the board until 95 okay and uh um and it was only a couple years later that very quickly that they sold um you know for me I learned a lot about board structures and how complicated it is in a venture back board when they wear multiple hats they won't take actions um you know there were a lot of issues there and I've been fortunate I've brought that to other companies where I've been on the boards now and uh kind of learned a bit about the role of a board member and I don't like it when um other than the CEO there are inside people on the board I think that that's extra hat Venture guy's got his Partners as well as the company those are two hats I think that's complicated because you always have to figure out what are they worrying about what's what's going on so then then was next after that well then Mitsubishi which was one of our C customers um through Mitsubishi research well Mitsubishi in Japan but Mitsubishi research in uh in um Boston area um got interested in the virtual community problem in essentially one of the big outcomes of doing Park Place which which could have been which I think was a bit of an error on our part not to understand which is when you are in research or you're thinking about onesies the nature of the programming situation is clearly different than when you have a team and two people can do fine when you get to three then you have code management problems and you have um you just have coordination problems um and that's true in software um there was a there were good Solutions in the small talk world done by another company Envy was an example um and we were doing our own in-house work funded by some of our customers because the Envy approach was one particular style and we had some other ideas um but but if you extrapolate from that and look at it more broadly that particular problem which is it doesn't matter how clever your language is it doesn't matter how what your libraries are like it doesn't matter whether your visual construction tools are like in the end there's going to be a team they're going to need to collaborate they need to have a shared Vision I had written a book with done some studies and written a book with um Kenny rubben on specifically this problem we got the book right but we got it in the wrong order in terms of what you do but that's part of the learning and um and and so it was like we wanted to understand well it's hard enough when they're all in the same building what happens when they're in different cities and it's very costly and we had learned a bit of the xerx experience that you really can tie people together in multiple cities in a way that felt fairly close um and and have a sense of Team there were some tricks to it but you could do it so um Mitsubishi was more about manufacturing engineering development they were interested in the problem so they offered to fund I think we got like $4 million from them to do a multi-year research project and so we actually built one of the uh designed and built one of the very early online project management um a little bit too researchy a little too clever you know from what um what was ultimately commercialized um but when we finish it I said I can't do this again because there isn't a waiting customer it's not a pull Market it's a push like it was for object technology it's too much marketing we're too early again and I just didn't want to um to make that into a company and I had at the same time concluded that the primary interests in these kinds of systems were going to be um if it wasn't just lists of things that were being checked off but but serious collaboration going to work best in Worlds where there's um compliance obligations so um the reason is that you're asking people today to spend time almost anally logging interacting I mean obviously you can use the tricks we have now everyone does with discussions they're not online they're online discussion forms but you get them email they get archived and that facilitates it because because our generation is used to email you know the current generation they Twitter so even it wouldn't work even for them but um and it's amazing they could say so little in such short they can say so much in such a little bit of space but um I I um I just didn't want to push that up and the compliance systems were more Waste Management in Pharmaceuticals and I had met uh somebody in the pharmaceutical who started teaching me about it so I've actually for the last decade been working with that same person um and ended up uh working with a private Equity Fund in drug Development building some of the um initial systems learning it's like a new career learning all about how drugs are developed and that and I'm enjoying that cool uh anything we haven't covered that should have been because you've done a lot of different stuff um when well you know I suppose if you were Alan Kay sitting there you would be shaking your finger and said what happened to your interest in education um and um so I I've tried a couple things I got involved with a company that was doing mostly CDs um very high quality and um and it didn't make it it was um it was like too late too late for CDs and too early for the online or something like that um and but the same but the um Executives there started got funded for and started a new company um to do online and I understood that what they were trying to do was build community amongst teachers and I was interested in that so um I was their initial CTO development manager and ended up being there for four years um building becoming a python programmer so progr okay that was the python that was the and and it's just as lovely you know I was really very happy with the system um I had you have to get your head around it but once you do um you know you you can build a lot fast and I swear it was we we had very little time counted months less than a year to build an authoring environment using XML um which got pre-processed to generate the HTML I use small talk for that and then uh uh a learning deployment system and um spent a lot of time mostly in Texas and the schools down there and um but in the end what we didn't really do teacher Community the politics I kept being told the the politics don't allow it there were a lot of those reasons and I don't I'm not convinced the New York Times has a new project in this area and they seem to be going after what I'd hope for now number of years have passed since um but we ended up doing more um el ronic books online and I think they they're effective as classroom aids to the teachers but they're really not for the kids and they're not for the teachers to help one another um so after four years um it was stable enough I left because it was they needed to rebuild everything um so so I moved on from that um and then you know I started thinking about what else would you do and how would you do it you know and I looked at the uh one laptop per child activities and I talked to Allan but um I haven't found the right thing in education to go back to I've talked with a number of people where the problem I think I've mentioned to you before is I can't get my head around a curriculum that says you're you're a kindergartener what should you do with Computing that would lead you by high school to be an able to use computers effectively as a thinking partner the way we know about how to how to um how to order our our reading and our math introductions um I've spent some time on it but I I don't think I have a a good solution yet I'd like to because I have grandkids and I'd like to get I'd like to get them started but um haven't haven't figured that out yet so I most sit on Skype with my six-year-old granddaughter and I give her word problems rather than just you know I give her 3 plus two um but it's more fun to just say to give her candy that and defy the candy amongst her friends and that she likes better so fun okay anything else no no I think that's it okay
