What happened to the 11 employees of Microsoft in the 1978 photo

http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/microsoft.asp

175 40 16 years ago

unwind• 16 years ago

It's just brilliant that Bob Greenberg allegedly now develops software for golf courses. I love http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism. :)

Yrlec• 16 years ago

Just like China's richest man Li Ka-shing.

cpr2• 16 years ago

Bob was my best buddy freshman year. He's a great fellow, though I've lost track of him lately.

He left Microsoft because he was never able to break into the tight "inner circle" of Gates, Ballmer and Allen, even though he was classmates of all of them.

I guess I shoulda taken his advice and joined MS as #8 way back when... ;-)

didip• 16 years ago

Why you decided not to? There were plenty of opportunity to work on programming languages back in those MS days, no?

mbyrne• 16 years ago

You mean "nominative determinism" in like, He was good at BILLing people to get money and setting up GATES to sharing of software, and a STEVE is a crown wearer who created JOBS for the creative class? Nope, nothing there...

kmfrk• 16 years ago

Might want to revise the Paul Allen entry.

iuytryuik• 16 years ago

It does seem to be an "official MSFT" account.

Although from interviews I've read with Allen his view seems to be - I got lots of money, I'm enjoying writing cool code and I have a yacht the size of a small country - who cares about the past.

guelo2• 16 years ago

Wow, seems like Gates treated them like crap and most of them left the company within a few years.

watmough• 16 years ago

You don't get rich by giving money away.

sriramk• 16 years ago

Actually, apart from the issue with Marla Wood, the article says that everyone else left in the mid-80s or 90s, ranging from 5-10/15 years after the photo was taken. That's a very decent stint in any company.

guelo2• 16 years ago

I counted 8 people that left disenchanted, tired or in a dispute. 6 were gone by 1983.

loewenskind• 16 years ago

>That's a very decent stint in any company.

It would be today, but back then?

jdp23• 16 years ago

Marc McDonald stayed for quite a while after he was reacquired ... he might still be there.

jimbokun2• 16 years ago

Seems like there's an important lesson in here:

"As Bill Gates was attempting to correct this egregious error, he was introduced to a black-haired gnome by the name of Gordon Letwin, who proceeded to chew him out in front of a group of about fifteen people. Letwin, the author of Heath's BASIC, felt his turf was being violated and by the purveyor of an inferior product to boot. Bill Gates nonetheless prevailed, selling Heath his BASIC and FORTRAN for H-DOS, a proprietary operating system Letwin had developed for Heath. But Letwin had instinctively understood how to win the favor of William Henry Gates: Stand up to the guy. By the end of the year Gordon Letwin would come to work for Microsoft and begin work on a BASIC compiler."

I read a similar anecdote about Steve Jobs at Next. He was interviewing candidates for a finance position, I think, and would basically belittle their previous experience and question their competence. The first guy who told Steve off to his face was the guy he hired.

martincmartin• 16 years ago

I'm glad I'm striving for the happiest life, rather than the most money. I wouldn't like working for that sort of employer.

I suppose I measure success differently than many people here.

josh33• 16 years ago

Striving for money and happiness are both selfish. Striving for the happiness of others because your own cup runneth over is true success. Providing people with jobs is a form of charity just like going to the backwoods of Africa and building schools is charity.

detst• 16 years ago

I can appreciate that you don't want to work for an asshole but I think a non-asshole employer can realize the effectiveness of this technique to find a certain kind of employee for a certain kind of position.

Silhouette• 16 years ago

> I'm glad I'm striving for the happiest life, rather than the most money.

I've found so far that, at least in my professional career, one of these often implies the other. It just happens that the implication is the "wrong" way around in my case. :-)

For example, moving to jobs with better working conditions and/or more interesting projects, leaving full-time work for the freedom of independent contracting, and ultimately forming my own company to build things that I hope others will enjoy or benefit from, are all moves I've made primarily for reasons other than money, but all tend to increase the money coming in as well.

I suppose I prefer to do worthwhile things with my working hours, but worthwhile things by their nature also tend to be better rewarded in a business environment.

(Edit: As a curious aside, my total amount of money coming in has actually decreased quite significantly in the past few years since I left full-time employment, but that is because while I have been earning higher rates per hour, I can now choose to spend fewer hours on the everyday pays-the-bills stuff in order to invest time in the newer ideas with better long-term potential for interesting work and/or high profitability. It had not even occurred to me before writing this post, but at some point I have stopped judging my financial position by the bottom line, and started judging it by the rate of income from different endeavours multiplied by the time I expect to spend on each of them in the future, with a footnote that the things I am doing right now still need to be above the threshold for paying the bills etc.)

T_S_• 16 years ago

The title of this made me think it was the subject of the next Dan Brown novel.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

For reference, the $120 in backpay that Bill Gates was screaming about in 1980 is about the equivalent of $317.56 in 2010 dollars.

http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

RodgerTheGreat• 16 years ago

Well, he was screaming about getting nailed for shortchanging his workers and having it in his public records. I agree that it's pretty strange he'd run that risk with only $300 to gain in the first place.

spoon16• 16 years ago

How much if it were Microsoft stock?

ck2• 16 years ago

I love how they recreated the photo 30 years later, wow!

petsos• 16 years ago

It is a shame the didn't match their exact positions though.

VB6_Forever• 16 years ago

I wonder if BG paid Marla Woods' expenses for the reunion photo.

fourk• 16 years ago

Is it just me, or is the inability to select or deselect text on the page kind of obnoxious?

jimbokun2• 16 years ago

I had to "view source" to post a quote in this thread.

k3dz• 16 years ago

or disable javascript in browser

lynx44• 16 years ago

From this picture, I'd actually feel quite good about the team in terms of their technical competency. I get a positive vibe from them in terms of that.

I would worry about their business acumen, however. This team does not seem to have an immediate business type presence.

steven• 16 years ago

I was there for the 30-year reunion, where my photographer recreated the original shot. (And also, despite my pleas that people wanted it as originally posed, did a bizarre setup that confused people, too.) Then I did a group interview. The tone was very upbeat and warm, though clearly there were some underlying issues. But I think that the group was simply happy to look back at an exciting time. We were all sad that Bob Wallace was missing (I knew him and really like him--he was at the first Hacker Conference!) There was a lot of laughter and good natured fun-poking. And at the time Miriam Lubow, the office manager (den mother) of the group, knew she had cancer, but had come to terms with it, and was loving the reunion. She died not long afterward. For me, it was an amazing experience to moderate the group discussion of these people coming together 30 years after they worked at an obscure startup, and were now on the campus of an historically huge and powerful corporation they helped launch.

And yes, I am under the impression that MS paid expenses for this reunion. (But I didn't confirm that explicity.)

jeffbarr• 16 years ago

Every time I see the original picture my heart skips a beat.

I worked with Bob Wallace before he worked at Microsoft. In his too-short life, Bob did a lot of amazing things. In addition to his graduate work at the University of Washington, he was the first editor of the Northwest Computer Club's newsletter.

He was the publications manager for Seattle's Retail Computer Store (ca 1978). He conceived of the portable computer and actually built one using a motherboard and video card from The Digital Group. When asked to write some accounting software in Altair Basic, he refused. And then went on to write a preprocessor that let him use long variable names and better control structures. And wrote the accounting software in that, instead.

Bob worked on Microsoft's first Pascal compiler (I wasn't there and have no idea what else he did).

After leaving Microsoft he founded QuickSoft, invented the concept of shareware, and made a comfortable living off of contributions from users of his text editor / word processor.

What happened to the 11 employees of Microsoft in the 1978 photo

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