Doug was our Einstein, but he largely punched out in the mid-70's, right as the PC and the commercial software industry took off. Later, I met him in 1998 and by that point he had no interest in talking about anything. He had any number of opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc. beyond what he did. That he didn't was a choice on his part, unfortunate for our industry, and not everyone else's fault like Tom seems to think.
It's hard to fully trust anyone's impressions of anyone, particularly if they're confident about it. (I don't particularly trust even my own. :)
Perhaps he sat down with you and said, "I have no interest in talking about anything. I have many opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc; but I simply choose not to, because... it bores me and that's how I roll now." Ok, then your reasoning is impeccable. (Or maybe you offered him carte blanche and he turned you down?) But from this one post, it's unclear you got into his head, or that he felt comfortable engaging with you.
I think there's an undercurrent that might be too difficult for Doug to have expressed openly. The thing that must be understood is the idea that "The Demo" was the culmination, the pinnacle, of years of hard work. Visionary work. Work that was not just hard on its own (imagine writing that software without the modern languages and tooling we have today, let alone trying to get it to run on such primitive devices) but which was also likely a very aggravating trial in terms of interactions with others and with the bureaucracies he had to face.
Unfortunately for Doug instead of "The Demo" being the end of such struggles and the opening of a door to the payoff for his work it was the beginning of an even larger struggle. Indeed, if anything it was even the preparation prior to that beginning. And the industry was not in the mood to listen at the time, generally speaking.
Sure he could have found other work, but most folks only have so much fruitless struggle in them, and he might have been at the end of his capacity, and sought instead a more comfortable and easy life, letting his legacy bear fruit on its own as it would or not.
It did bear fruit, of course, though it's telling that even when a major Fortune 500 company, Xerox, attempted to build something revolutionary with a lot of inspiration from his work, the Alto, it still missed the mark, partly because the company was clueless and not very committed to the idea. And that was a mere 5 years later. It took several additional false starts and a decade of additional work for many of those ideas to actually become practical and commercially viable (in, for example, the Apple Macintosh).
It also required the inception and maturation of an entire new industry, not just the microcomputer industry but "startup culture" and the silicon valley way of doing business, to create the sort of environment where revolutionary ideas such as Doug's could find willing listeners and folks willing to take such ideas to heart in the making of new types of computing systems.
In a not insignificant way Doug was responsible for the blooming of silicon valley and of startup culture itself even though his contributions came too early for him to receive an easy payoff. The irony, of course, is that today a "demo" similar to Doug's in today's world is often a quick route to substantial funding or even acquisition. There are lots of tech startups out there today who have far less substance, both in terms of functionality and man-hours, behind their business than went into "The Demo" and are swimming in tens of millions of dollars of VC funding.
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Doug was our Einstein, but he largely punched out in the mid-70's, right as the PC and the commercial software industry took off. Later, I met him in 1998 and by that point he had no interest in talking about anything. He had any number of opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc. beyond what he did. That he didn't was a choice on his part, unfortunate for our industry, and not everyone else's fault like Tom seems to think.
It's hard to fully trust anyone's impressions of anyone, particularly if they're confident about it. (I don't particularly trust even my own. :)
Perhaps he sat down with you and said, "I have no interest in talking about anything. I have many opportunities to build products, start companies, get research funding, etc; but I simply choose not to, because... it bores me and that's how I roll now." Ok, then your reasoning is impeccable. (Or maybe you offered him carte blanche and he turned you down?) But from this one post, it's unclear you got into his head, or that he felt comfortable engaging with you.
I think there's an undercurrent that might be too difficult for Doug to have expressed openly. The thing that must be understood is the idea that "The Demo" was the culmination, the pinnacle, of years of hard work. Visionary work. Work that was not just hard on its own (imagine writing that software without the modern languages and tooling we have today, let alone trying to get it to run on such primitive devices) but which was also likely a very aggravating trial in terms of interactions with others and with the bureaucracies he had to face.
Unfortunately for Doug instead of "The Demo" being the end of such struggles and the opening of a door to the payoff for his work it was the beginning of an even larger struggle. Indeed, if anything it was even the preparation prior to that beginning. And the industry was not in the mood to listen at the time, generally speaking.
Sure he could have found other work, but most folks only have so much fruitless struggle in them, and he might have been at the end of his capacity, and sought instead a more comfortable and easy life, letting his legacy bear fruit on its own as it would or not.
It did bear fruit, of course, though it's telling that even when a major Fortune 500 company, Xerox, attempted to build something revolutionary with a lot of inspiration from his work, the Alto, it still missed the mark, partly because the company was clueless and not very committed to the idea. And that was a mere 5 years later. It took several additional false starts and a decade of additional work for many of those ideas to actually become practical and commercially viable (in, for example, the Apple Macintosh).
It also required the inception and maturation of an entire new industry, not just the microcomputer industry but "startup culture" and the silicon valley way of doing business, to create the sort of environment where revolutionary ideas such as Doug's could find willing listeners and folks willing to take such ideas to heart in the making of new types of computing systems.
In a not insignificant way Doug was responsible for the blooming of silicon valley and of startup culture itself even though his contributions came too early for him to receive an easy payoff. The irony, of course, is that today a "demo" similar to Doug's in today's world is often a quick route to substantial funding or even acquisition. There are lots of tech startups out there today who have far less substance, both in terms of functionality and man-hours, behind their business than went into "The Demo" and are swimming in tens of millions of dollars of VC funding.