

Of course comparing what this has achieved (GMail) versus what Google has bought in (Earth, Android and everything else) isn't a great advertisement for formalised slacking off.Ī working group in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has proposed a series of steps to "decolonize" the Informatics curriculum, which includes trying "to avoid using predominantly Western names such as Alice/Bob (as is common in the computer security literature)." This was the thinking behind Google's early decision to allow engineers to work on their own projects, unsupervised, for 20 per cent of the time. So important things happen by accident, if you can allow the engineers a bit of slack. Microsoft didn't miss the strategic significance.
#Readme editor for mac + ming windows#
The intern's work allowed Windows to break the memory barrier and take on a few aspects of a real operating system. Microsoft's focus was on making IBM's OS/2 work, as very junior partner, and persuade a sceptical IT industry that they needed it. Windows™ was then a joke, absorbing precious memory resources and with no developer mindshare and little use other than as a run time for Excel and Pagemaker. In 1987, a summer intern at Microsoft found a way of running the company's GUI-run time for MS-DOS in extended mode.

There is actually a spooky parallel with Microsoft. It's a lovely story, and shows how an enterprising lone engineer can create something of huge importance, away from the deadlines and bureaucracy of the main job. Finally it acquired a couple of more engineers early in 2002 and serious staffing late that year. For 18 months it remained a one-man project, tolerated rather than encouraged, and in that time according to Scheinberg, only six people within Apple knew about it. Kullmann had began the project in his own time in 2000, something he was able to do because he had been given special dispensation to work from home. Three years after Apple acquired NeXT there was no Intel port.
