Tech Pioneer Connections

Commenters share personal anecdotes about working with, knowing, or having family ties to historical figures and projects from early computing eras, including Xerox PARC, Apple, and Silicon Valley startups.

📉 Falling 0.4x Career & Jobs
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#5675
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Keywords

NY CPU US ARM M1 DMR CEO AMD UCLA AI worked bell labs labs bell parc guy intel engineer xerox sysadmin

Sample Comments

memetomancer Jan 23, 2023 View on HN

Nice to see it! I had a pretty big hand in making these suckers, worked at New World Computing during that era...I'm thinking I'd better not elaborate on the particulars or give out any personally identifying information, but maybe I'll pop into their discord and make myself vaguely available (if I could even be of any help).

kilroy123 Jun 19, 2016 View on HN

My uncle worked at PARC when this was being made. I probably wouldn't of gone into tech, if it weren't for him.This makes me want to message him and ask him about his time there.

hnaa May 14, 2020 View on HN

Hey this is a former coworker of yours from GU back in the day. Nice post! Hope you're doing well and congrats on the IIe. I grew up coding on one of these as well. :)

fsckboy Jun 5, 2023 View on HN

it was a loooong time ago when the CEO was one of the original coders

kilroy123 Feb 21, 2020 View on HN

My uncle is one of those people who worked at Xerox Parc during that same era. (I'm sure he would know this person you're speaking of.)He too is _very_ humble and reserved about the whole thing.

tayo42 Jun 15, 2023 View on HN

What kind of work were you doing that's required that? Like domain of programing? Sounds interesting>that kept showing us that the clever thing we did, was not so clever.I had the same experience talking with some people network people from Intel. Was pretty funny. To any Intel lurkers here, nice job! Lol

kilroy123 Dec 25, 2022 View on HN

My uncle worked at Xerox PARC and worked directly with Alan Kay (still friends to this day).He led the design group. I have no idea if he dropped acid during his time working there but I sure hope so!

whyenot Jun 8, 2011 View on HN

When Steve Jobs was 13, he called up Bob Hewlitt to ask for some spare parts for a frequency counter he was working on. He worked at HP, was a technician at Atari, and attended the Homebrew Computer Club. He does know about electronics, and it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to me that he might actually know a thing or two about programming as well.

jacquesm Jul 13, 2010 View on HN

Yep, it's a true story.The guy used the software to found DMR, one of the largest IPSPs of the time. Afterwards they contracted me for 3 months to modify the system to their liking, so I got to visit Minot in the middle of the winter, to work together with their programmers. Interesting times.Turns out he knew me indirectly because another customer of mine was a friend of his, but I didn't know that at the time, to me he was a stranger.

hypervisorxxx Apr 5, 2021 View on HN

No- someone who worked at a semiconductor startup