I worked for Larry Tesler back in the 90s. He's always remained one of my favorite people for his combination of intelligence, creativity, realpolitik, and a deep and genuine desire to make computers and the world a lot better.

 

Larry was VP of Advanced Products at Apple when I was on the Newton team. I worked on a prototype, large-format version of the Newton called Bauhaus, which used an object-oriented dynamic language derived from Lisp (Scheme) called Dylan. Dylan was a great language, and Bauhaus was one of the coolest pieces of software I ever worked on. I did the user interface and interactive graphics layers.

 

At this time, Larry was of course a full-time manager, but he did have his five-year sabbatical coming up. Me and three other folks (Jim Grandy, Yu-Ying Chow, and Mikel Evins) were given four months to prove that Dylan was performant enough to deliver a compact and compelling user experience on the larger Newton. (we did) After the first few months, Larry decided to spend his sabbatical writing code with us. I frequently slept in the office over that frantic, beautiful summer, literally waking up, stumbling over to my Mac, and dropping right back into the code I had left the previous night. It was a great time, and we did some great things - for another conversation.

 

So I'm reading What the Dormouse Said, (see previous) and realizing that Larry was not just the brilliant manager I had known, but had spent his own grungy all-nighters in his youth inventing things like, y'know, pop-up menus. The event loop. Bit blitted graphics. Icons. The modeless user interface. Sigh. Newton, malformed, beautiful mutant that it was, was part of a history for him that went back to the first foundations of the modern user interface. I kind of knew - but I never quite ... realized.

 

Do we ever realize how truly cool people are while we're still with them, or is it always just fond remembering?

 

UPDATE: Yes, Larry Tesler is alive and kicking. We just work in different places now :)