This is the eleventh entry in the O’Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. Paul Everitt is a co-founder of the Zope Corporation, executive director of the Plone Foundation, and was CEO of Digital Creations, the company that employed a lot of the Python core team during the early part of this decade. He keynoted at EuroOSCON this year, and was hilarious.
Paul Everitt’s Story
I had a very fortunate boyhood, back in the pleistocene era. I was
in a school program that involved computers in the late 70’s. I
remember working on a VAX connected to the university, 200 miles
away. There was this weird space dilation — if you picked up the
VAX phone handset, and called the office handset 1 yard away, it was
a long-distance call. I was around 11 at the time and thought that
was the coolest thing, next to the Wampus teletype game we played.
We also had TRS-80’s and Commodore PETs — remember those glyphs on
the facing side of the keys?
I had some friends with computers during the 1980 time frame, and I
wound up getting an Atari 800 for Christmas. No, not the membrane
keyboard — that was the 400. Still, I gravitated towards my older
brother’s TI/99A, and for spent a great deal of time anti-socially
involved in a flowchart program. Ahh, BASIC. It was all do-able, if
you just worked hard enough. No real genius necessary — early signs
of my long-term philosophy. I experienced my first total-obsession
during a Christmas, working all night, ignoring relatives, etc. And
I finished it — and no soul in a 100 mile radius could appreciate it.
I also learned to type fairly early, in junior high school. I tried
out for the chorus, because, well, girls were in chorus. But my
voice wasn’t. Alas, me and my voice relocated to typing, where I
learned to type on a manual typewriter. Ha!! Take that, all you girl-
landing singers, I can type the lights out of a stadium now. Ain’t-cha jealous.
Then I went away from computers, not to return until college. I was
on a Navy scholarship, on the way to flight school, and enrolled in
computer engineering. I failed out, not just badly, but fabulously.
Bad enough that I couldn’t get kicked out of the engineering
department — not even philosophy would take me. So I got a
materials engineering degree. But I still did my brand of low-talent
computing. I got a job teaching the faculty how to use WordPerfect
and friends. After seeing the horror of Fortran, I even convinced a
professor to let me create a course. I taught other students how to
use PC programs for mathematics, including making tests and giving
grades. Hard work.
Finally, and joyfully, and stupidly, I did my senior project on
drawing 3-d state diagrams for 3-part compunds using AutoCAD’s
AutoLISP. I had never seen LISP — how hard could it be, right?
When we learned materials, the professor would take 3 pieces of
different-colored chalk and try to give a perspective drawing on the
chalkboard. They’d then say: “Imagine we vary the composition” and
proceed to redraw a diagram. Bleh!
I tried to computerize this with AutoCAD. My roommate (and later,
Zope co-founder Rob Page) had an 8 Mhz 80286. But no math co-
processor, so no AutoCAD. Hah, no problem! We installed a software
math emulator. You can’t imagine how slow that was.
Then I went away to flight school. But didn’t — my eyes went out on
me in transit. Rob and I, after joking about it for years, started a
business together. I lived in what was technically the garage. My
first open source claim to hilarity is that I taught myself Python in
1993 when I visited my (later) wife in France, using an enormous 286
laptop. Geez, she shoulda seen the handwriting on the wall.
Perhaps my best experience in computers was failing out of computer
engineering. I learned that my role in the drama isn’t to be
brilliant. Instead, I play other roles. First, by hiring and paying
brilliant people and now working with them in community endeavors.
I’m a mediocre programmer, nee, a Mediocre Programmer. I know my
place in the pack.
What’s next for me in computing? Perhaps I’ll learn more about being
a bon-ah-fide developer. More likely, I’ll think more about how to
glue people together into a team, joined by joy, organized for
effectiveness. I find this non-finite part of open source computing
to be fascinating.