Thu

Nov 24
2005

Nat Torkington

Nat Torkington

Burn In 10: Paul Everitt

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.


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