Scott,
The longest stream of consciousness diatribe ever to be seen here… announcing :
Copious ramblings by me brought about by your T-Shirt comments herein :
Incidentally, most foreign territories for software purchases have to go through thuggish regional distributors that buy and "own" the territory rights. Making product fulfillment for things like T-Shirts to Australia problematic. Sometimes territories are individual countries in my experience : france, denmark, Iceland, etc. Small “localizers” OWN the rights for sales, many refused to drop prices.
About the toaster :
Because money was pouring in bushels every week, at the Berkeley Systems office they treated "The Toaster" with utmost reverence. The main conference room had around it a large collection of expensive gleaming toasters.
It was not the only shrine room though, in the 200+ person company (might have been 180 but close enough). The other shrine was a darkened cubicle reserved for "Da Mouse"
Da Mouse was Mickey Mouse, whom out of reverence you never dare invoke the name aloud other than saying 'Da Mouse". There was incense and a black velvet picture of Da Mouse i remember. It was like a hindu shrine. I think they lit a candle on final builds before shipping. They should have been making duplicates of the damned source code. Like 3 other companies I know, fools there sometimes forget to preserve a copy of the final source and tools used to make a commercial release requiring binary hacking to make mods in the future.
One time Berkeley Systems got in trouble over Da Mouse. A prototype version had Da Mouse hold a hoop and jump through it himself while holding it. Disney quality and standards had us remove it stating " Mickey shall never perform circus acts "
They also gave us all the merchandising allowed expressions in the expression books. Pete the Dragon cannot EVER have a mean face or EVER get angry for example.
One nonlegal thing was put in one screen saver as an "easter egg" and had to be removed. In The Simpsons screen saver Itchy and Scratchy had the cat get the mouse on a particular day of the year (april 1?) and that is very very forbidden. The mouse ALWAYS has to win in the Simpsons universe.
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) from Star Trek had to approve himself in all merchandising as per his own contract. So spock had to review himself in the screen saver, marching profile with jackboots on like a goosestepping nazi. But that was OK with him. He cared more about his face I guess even though so few pixels were available.
Like you, I liked the Disney one too. The music was charming, and it really was refreshing. Annoyingly, the sound music driver that played the music could have been better in my opinion. It was Halestorm's SoundMusicSys a MIDI driven software sample-playback synthesizer developed by Steve Hales and Jim Nitchals. Halestorm sucked in my opinion because I had written a better one that I never hipped. His did not ue different samples for 32nd notes and 64th notes so a flute, for example, would be all attack. The bug was that his engine used MIDI on and off events, like QuickTime does, and had no concept of note duration even though the data was recorded ahead of time. The compositions were amazing. Disney wrote it but Halestorm had to bring it to life with about 8 instruments or so at a time. I think Peter Drescher might have worked on some compositions.
Halestorm was superior to Apples (much later) General Midi player because Apples stopped playing if applications got no CPU time, but Halestorm was interrupt driven and played music even while in T/MON debugger I think I recall (if T/Mon default was set to allow drivers to run while debugging, such as network, etc).
The only After Dark tshirt I think I might have had was a After Dark 'Bad Dog' with a dog pissing yellow piss on some object (a trash can?). Back in the 80s and 90s developer teams at huge companies made tshirts to feel good. Apple had countless ones, especially groups at apple that never shipped a single useful product that lived more than 2 years, such as Apples entire "Advanced Technology Group"
Apple only allowed about eight 3rd party products to ship on CDs provided with a particular mac (8500?) and one of the three was After Dark 3. And my game was indeed the star highlight (You Bet your Head, the early precursor to You don’t Know Jack).
After Dark 3 was the most popular of their revenue I think, and I was glad to have worked on that version. Though it was a fiasco due to mismanagement of engineering. They wanted to ship in about 5 months (dec 15th) and I said they could never make that deadline and my calculations showed 6 months maybe 7 with super gods rock star coder gurus.
They were enraged at me. I insisted that they would never ship by December.
I held my ground in the engineering argument. They said “failure was not an option”. I told them they did not know engineering well. And I knew what resources they had to use, so I gave them my 2 weeks written notice to quit.
Berkeley Systems never shipped After Dark v3 in 5 months. or 18 months.
They never shipped that December nor even shipped the FOLLOWING DECEMBER !!
I was of course, correct. They shipped after two decembers came and went. And the delivery medium (a pair of floppy disks) was comical, in a world of CD-ROMS. They chopped content out of the content-rich screensavers to get it to fit on floppies.
The reason they never got it to ship was because they lost all their best engineers, most of whom quit because of visible brain drain. (Basically they had super star high paid coders, and had low paid novice students from the university, and no engineers in between). The problem was "everyones voice counted" and in meetings everything was a democracy.
Actually it was an Idiocracy.
One vote they took was , I KID YOU NOT, to rename every filename from 31 characters or so to 8 character filenames as corporate policy even though windows and the compiler and debuggers had no problem with filenames larger than 8 characters on floppy nor hard drive.
The 8 character vote won. Even though 8 character filenames all piled up on the rootlevel of a C: driver on a shared PC is as close to an Abomination from Hell as one could fathom. A true travesty of all that is acceptable or sane. I proclaimed aloud at the meeting that I had not used 8 character filenames on a Macintosh in my life and on windows rarely ever created them. I told everyone there that I would NEVER start creating 8 character filenames for source code. Some chuckled and muttered "oh yes you will" and I smirked back "Oh no I won't, you will see".
... and of course, after working day and night for my 2 weeks notice (and finishing my project), I got the hell out of that Idiocracy before ever having to create a 8 character filename.
After I quit EVERY good engineer quit one by one. One stayed behind a while collecting the name badges in a small grim collection. My name badge was first in the collection. 8 other big league coders name badges followed mine. Many gave a reason of quitting as "I am quitting because quit.", and that became a running gag of sorts. Every engineer that quit one by one said as one reason that they quit "because quit" after first listing the other engineers names.
Amusingly, a HR person and two others gave exit interviews to get you to say WHY you were quitting and I refused to say one word. I kept repeating "no reason" and it infuriated them all and saddened my mentor and boss (a truly great man). (My boss also did not know why I was quitting. He also did not know that I was the aggitant source of a hilarious flame-war blog he read everyday on the internet (the famed Linda Kaplan flamewar), something I started before meeting him) But Berkeley Ssyetms knew my quitting was not pay.
Pay there was good. Pay at all silicon valley booming companies is great for star engineers.
Berkeley Systems gave a 20 or 25,000 dollar bonus to a mid level (low level) product manager. I saw it personally. (he orchestrated shipping the MS-DOS (not windows) version of After Dark on time. Typical yearly silicon valley bonuses were 5 to 10 thousand dollars.
I never told them why I quit and the ripple effect of the rest quitting quickly sunk Berkeley Systems.
The project I worked on immediately after quitting was successful in its own right and a few months later my next product was featured in a long article as front page news in a major newspaper, as the main topic. (it was digital puppetry animation software that moved the mouths of the characters as the actors spoke, and had fancy backgrounds)
Every company I quit goes out of business less than 2 years (sometimes 1.5) after I quit. I think the list of dead companies is endless. I am not indispensable, but when I quit, others quit too. I joke about that fact at companies and they say "then you had better not quit". And of course... eventually I quit and they go out of business for a variety of reasons. Even the founding engineers soon quit !
Mercifully, I tend to work as a contractor, not an employee. Most contractors cost too much to own as employees permanently.
Speaking of quitting, the last and final product left in the dead company of Berkeley Systems was You Don’t Know Jack. (not kidding). How amusing and ironic.
Oh…. I never told anyone in the world why I quit. EVER. The reason is quite amusing. I am telling you all now here for the first time over 14 years later. The reason the company imploded (all because I quit) is :
I quit because my printed and signed employment offer letter with Berkeley Systems was not being honored, nor would they. In it, I negotiated a fully paid company parking spot. They said they would pay me DOUBLE to pay it myself each month (a building next door). I refused. I am a man of my word. They are not.
I quit one company over the time I was allowed to start work even though I was not “officially” being asked to come in earlier, even though I worked more hours per day every day than anyone in the firm. (It was because I never left for lunch hour like other engineers and to buy tacos at taco bell I had to start work at 10:36 am every day). That company refused to believe that was the sole reason I was quitting and quitting cost them a lot of money. (sometimes 2 thousand a day in fees to me) as I “went contractor” on them. But that was not the plan. I did not quit to milk them.
Yes… I am a Prima Donna. But that company with the taco story made 4 million dollars a year in at least one year from one of my products (that I wrote every single line of).
Some other products of mine have sold 750,000 paid licensed physical copies. Some products sell one copy (very vertical). Some products sell no copies because I write them for free and they are meant to be used for free.
The thing I wrote two months ago will sell 200,000 paid for copies (it phones home so it can be accurately tracked, and that is the lowball estimate).
I mention these numbers because commercial mass market software is a huge industry. But it is still an artform. A craft. It is not something you can learn in a college. Its almost something you have to be born with. Like chess playing. Craftsmanship may be related to IQ, but when IBM hired the smartest people they could find in the 1950s they sucked at programming after training. Its an art. And with artists you do have Prima Donnas, and you better treat them properly and with due respect.
That is why you have no After Dark screensavers for sale nor working on OS X.
The longest stream of consciousness diatribe ever to be seen here… announcing :
Copious ramblings by me brought about by your T-Shirt comments herein :
Incidentally, most foreign territories for software purchases have to go through thuggish regional distributors that buy and "own" the territory rights. Making product fulfillment for things like T-Shirts to Australia problematic. Sometimes territories are individual countries in my experience : france, denmark, Iceland, etc. Small “localizers” OWN the rights for sales, many refused to drop prices.
About the toaster :
Because money was pouring in bushels every week, at the Berkeley Systems office they treated "The Toaster" with utmost reverence. The main conference room had around it a large collection of expensive gleaming toasters.
It was not the only shrine room though, in the 200+ person company (might have been 180 but close enough). The other shrine was a darkened cubicle reserved for "Da Mouse"
Da Mouse was Mickey Mouse, whom out of reverence you never dare invoke the name aloud other than saying 'Da Mouse". There was incense and a black velvet picture of Da Mouse i remember. It was like a hindu shrine. I think they lit a candle on final builds before shipping. They should have been making duplicates of the damned source code. Like 3 other companies I know, fools there sometimes forget to preserve a copy of the final source and tools used to make a commercial release requiring binary hacking to make mods in the future.
One time Berkeley Systems got in trouble over Da Mouse. A prototype version had Da Mouse hold a hoop and jump through it himself while holding it. Disney quality and standards had us remove it stating " Mickey shall never perform circus acts "
They also gave us all the merchandising allowed expressions in the expression books. Pete the Dragon cannot EVER have a mean face or EVER get angry for example.
One nonlegal thing was put in one screen saver as an "easter egg" and had to be removed. In The Simpsons screen saver Itchy and Scratchy had the cat get the mouse on a particular day of the year (april 1?) and that is very very forbidden. The mouse ALWAYS has to win in the Simpsons universe.
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) from Star Trek had to approve himself in all merchandising as per his own contract. So spock had to review himself in the screen saver, marching profile with jackboots on like a goosestepping nazi. But that was OK with him. He cared more about his face I guess even though so few pixels were available.
Like you, I liked the Disney one too. The music was charming, and it really was refreshing. Annoyingly, the sound music driver that played the music could have been better in my opinion. It was Halestorm's SoundMusicSys a MIDI driven software sample-playback synthesizer developed by Steve Hales and Jim Nitchals. Halestorm sucked in my opinion because I had written a better one that I never hipped. His did not ue different samples for 32nd notes and 64th notes so a flute, for example, would be all attack. The bug was that his engine used MIDI on and off events, like QuickTime does, and had no concept of note duration even though the data was recorded ahead of time. The compositions were amazing. Disney wrote it but Halestorm had to bring it to life with about 8 instruments or so at a time. I think Peter Drescher might have worked on some compositions.
Halestorm was superior to Apples (much later) General Midi player because Apples stopped playing if applications got no CPU time, but Halestorm was interrupt driven and played music even while in T/MON debugger I think I recall (if T/Mon default was set to allow drivers to run while debugging, such as network, etc).
The only After Dark tshirt I think I might have had was a After Dark 'Bad Dog' with a dog pissing yellow piss on some object (a trash can?). Back in the 80s and 90s developer teams at huge companies made tshirts to feel good. Apple had countless ones, especially groups at apple that never shipped a single useful product that lived more than 2 years, such as Apples entire "Advanced Technology Group"
Apple only allowed about eight 3rd party products to ship on CDs provided with a particular mac (8500?) and one of the three was After Dark 3. And my game was indeed the star highlight (You Bet your Head, the early precursor to You don’t Know Jack).
After Dark 3 was the most popular of their revenue I think, and I was glad to have worked on that version. Though it was a fiasco due to mismanagement of engineering. They wanted to ship in about 5 months (dec 15th) and I said they could never make that deadline and my calculations showed 6 months maybe 7 with super gods rock star coder gurus.
They were enraged at me. I insisted that they would never ship by December.
I held my ground in the engineering argument. They said “failure was not an option”. I told them they did not know engineering well. And I knew what resources they had to use, so I gave them my 2 weeks written notice to quit.
Berkeley Systems never shipped After Dark v3 in 5 months. or 18 months.
They never shipped that December nor even shipped the FOLLOWING DECEMBER !!
I was of course, correct. They shipped after two decembers came and went. And the delivery medium (a pair of floppy disks) was comical, in a world of CD-ROMS. They chopped content out of the content-rich screensavers to get it to fit on floppies.
The reason they never got it to ship was because they lost all their best engineers, most of whom quit because of visible brain drain. (Basically they had super star high paid coders, and had low paid novice students from the university, and no engineers in between). The problem was "everyones voice counted" and in meetings everything was a democracy.
Actually it was an Idiocracy.
One vote they took was , I KID YOU NOT, to rename every filename from 31 characters or so to 8 character filenames as corporate policy even though windows and the compiler and debuggers had no problem with filenames larger than 8 characters on floppy nor hard drive.
The 8 character vote won. Even though 8 character filenames all piled up on the rootlevel of a C: driver on a shared PC is as close to an Abomination from Hell as one could fathom. A true travesty of all that is acceptable or sane. I proclaimed aloud at the meeting that I had not used 8 character filenames on a Macintosh in my life and on windows rarely ever created them. I told everyone there that I would NEVER start creating 8 character filenames for source code. Some chuckled and muttered "oh yes you will" and I smirked back "Oh no I won't, you will see".
... and of course, after working day and night for my 2 weeks notice (and finishing my project), I got the hell out of that Idiocracy before ever having to create a 8 character filename.
After I quit EVERY good engineer quit one by one. One stayed behind a while collecting the name badges in a small grim collection. My name badge was first in the collection. 8 other big league coders name badges followed mine. Many gave a reason of quitting as "I am quitting because quit.", and that became a running gag of sorts. Every engineer that quit one by one said as one reason that they quit "because quit" after first listing the other engineers names.
Amusingly, a HR person and two others gave exit interviews to get you to say WHY you were quitting and I refused to say one word. I kept repeating "no reason" and it infuriated them all and saddened my mentor and boss (a truly great man). (My boss also did not know why I was quitting. He also did not know that I was the aggitant source of a hilarious flame-war blog he read everyday on the internet (the famed Linda Kaplan flamewar), something I started before meeting him) But Berkeley Ssyetms knew my quitting was not pay.
Pay there was good. Pay at all silicon valley booming companies is great for star engineers.
Berkeley Systems gave a 20 or 25,000 dollar bonus to a mid level (low level) product manager. I saw it personally. (he orchestrated shipping the MS-DOS (not windows) version of After Dark on time. Typical yearly silicon valley bonuses were 5 to 10 thousand dollars.
I never told them why I quit and the ripple effect of the rest quitting quickly sunk Berkeley Systems.
The project I worked on immediately after quitting was successful in its own right and a few months later my next product was featured in a long article as front page news in a major newspaper, as the main topic. (it was digital puppetry animation software that moved the mouths of the characters as the actors spoke, and had fancy backgrounds)
Every company I quit goes out of business less than 2 years (sometimes 1.5) after I quit. I think the list of dead companies is endless. I am not indispensable, but when I quit, others quit too. I joke about that fact at companies and they say "then you had better not quit". And of course... eventually I quit and they go out of business for a variety of reasons. Even the founding engineers soon quit !
Mercifully, I tend to work as a contractor, not an employee. Most contractors cost too much to own as employees permanently.
Speaking of quitting, the last and final product left in the dead company of Berkeley Systems was You Don’t Know Jack. (not kidding). How amusing and ironic.
Oh…. I never told anyone in the world why I quit. EVER. The reason is quite amusing. I am telling you all now here for the first time over 14 years later. The reason the company imploded (all because I quit) is :
I quit because my printed and signed employment offer letter with Berkeley Systems was not being honored, nor would they. In it, I negotiated a fully paid company parking spot. They said they would pay me DOUBLE to pay it myself each month (a building next door). I refused. I am a man of my word. They are not.
I quit one company over the time I was allowed to start work even though I was not “officially” being asked to come in earlier, even though I worked more hours per day every day than anyone in the firm. (It was because I never left for lunch hour like other engineers and to buy tacos at taco bell I had to start work at 10:36 am every day). That company refused to believe that was the sole reason I was quitting and quitting cost them a lot of money. (sometimes 2 thousand a day in fees to me) as I “went contractor” on them. But that was not the plan. I did not quit to milk them.
Yes… I am a Prima Donna. But that company with the taco story made 4 million dollars a year in at least one year from one of my products (that I wrote every single line of).
Some other products of mine have sold 750,000 paid licensed physical copies. Some products sell one copy (very vertical). Some products sell no copies because I write them for free and they are meant to be used for free.
The thing I wrote two months ago will sell 200,000 paid for copies (it phones home so it can be accurately tracked, and that is the lowball estimate).
I mention these numbers because commercial mass market software is a huge industry. But it is still an artform. A craft. It is not something you can learn in a college. Its almost something you have to be born with. Like chess playing. Craftsmanship may be related to IQ, but when IBM hired the smartest people they could find in the 1950s they sucked at programming after training. Its an art. And with artists you do have Prima Donnas, and you better treat them properly and with due respect.
That is why you have no After Dark screensavers for sale nor working on OS X.