Microserfs

Laura used to be at Apple's Advanced Technology Group, but left a year ago. When she started at Apple, they had a 3-to 7-year yield time for theoretical research; a project had to pay for itself from three to seven years after its start. In the early 1990s, the yield time dropped to one year - "Not one-point-oh enough," said Laura. "Here, it's 5- to 10-years' yield time. That's good."

We asked her what the difference was between Apple and Interval, and she said that Apple tried to change the world while Interval tries to affect the world. "We have a touchie-feelie reputation," she said, "probably because of Brenda Laurel's work in gender and intelligence, but believe me, it's heaven to be able to do pure math, theoretical software, or watch Ricki Lake if you need to." (I should add, Laura is a real pool shark. I pointed this out and she said, "Oh, it's only math.") Brenda Laurel is the woman responsible for research into how women interact with math. She's the Anti-Barbie.

"Staff here are a bit older, too," she said, "and people mostly only get in via recommendation. There's no snatch-the-pebble-from-my-hand koan routine for prospective employees. And there's no reporting tree. It's post-grad school, sort of. Everybody's supposed to be equal, too, but of course you have sub-equal and super-equal personalities. They fall into planet/moon relationships soon enough. But for the most part, we're all start-up types, ex-academic and ex-corporate types who want to keep the one-point-oh flame alive."

Laura cleaned up at pool. I felt goofy losing, the way you do with pool. Pool is like rollerblading: you have to pretend you're the cooly-wooliest person on earth, while you're quietly cringing inside.

Other teenies came and went, and it felt refreshingly like a normal workday. Karla promised to fix Laura up with Anatole. Laura used to have a crush on him back at Apple. L'amour, I'amour. I was a little underwhelmed. I guess I was expecting them to be doing Tesla Coil experiments or building jets out of Mylar. Or 3,000-lb. onions being carried out of the parking lot with machine-gun totin' guards alongside the truck.

I said that since Anatole's friends were going to help us alpha test Oop!, maybe we could get her closer to Anatole if she wanted to help test. She agreed immediately. Talk about Tom Sawyer painting a fence white!

* * *

When we got home, Mom and Dad were just back from a bike ride along the Foothills Expressway. They were sweating, and Misty was licking them in pursuit of sodium. After this, they watched Martha Stewart tapes and felt guilty for not orchestrating their lives more glamorously.

Bug popped by en route to a party in San Jose. We told him about our trip to Interval and he told us that the replacement paradigm for Graphic User Interface was going to emerge from there, and that PARC's 1970s desktop metaphor work had become the "intellectual avocado-colored appliance of the computer industry."

"My, how fickle are our allegiances," said Karla.

"Oh come on, Bug," I said, "can't you be even a bit bitter aboat PARC

anymore?"

"I can foam about PARC forever," said Bug, "or I can groove on the next PARC-like think tank. I choose to groove. Where's your mom, Dan? I brought her a rock she might like."

Bug is spending part of his off-time developing a traffic-monitoring routine for offices that allows office workers to minimize the number of times they bump into each other in the hallway. He was inspired by that cartoon character, Dilbert, who freaks out every time he has to walk down a hall with somebody else. "I mean, what's a person supposed to say, Kar? How often can a person regenerate fresh and witty banter each and every time they bump into a person? Oohhh . . . nice carpeting. Oohhh . . . what an attractive Honeywell thermostat control switch next to the photocopier. Human beings weren't designed to bump into each other in hallways. I'm providing a valuable postindustrial service. Microsoft would have been heaven if my system had been operative and in place."

SATURDAY

New Year's Day, 1994

Abe left for SFO Airport and then we all went for a drive in the Carp - Karla, Ethan, Todd, Bug, and I.

We drove past the home of Thomas Watson Jr., 99 Notre Dame Avenue, San Jose, California. Watson steered IBM into the computer age - and was made prez of the company in 1952. In 1953 he developed the first commercial storage device for computers. He died on a New Year's Eve.

* * *

On the radio we heard that Bill got married, on Lanai in Hawaii, and we all screamed so loudly that the Carp nearly went off the road. And apparently Alice Cooper was there. So to celebrate we played old Alice Cooper tapes and purchased a "Joey Heatherton" fondue kit in a secondhand store and later on boxed it up to mail to Microsoft. They'll probably think it's a bomb.

"Ooh, Bill - please, please feed me another bite of hot, bubbly cheese cube," Susan whispered in a little girl voice in the backseat.