SteveBurbeck once told me this AlanKay story from his days at Apple.
A lot of the developers and managers at Apple were gathered around watching a presentation from someone about some “wonderful” new product that would save the world. All through the presentation, he had been stating that the product was “object-oriented” while he blathered on.
Finally, someone at the back of the room piped up:
“So, this product doesn’t support inheritance, right?”
– “that’s right”.
“And it doesn’t support polymorphism, right?”
– “that’s right”
“And it doesn’t support encapsulation, right?”
– “that’s correct”.
“So, it doesn’t seem to me like it’s object-oriented”.To which the presenter huffily responded,
“Well, who’s to say what’s object-oriented and what’s not?”At this point the person replied,
“I am. I’m AlanKay and I invented the term.”— KyleBrown
I was in the room when this happened, some time in the second half of the 1980s. The presentation was on Oberon, before anyone had really heard of it. It was basically a “what I did on my summer vacation” talk given by a quality engineer who had dropped by Wirth’s lab while he was vacationing in Europe. The announcement really played up that this was the next big object-oriented system, so that’s why Alan lowered the boom on the guy like that. The thing that amazed me was that the presenter just went right on like nothing had happened. I think I would have gathered up my slides, thanked the audience, and walked out!
I recall Alan’s answer as being more like “Well, I invented the term, so I think I have something to say about it.” He did NOT say his name, and I don’t think most of the folks in the room recognized him (including the presenter), so the, um, impact of his statement was perhaps not as great as one might expect. Steve and I got a really good chuckle out of it though.
— JoshuaSusser
I’ve been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week. One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I’d share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn’t do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec. The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell).
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what’s a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?
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