Following on from my renewed interest in the history of computers and logic, it seems appropriate that it is the 20th anniversary of the publishing of Programmers at Work. Not that I had heard of the book or read it, it is definately on my list now.

At a recent forum, some of the 19 porgrammers interviewed in 1986 for the book met to discuss current problems with the software industry. Andy Hertzfeld (a software guru of the original Macintosh and subject of this recent blog entry), Jef Raskin (another great mind behnid the Macintosh), Dan Bricklin (of Visi-Calc fame) and some others shot the breeze in what would have been a fantastic panel to witness.

Too bad there is no transcript available, but this salon.com article gives some tasty excerpts, and Dan Bricklin's blog from March 11 has a few notes and also some excerpts from the book

My takeaway is that the community in general, especially the business community, does not understand what is required to make amazing technology and software that truly changes things. In fact most software companies probably don't.

How to change that, I'm not sure. Some of the panelists have good ideas and have the money (courtesy of the tech boom) to put them into action. The rest of us creative tech geniuses without the cashola? Well I guess we'll just continue to do our best.

My friends at Collaboraid are giving it a red hot go, as are many others in my favourite open source community Open ACS. It's a funny time—like the early times in computers. Lot's of promise and ideas, but no clear path or funding. As opposed to the Internet boom when there was lots of funding and a clear path—even for those with no promise or idea!