[tromp]

It's rare that a tech story brings me to tears, but I couldn't help feel one swelling up when reading the final paragraphs.

> Eventually, it was Wilkie who made the first move. Overwhelmed with emotion, his eyes red and swollen with grief, he stepped forward and detached the red rosette from the lapel of his suit jacket. It was the same one Don had given him years before. Leaning down, he gently placed the rosette on the casket.

It feels like there should be a movie made about this story...

[tracker1]

I feel the same way. The end of the story is just sad. I wish that more companies could break their own structures to offer rewards, bonuses and more freedom to teams like this. The kinds of people that thrive with these kinds of opportunities tend not to do as well with general corporate culture.

So many times a relatively small upstart team with enough freedom will accomplish greatness, only for corporate culture to completely destroy what was.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Although I sometimes wonder how much survivor bias there is in these stories.

How many misfit teams failed?

Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.

[wslh]

It is more complex than that. In some fields there was a culture of labs and special projects. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, and many other companies followed that route and there were corporations with a lot of bureaucracy.

Good thread in /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_...

[gregw2]

Over a decade ago, I had the chance to interact with at a startup with a Microsoft senior person who joined the firm as CTO. One piece of advice he gave stuck out:

"Heroism doesn't scale"

This wisdom of it was instructive (and you can see it in Estridge's early struggles with success), but so too was the sense that perhaps this "wisdom" was part of what underlay Microsoft's malaise of the late 2000s against Apple and Google (and IBM's in this story and your final comment.)

[vmfunction]

"Heroism doesn't scale"

You can pretty much replace Heroism with Leadership or whatever.

Question is do we really need it to scale?

Corporatism thrived off the back of the industrial revolution. It is not bad, it just has taken us as far as it can go.

Something more decentralised and organic should take place instead of corporatism for large scale human development and space exploration.

[com2kid]

Microsoft has plenty of similar stories, perhaps most famously the story of how Xbox was developed.

I was lucky to be at MSFT during what might have been the last gasps of when a single person could have a huge impact, and it was something I saw from time to time, but it by the 00s and surely the 2010s, it was in huge decline vs the stories that were told about the 1990s.

Edit: Someone posted below about how Windows 3.0 was also a misfit project.

There is also F#, which has had a huge impact on C#.

The entire async framework in .NET was originally developed by a small team headed up by one brilliant engineer.

Silverlight started as a project by a small team in Microsoft Research to see if they could shrink .NET's runtime down to be small enough to complete with Flash.

[illys]

I love the story... But don't forget this story is the proper selection of events with textual glue and interpretation to make it feel like a novel.

Some statements belong more to the glue than to History, and they should remind us this is a real-life-based * novel *. I especially noted this one: "nobody at IBM had any real experience with [microcomputers]".

IBM senior management was certainly reluctant, but "nobody"... They even had microcomputer products that hit the market:

- IBM 5100 1975, first IBM personal computer

- IBM 5110 1978, 5100 updated for a larger market target

- IBM System/23, under parallel development with the IBM PC and released 1 month before in July 1981: many of the IBM PC features are shared with or taken from it (8-bit Intel processor family 8080 vs. 8088, very same expansion connector, reuse of the electronic expansion cards such as serial, exact same keyboard - just in a different box and with different function keycaps...)

[illys]

Small fix: the IBM System/23 Datamaster was based on Intel 8085, an improved version of the 8080 (binary compatible, more features, requiring less electronics around).