John Ellenby dies at 75

ellenbyI wouldn’t normally be writing a column early on a Saturday morning but I just read that John Ellenby died and I think that’s really worth mentioning because Ellenby changed all our lives and especially mine.

If you don’t recognize his name, John Ellenby was a British computer engineer who came to Xerox PARC in the 1970s to manufacture the Xerox Alto, the first graphical workstation. He left Xerox in the late 1980s to found Grid Systems, makers of the Compass — the first full-service laptop computer. In the 1990s he founded Agilis, which made arguably the first handheld mobile phone that wasn’t the size of a brick. Finally he […]

By |August 27th, 2016|2016, Breaking News, history, People|39 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 5 — Role Models

altost1ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER FIVE

ROLE MODELS

This being the 1990s, the economy is shot to hell and we’ve got nothing much better to do, the personal computer industry is caught up in an issue called look and feel, which means that your computer software can’t look too much like my computer software or I’ll take you to court. Look and feel is a matter of not only how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but what dance it is they are doing and who owns the copyright.

Here’s an example of look and feel. It’s 1913, and we’re at the Notre Dame versus Army football game (this is all taken straight from the film Knute […]

By |February 20th, 2013|2013, Books, Companies, Computing, history, Software|39 Comments
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