NATHAN MYHRVOLD PhD ORAL HISTORY - The Computerworld ...

After being there for a year, I decided to take leave of absence for three months, and
I never returned from my leave of absence. I intended to return, but I went to work
on a software project that some friends of mine from graduate school had done, and
that kept sort of snowballing. We thought we would work for a couple of months on
the software project. I had never been into computers, I should mention.
DA: Did they ask you whether you’d be interested in computers?
NM: I was interested in computers a little bit, but I’ve never had a class in
computing. I never had a class in computer science. I learned to program
computers, and did a little bit of work on my thesis with computers. I typed my
thesis on one of the early CPM-80 machines. It was a machine by a company called
Northstar. And I used a word processor called Magic Wand, which was one of the
earliest word processors. One night I had typed and typed and typed and typed,
which I was terrible at. I was terrible at typing. And the machine crashed. And I
hadn’t saved the stuff.
This was the middle of the night, but there was a guy named Bob Austin who is still a
professor at Princeton, and Bob kept bizarre hours, as I did, and I went down and
talked to Bob and I talked to another friend of mine who was into computing. And
he said, “Well there’s a debugger program that you might be able to use to extract, as
long as you haven’t turned the machine off. You could actually go and get this
debugger to boot into the machine and inspect the contents of memory. “ You can’t
do that in computers any more, but on the CPM-80 machines you could. So he gave
me this debugger disk, which is this eight-inch floppy monstrosity, and this
mimeographed instructions for the debugger. It took me like three hours, but I
figured out how to use the thing and how to recover. Of course I would have been
time ahead if I’d just retyped it. But by god I was going to get that stuff out. So I
got it, and I saved it off disk, and that was my first experience with a mini,
microcomputer.
While I was working on my thesis, a couple of friends of mine in graduate school
decided that it would be great if there was a program to help us do equations on our
computers --something that would let you use equations with the same facility you’d
manipulate text with the word processor. At that time there was a couple of
programs, something called Maxima that was done at MIT, and something called
MSP that had been written by a guy Cal Tech, who was in the Institute for Advanced
Study, named Stephen Wolfram. They were computer algebra packages, but they
weren’t made for little computers, they were made for big computers. They weren’t
made for casual use.
Nathan Myhrvold
Oral History
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