7 bit words

I’ve never googled myself in images before that is, until, today.  The results were amazingly accurate, however I noticed an old green screen monitor in some of the results.

Stranger still, it looked vaguely like a program I had written as a teenager.  It was called beautiful boot.  In a nutshell, it replaced the OS on a disk in place of a dynamic catalog.  This in turn, freed up valuable real estate on the floppy which made room for .. well.. more games.  Why is this strange?

1. I wrote the code as a teenager in the 80s.  This is 30 years later.
2. Someone took the time to disassemble (AND COMMENT!)  my code.
3. Someone took the time to write about how it blew their mind at the time.

Here’s why I’m proud of what I did then:

1. I actually stopped playing games long enough to create something that the world used for years to come.  Free, useful, cool.
2. Even then, you can see how I cared about usability, efficiency, savings.  I like that what worked then as a teenager still works well as a CEO today
3. I hand crafted the typeface.  I love type.  I love that people noticed it was stylish while easy to read.  Back then, you did it one pixel at a time, no tools.  Get out a piece of graph paper, draw the bits, convert binary 
4. Amazingly small footprint.  A graphics subsystem, audio subsystem, animation, entire ascii FONT,  and disk I/O layer.  How big?  4KB.  Yes, only 4KB.  Crazy.  Back then, programmers carried screwdrivers.  Scary times indeed.
5. It was self mutating/modifying.  It would persist itself with new state.

It was one of the earlier things I wrote.  I went on to develop things most probably don’t remember but were insanely ahead of their time - HBBS, Megaterm, Pixterm, The Parrot, A shape shifter/editor, etc.  Good times.

So, want to see what hand crafted 8 bit assembly looks like?  Take a look at the source.  Pretty crazy what you could do if you weren’t dating girls or drinking.

Before you get hung up on all of the reasons it can’t/wont happen, take a moment and imagine the possibilities:

• Apple gains a critical piece of technology:  A distributed low cost communications framework on top of which they can build other technologies.  A few ideas:
• iTunes CDN - efficient content distribution is hard.  Skype does this better than anyone.
• iPhone Games - they could add gaming api that provides P2P data transport between devices ala bonjour without breaking the bank
• iChat - With the new power of distributed networking within Skype, iChat would be made much more powerful - shared environments where users share video, documents, desktops, even virtual realities.
• Apple instantly becomes the largest VOIP (video over IP) provider in the world.  The potential to leverage this reality in other markets / providers is insane.
• Skype has an amazing product brand, Apple both recognizes this and could easily steward that product brand to the next level.

The largest issue (besides theoretical antitrust) would be convincing the carriers this isn’t a threat.  My guess (and hope) is they’ve already figured out they’re an ISP.  Skype will be allowed to run over their network regardless - Apple would be a better partner.

Once they own Skype, do they remove it from Android?  From a competitive point of view, it’s pretty tempting.  But imagine Apple having a critical piece of software on every meaningful platform has fantastic strategic value.  For example - take Android.  Google’s android needs Skype - just like the iPhone really needs Google.

What else could Apple do with Skype?

Now that Apple has surpassed Microsoft in terms of Market Cap, I’m starting to read how “Microsoft saved Apple” back in the day when they invested $150M in Apple (1997).

Give me a break.  That’s not what I remember.

I remember Microsoft hiring the same people that worked on quicktime.. and somehow ending up with Apple’s source code in their player.   I remember them settling patent disputes and forging a reasonable tit (office on time for the mac) for tat (MS Explorer browser default on mac).

Put simply, I remember Microsoft pushing Apple around until Jobs returned and promptly pushed back.

Apple had over $1B in cash at the time:

Their revenue was falling to a low of $6B:

They didn’t need cash, they needed a visionary leader and reclaimed one in Steve Jobs.

So here’s a new perspective/meme for you:

Apple tried to give Microsoft $4.7 billion and they declined.  They received 18.2M shares for only $150M ($8.24/share).  Had Microsoft held onto those shares, they’d have an additional 4.7 Billion for their bottom line.