transcript from a panel discussion hold by microsoft to celebrate their 25th anniversary in the year 2000: 25 years of innovation.

But what I do is like be a thorn in everybody's side saying, we shouldn't be doing what we're doing ... There's not a UI answer ... I like to say, let's take the existing desktop, treat it as Chernobyl, put it in concrete, and just let it live. It will be like DOS or CP/M, it's fine. (steve capps, worked on the finder at mac, he was in the newton group, later he joined ms)

exploiting dan bricklin's essays:

'Word processors are designed for writing for paper ... They evolved for the purpose of producing paper output. (in good documents)

'General purpose personal computers were still in the future, and each computer was built specially to do word processing. With the advent of inexpensive video computer screens, the connection to the typewriter as input device was broken. Some early devices tried to avoid this break, and simulated the look and feel of a typewriter by making the screen act as much like a piece of paper as possible, even going as far as having margin setting levers that were under the screen just like those under paper on a typewriter. These devices kept the page orientation.' (history of word processing')

edgar f. codd, an ibm computer pioneer who originated the relational approach to database management died. (via chris)

'I began reading documentation,' Codd said, 'and I was disgusted.' (mercury news)

codd's vision.