Comments by Dave Briccetti

1. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #125731 by Dave Briccetti on February 12, 2008 at 12:00 am

I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Simonyi February 6th at a Stanford Lecture: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
You can see it online.

I still don't know which of his accomplishments that I'm aware of made shaking his hand more of a thrill:

- being a pioneer at Xerox PARC, inventing a graphical word processor (which later led to Microsoft Word)

- flying to space

- becoming a billionaire

Someone in the audience asked him, after we'd been discussing code complexity (see the video) if he was confident strapping himself to an old computer-controlled tin can and flying to space. He said he was, because the Soyuz is such proven technology. He said that some of the systems have been updated over the many years, and there are emulators for older systems that appear on the computer display. When you invoke these old, emulated features, they appear in an ancient, crude font made of very few giant pixels, and it's quite jarring. (Reminds me of a funny scene in the Space Quest computer game where you're in a bar and in walk two low-rez characters from an earlier, EGA version of the game. They make some taunt like, "Oh look at me, I'm Mr. Super VGA!")

Anyway, it was a real pleasure meeting one so accomplished, and I'm glad that he's been able to support the fine work of Professor Dawkins.