mordant wit

In 1992, James Gleick was having a lot of problems with buggy software. A new version of Microsoft Word for Windows had come out, which Gleick, a science writer, considered to be awful. He wrote a lengthy article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine which could only be described as a flame, skewering the Word team for being unresponsive to the requests of customers, and delivering an enormously buggy product.

Later, as a customer of a local Internet provider Panix (which also happens to be my Internet provider), he wanted a way to automatically sort and filter his mail. The UNIX tool for doing this is called procmail, which is really arcane and has the kind of interface that even the most hardcore UNIX groupies will admit is obscure.

Anyway, Mr. Gleick inadvertently made some kind of innocent typo in procmail which deleted all his email. In a rage, he decided that he was going to create his own Internet access company. Hiring Uday Ivatury, a programmer, he created Pipeline, which was really quite a bit ahead of its time: it was the first commercial provider of Internet access with any kind of graphical interface.

Now, Pipeline had its problems, of course. The very first version didn't use any kind of error correction protocol, so it had a tendency to garble things up or crash. Like all software, it had bugs. I applied for a job at Pipeline in 1993. During the interview, I asked Mr. Gleick about the article he wrote. "Now that you're on the other side of the fence," I asked, "do you have a bit more of an appreciation for the difficultly of creating good software?"