I’d worked at a few New Hampshire seacoast companies before taking the plunge with DRI and moving to California with two weeks notice. But I think of DRI as my first “real” job. DRI was famous at the time for creating the operating system that powered the vast majority of business computers at the time — CP/M, as well as business software and computer languages to support them.
I was hired to help port CP/M to the Motorola 68010 processor. It had advanced memory management that made it fairly easy to run multiple programs at once, a capability unheard of in microcomputers at the time. I later moved to the FlexO/S group, where we created a multithreading, multiuser real-time O/S with complete user protection; one user crashing wouldn’t affect any other process. I understand FlexO/S was used to power point-of-sale networks for many years.
Symantec was one of many DRI spinoffs, and that’s where I ended up when I left DRI. The exact reason why I left DRI is a story for another time. But it was a good move, for me. I got into Symantec before they went public, and my founders stock got me a down payment on a beautiful house just half a mile from the shores of Monterey Bay.
But… what if I’d made a different choice?
I think about the DRI days a lot. Sometimes I think of the name of someone I used to work with, and google them, to see what they’re up to. Most just went on to ordinary jobs after leaving Dijj, but this time, it was different. I’d thought of Bruce Skidmore.
Turns out he and a bunch of other people I used to work with, split off from DRI to make business simulations. Bruce Skidmore, Bruce Montague, Greg Rossi, John Hiles, Dan Riddel — I knew all these people and worked with some of them.
They all eventually hooked up with Will Wright and Maxis, where SimCity was a huge hit, and they started churning out business simulations based on the SimCity foundation, including their biggest hit — SimRefinery.
Here’s a great article about the history of the company that would become Maxis Business Simulations -> When SimCity Got Serious. Around the same time, ArsTechnica reported that a playable copy of SimRefinery had been found.
I would love to talk more about this, but the only person I met after all of this was Dan Riddel-Kaufman; we worked together on educational software for awhile. I knew he’d been at a company called Thinking Tools, but I had no idea what he’d been doing there. I had no idea about any of this, stuff that if I’d been more social, I might have known about, until I happened to look up this one name on the web.
Hiles & company left DRI while I was still working there, so I can’t say I wasn’t around when all this was happening. I was still a new programmer, and I doubt anyone ever considered asking me to jump ship with them.
Would I have gone, if offered the chance?
I don’t know. In retrospect, staying and leaving later for Symantec was financially the better choice, and that opened doors for me at Apple and Sony that wouldn’t have been open otherwise. And going would have been taking a huge chance that probably would have ended with returning to New Hampshire with my tail tucked between my legs, broke and begging for help from my family. Instead of how I actually returned to New England… broke and sleeping on the floor. But that is another story for another time.
I reached out to the one person there who might remember me, on LinkedIn. I hope he gets back to me. I’d love to find out what convinced him to take that leap.
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