Friday, 04/12/02

In 1996, Evan Henshaw-Plath and I hopped in his car and drove to Boston for the first (and for all I know, last) meeting of a Be user group at Harvard, where a couple of Be engineers were showing off their bizarre new computer. I stayed awake throughout and felt good about myself later.

One of the Be people was Dominic Giampaolo, a name that has stuck with me ever since. He was an enthusastic, pleasantly jittery sort, also distinguished by his long, lustrous tresses. A couple of years later he sat one row behind me when I went to hear Neal Stephenson read the wisdom teeth chapter of Cryptonomicon at Cody's Books -- Be's headquarters was just up the street in Palo Alto, and Mr. Giampaolo was with a small group of Be engineers who wanted to know why Randy's operating system in the book was called Finux.

(I wanted to know if Stephenson had an opinion of Amazon.com, either as an author or a technology guy. He neatly dodged the question by saying he couldn't even repeat it into the microphone without mentioning a competitor to his hosts of the day, and so must decline. At the time I was disappointed, but I eventually got a clue, and my appreciation for the tactical and political deftness of his reply has steadily escalated in the years since.)

I learned today that Mr. Giampaolo is now working at Apple, which is most likely good news for the future of OS X's filesystem. 10:26PM «

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