From Sawnwood to Software
What, why, and how I am writing on Substack today
I am an extremely lucky man.
I grew up in rural Michigan in the late 60s and early 70s in a small town that had been founded by a group of lumberjacks and their families only a few decades prior.
As more trees were cut down, there was more land for people to settle on. Naturally, more families moved in to take advantage of a booming lumber industry and the virtuous cycle would repeat. The trees had to be hauled for only a few miles before being shipped across Lake Michigan in large lumber carriers to the heart of industrial America. I’d always thought that the Great Lakes resembled a human heart - various chambers pumping the lifeblood of the American economy from Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania downstream to the population centers on the east coast.
Some time in the 1950s, the lumber industry in Northern Michigan hit an inflection point due to a number of reasons: the remaining high-quality wood was further away from the towns, had to be transported over longer distances, and Canada’s sawnwood industry had roared back from a depressive period powered by legislative changes and techniques like conifer release. When I was born, there were under 2000 people living in my town. My first job was at a sawmill my father had often worked at. At the ripe age of 14, I was not allowed to work with powered tools, and instead worked a two-man saw in the summers with the other new editions. It was difficult work, and I have quite a few scars on my arms that remind me not to get too nostalgic.
Power tools were about the most fascinating technology anyone in my town had seen. Until the late 70s, we had only two televisions in a town of over a thousand people. It was only due to the pleas of workers who wanted to watch The Magic Man’s games at Michigan State that one sawmill installed televisions in the cafeterias. Some others followed suit.
It is said that if you dug a pond in your yard, it will only take a few months for fish to emerge in it - almost as if by divine miracle. The real reason is because birds that come to drink in the pond unknowingly carry sticky fish eggs on the feathers under their belly. The most remote of ponds can start to teem with life whose closest roots are a continent away. I did not know of this phenomenon when, in 1988, I found myself in a pond which would become an ocean over the next decade. That pond was Microsoft. I had made it there by the skin of my teeth, largely by a clash of one chance event after another. A fish egg that had gotten stuck to many a bird’s feather over the last decade.
After my first day at work, I called my mother and I told her I wasn’t coming back to Michigan. I decided that fate had put me in the heart of an industry that would shape the life of every human being who would ever live going forward, and I would not take a second for granted. I was sitting beside people who’d invented the gadgets dreamt up in science fiction books just decades earlier. I was going to learn all of it, etch it deep into my memory, and only look back at the end of my life.
32 years later, I remember my upbringing in Michigan much more clearly than any piece of code or spec I’d written. I would gladly let someone else enjoy the work I’d done on virtual memory access in Windows, or the earliest commercial web servers, or making heads and tails of WebTVs weapons-grade encryption for another go with the two-man saw.
What I do remember about my time at Microsoft (and a few other names you might recognize) is the adrenaline. The feeling of being in a roller-coaster ride every day - a competitor figuring out a 7-instruction hardware trick that could run us out of business, coming up with ways to make a product a thousand times more performant on the same hardware, a 16-hour drive to convince a 23-year old to leave his job and join us, the atomic bomb that was the internet’s arrival. The shouting matches. The trips each time we shipped something to 10 million people - 100 million by the later years. The chaos and backstabbing inside and outside the workplace. I continued to work in the industry until very recently, with different companies, with very smart people. I retired when I realized none of it approached the day-to-day excitement of the first decade of my career.
In the upcoming months, I hope to write some of the stories that shaped the industry - for the better and for the worse, along with memorable anecdotes, the thinkers and doers that got us to today, the tactics we adopted in a chaotic battleground, and other tangentially related topics.
To wrap up this introduction, I should give due credit to the people in my pandemic email chains, as well as the community at HackerNews who have been a receptive and encouraging audience on the occasions that I decided to ramble about these memories. I hope you will enjoy the long-form summaries here.