Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Hence, *bliss*, shiatsu.

"You know yourself, Dan, that every sitcom ever broadcast is stored in your brain – that's terabits of terabits of memory – as well as the details of Burt and Loni's divorce. Brains just don't have enough space to handle all these bits. And so I decided to learn shiatsu massage – as a means of thawing memory frozen inside the body."

I thought about this. The concept of body as hard drive seemed very plausible to me.

I couldn't believe we had been enemies for so long. Trek on, woman!

So Dad's working – for Michael. Michael is hiring people. That is so random. The world is indeed chaotic.

Space Needle 1962

Mattel

C+++++++++++ silver lens sunglasses

Redmond

Schaumberg, III.

Interstate 80/287, NJ

Dallas Galleria/LBJ Fwy.

Torrey Pines/UTC Sorrento Valley, Ca.

Metroplex/lrvine, Ca.

King of Prussia/Route 202

Tandy Corp., Fort Worth, Texas 76107

relentless... crispy...

fluids...

200 years from now

Ebola Reston

Marburg

Hepatitisnon-A/non-B

Ebola Zaire

Sabia

Michelangelo Machupo Rift Valley Hanta

A FedEx pack arrived today with letters for everybody: Roommates®Geek House followed by our postal address. Talk about news. Michael's offering all o f us jobs at a start-up company he's assembled down in Silicon Valley. Excerpts from Michael's letter:

... People our age are abandoning the tech megacultures in droves, starting up their own companies, or joining small, content-based start-ups. There's a recruiting frenzy going on. ... multimedia craziness and the big companies that aren't minting money are hemorrhaging brains. It's intellectual Darwinism.

... The five of you are rudderless at the moment. Is now not the time to take a risk and jump into the future?

... Some say that the world is visibly cleaving into a race of information Haves, and a race of information Have-Nots. Whatever. Let me simply say that history is happening, it's happening now and it is happening here, in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco.

... Tell me, are you seriously going to be at Microsoft 20 years from now? 15? 10? 5? Or even 2 years? At what point do you decide that you have to take your own life into your own hands?

... At the very least, you'll make an 'okay salary if you work with me; at best, you'll gain equity in something that might become very valuable; I have an idea for a product that I think will be very popular. And wouldn't it be amusing for all of us to be together again!

... I must have your decisions immediately. Do call.

Most definitely yours,

Michael

Michael has designed this amazing code and the scary part is completed already – the proprietary work that could only have sprouted from Michael's brain – Object Oriented Programming from another galaxy. And he's been doing it in his spare time – as a game called Oop!. He offered me a job coding, as opposed to just testing ... who knows how long it'll take me to move up to coding at Microsoft?

He sent us a rough draft of a product description he's written plus ERS – Engineering Requirements Specifications. Herewith:

Oop!

Oop! is a virtual construction box – a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick has eight "bumps"; an Oop! brick can have from eight to 8,000 bumps, depending on the precision demanded by the user.

Oop! users can virtually fly in and out of their creations, or they can print them out on a laser printer. Oop! users can build their ideas on a "pad" or they can build their ideas in 3D space, a revolving space station; running ostriches ... whatever. Oop! allows users to clone structures, and add these clones onto each other, permitting easy megaconstructions that use little memory. Customized Oop! blocks can be created and saved. The ratios and proportions of Oop! bricks can also be customized by the user in much the same way typefaces are scaled.

Imagine:

"Oopenstein" –flesh-like Oop! bricks or cells, each with ascribed biological functions that allow users to create complex life forms using combinations of single and cloned cell structures. Create life!

"Mount Oopmore" – afunction that allows users to take a scanned photo, texture map that photo, and convert it into a 3Dvisualized Oop! object.

"Oop-Mahal" –famous buildings, preconstructed in Oop!, that the user can then modify as desired.

"Frank Lloyd Oop" –architectural Oop! for adults.

As Oop! users won't have the actual plastic blocks in their hands, Oop! generates new experiences to compensate for this lost tactility: feedback loops ... hidden messages ... or "rewards" for properly completing a kit; i.e., King Kong will climb up and down your Empire State Building and install the flag if you finish. Oop! comes equipped with "starter modules" such as houses, cat shapes, cars, buildings, and so forth that can be added on to or modified or finished in an unlimited number of colors or surfaces: slate, leopardskin, woodgrain, and so forth. Oop! structures can grow hair or plant life. Oop! structures can be distorted, stretched, morphed, or "Jell-O'd." Oop! users can dissolve the connection lines between bricks to create "solid" structures.

Oop! constructions can be saved in memory or they can be "destroyed" by:

"Los Angeles"(earthquake simulator)

"Pyro"(fire andmelting)

"Ruins"(decay simulator: x-numbers of years of decomposition can be selected and simulated. Imagine your ranch house rotted into fragments and covered in kudzu or a variety of choking vines. Another idea: "Flood")

"Big Foot"(elder sibling emulator: kicks constructions into bits)

"Terror!"(a bomb explodes either inside or outside the structure)

As the Lego Generation ages (and as the Oop! product invariably grows more sophisticated), Oop! becomes a powerful real-world modeling tool usable by scientists, animators, contractors, and architects. Object-Oriented Programming design allows great flexibility for licensees to develop cross-platform software add-ons.

Build every possible universe with ...

Oop!

We felt surreal from Michael's offer.

At sundown, we congregated in the living room, turned off the ESPN, cracked open two Safeway fire logs, and chewed over Michael's data, while Mishka chewed up a Windows NT box. We felt like a Magritte painting.

We talked some more, but the basic idea was clear. As Abe said, "It's virtual Lego – a 3-D modeling system with almost unlimited future potential."