20, 21 and 22 years ago (1987-1989)

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Ok, at this point it should be blindingly obvious where this series is going :).

In early 1987 I was still working on MS-DOS 4.1, a custom version of DOS for ICL in the UK.  I also got married to my wonderful wife Valorie in January.  We returned from our honeymoon and I wandered into work after getting off the plane (I’d parked my car at work and took the shuttle to the airport from work).  That was a HUGE mistake because I learned that the entire MS-DOS 4.1 team was going on a plane to the UK in 36 hours.  These days, I’d never do what I did next: I left my bride of a week at home (with a car with a manual transmission that she didn’t really know how to drive) for a week while I flew to the UK and met with customers (these days, I’d have insisted that Valorie come with me to the UK so we’d at least be together in the evenings and weekend).  I spent a huge amount of time in the UK that year finishing up MS-DOS 4.1.

Between 1988 and 1990 I spent most of the time working on the Lan Manager family of products, starting with Lan Manager 1.1 and continuing through Lan Manager 2.0 (I left the Lan Manager team for NT OS/2 after Lan Manager 2.1).

LanMan was a hoot – LanMan was when I first started working with Brian Valentine (and later for Brian Valentine).  Brian was maybe the most inspirational manager I’ve ever worked for, working for him was always a blast.  This was also where Danny Glasser gave me the nickname “DOS Vader” – at one point in the very late 1980s, I probably knew as much about the internals of MS-DOS than any other developer in the world. 

In Lan Manager, I was the developer for the DOS version of the Lan Manager client.  It’s also when I had the “8 F**ING BASICS” meeting with Bill Gates.  I started with a version of the messenger service for MS-DOS and then moved onto the network client – eventually I’d added support for a fully asynchronous programming model running under MS-DOS which was pretty cool (there were some limitations but in general it worked great).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2009
    Early 2007 eh? :) Probably want to make that say 1987 ;)

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2009
    I know it's a cheap shot to pick on typos, but: "In early 2007 I was still working on MS-DOS 4.1" Mate, if you were still working on MS-DOS 4.1 in 2007, you should probably have asked to be reassigned. Talk about a dead-end career path....

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2009
    I know all this is "like it was yesterday", but I think you meant "1987" in the 1st paragraph, not 2007... :) BTW, thanks for all these memories.

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2009
    100 years ago you were just a twinkle in your grandfather's eye.

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2009
    So your edit shows up in RSS but not on this page :( And there's more than one thing in that post that could be described as "a really broken date", but obviously you fixed the other some time ago.

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2009
    my date of birth is 26 june 1987. how many could be untill 21 October,2009 plz send me mail on my email- id---- anilkn16@yahoo.co.in