Made the mistake of checking out the NYT and the snotty Maureen Dowd who has a fresh bitchy whine casting Obama as an insufferable elitest and a cheap shot on Michelle’s Colbert appearance.

(poof)

In the very early 80s, I read about this Stanford grad student, Andy Bechtolsheim, who had as his thesis project designed a three board set that could be plugged into a VME bus to constitute a diskless workstation: a processor board with virtual memory, and ether net board, and a graphics board. And he had licensed three or four companies to build such boards.

Well, that was exactly what I wanted — at a minimum, I could use them as low cost terminals. So I called him and asked which company was doing the most competent job of making those boards. He said he wasn’t happy with any of them, and to call back in a month, which I did. This time he said the same thing, but that he was working on something of his own. He asked me to call back in a month. I did so, and the voice on the other end of the phone said: “Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla speaking.”

For those who don’t know:

– Andy was the hardware guy among the founders of Sun.

– Vinod was the financial guy.

– Bill Joy was the software guru.

– I think there was a fourth guy, but my memory fails.