Embedded - 533: The Garage Is Open

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Author Susan Lammers joins the show to discuss the 40th anniversary edition of her classic book, Programmers at Work. We discuss what it was like to interview young and pioneering software developers like Toru Iwatani, C. Wayne Ratliff, and Michael Hawley and how the personal computer revolution was built by individuals seeking freedom from corporate mainframes.  Susan also shares her experiences as Editor-in-Chief at Microsoft Press, leading Microsoft's early interactive CD-ROM division, founding Headbone Interactive in the 1990s, and why she's bringing retro games like Elroy Goes Bugzerk back to Steam today.  SUSAN'S BOOK & WEB RESOURCES: Programmers at Work: 40th Anniversary Edition – Official site featuring updated bios, excerpts, and current career paths of the 19 interviewees Programmers at Work on Amazon or on Simon & Schuster website Overview and list of interviewees on Wikipedia HEADBONE INTERACTIVE & RETRO GAMING: HeadboneInteractive.com Headbone Interactive - Wikipedia  Elroy Goes Bugzerk on Steam – The classic 1990s interactive cartoon adventure game brought back for modern platforms SOFTWARE & HISTORICAL MENTIONS: VisiCalc on Wikipedia (The first computer spreadsheet) Ukatsuke Komachi (The automated receptionist robot at Namco in 1985) The Paris Review interview series (The literary inspiration behind Programmers at Work) Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elycia White, alongside Christopher White. Our guest this week is Susan Lammers. And we're going to talk about programming and time and history and writing and all kinds of things. Hi, Susan. Welcome. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at a dinner at the Computer History Museum? I guess you could say my career was built at the intersection of arts and technology. I started out in publishing. I was an English major in college, but I took programming classes. And then I went on to end up at Microsoft where information was becoming more and more through optical stories. a part of what the computer did.

I am the author of programmers at work, a book that's being republished this year from 80-80 books and Simon & Schuster. It's a 40th anniversary edition. I wrote it when I was in my 20s back in 85 at Microsoft. And it's a bit of a classic for fans, including Chris Speck, who's part of your show. I wrote it while I worked at Microsoft, and then I went on from Microsoft to do some other interesting things in technology, including starting my own company, Headbone Interactive, in the 90s. And that was a game company. I'm working a lot these days, which is exciting and strange after a long break, because we're bringing the headbound games back and this book.

All right. So mostly I have questions about the book, but now I'm typing up questions about the games too. But before we get to that, we want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask how and why and exactly what was the name of that robot. Are you ready? Yes, I'm ready. Favorite piece of software developed before 1986. Uh, uh, VisiCalc? All right.

Favorite version of Microsoft Word. The one I started with, maybe, back in the 80s. Uh, what is your favorite thing to do when you're stuck on a writing project? Go for a hike. Music, art, or poetry? Music. Uh, when you were young, could you have predicted your career? Yes and no.

I mean mostly no. but I was interested in personal computers. Complete one project or start a dozen? Dozen. Favorite acronym? Scuba. Okay. I just have great admiration.

I'm so happy they came up with that because remembering self-contained underwater breathing aporess. It's pretty hard. Do you have a favorite fictional robot? Yes. and I have a good story about that because I encountered it when I was doing this book. I was going over to Japan to interview Toru Iwatani at Namco

and I walked into their office building and I was greeted by a robot. This is 1985. There weren't really robots around them. and her name was Ukatsuke Komachi, which means the beautiful automated receptionist. And she was the only person there or robot there. And you logged in and then eventually the people came down to greet us.

and there was another robot too that served he. It was a guy. He was like a waiter. Anyway, it was very memorable. And I guess she went on to play roles in some of the PlayStation games that they created. Cool. And it was 1985. Yes.

Okay, so were you alive then? Yes. Yes, we were both alive, but we were not very old. But I was using computers. Yes, I think we both had started playing with computers by that age. Good. So programmers at work, it's 19 interviews of engineers or engineering managers about programming, design, life, philosophy, and the state of the art.

How did it come about? I was working in the publishing division of Microsoft, and back then, PCs were just starting to take off. I mean, there were only 120 or 50 programmers at Microsoft when I worked there. And I think it was 1983, the IBMPC was named Man of the Year. They changed it to Machine of the Year. And it was entering the lives of not just people in, business, but in everyday life.

And people didn't even know what a programmer was. And so I was the lone English major in a sea of technical people at Microsoft. And I just felt like there was a call for who are these people? And how are they doing this? creating this revolution. And a favorite book of mine, because really I wanted to be writing the Great American novel, was the Paris Review series where they went out and did in-depth interviews with famous authors to discuss how they went about their work, you know, how they came up with

their ideas, what their routines were, what their techniques were. and we made the connection. Isn't that what life's about, you know, connecting things that haven't been connected before? And we set out to make this, I set out to write this book. I sat down with Charles Simone at Microsoft. I explained the idea,

and he was on board. And from there, it just took off. But only some of the people were Microsoft people. Yes. That was deliberate. I mean, we didn't want it to be a book about Microsoft. We could have gotten 20 great programmers there, but we wanted it to be like a roundtable of all the players,

or not all the players, but, you know, a handful of players in the industry who they all knew each other. It was such a small world then. And so I started developing the list. Charles said, oh, you've got to talk to Butler Lampson. You've got to talk to John Warnock. Bill Gates said, you've got to talk to guys at Apple, you know, Andy Hurts. or whoever, Dan Brooklyn, Physicalk, things like that.

And it was very organic. Each time I talked to somebody, they would tell me about another person. And I did a bunch of, plus, I went everywhere to talk to these people. So I went into their homes and sat down or their office. and things, that was an interesting experience too. And you talk about that some in the book about Michael Howley

having keyboards and clutter and some of the other buildings that were mostly you interviewed them in their offices. No? Well, right, yes. I noticed the ones that were in the office more than the ones that were in home.

Yeah. Did the surroundings tell you as much about the people as what they said, or were you mostly focused on what they said? I was mostly focused on what they said, but definitely the surroundings impressed me. For one thing, these people, you know, they were ordinary people too. They were just, you know,

In this new industry, they were leaving, for the most part, corporate jobs. I walked into Jaron Lanier's house. It was a tiny little house. It was in Palo Alto. But at the time, you know, that was a long time ago. Yeah. But it was like a million computer, I mean, musical instruments. laying around everywhere.

Some old sofa, you know, the lights were off and I wander in. He comes out. It was every time I walked in a place, it was, you know, a discovery, I guess. These were brilliant people and a lot of them were big characters. It's easy to look back and say, well, wait a minute, where was Steve Wozniak in here? Or any of the names that I knew. But the truth is, I only knew a few names. I was not, Chris could look at the table of contents and knew who these people were.

And I couldn't. I didn't. I know some of them. I recognized Bill Gates and that was it because that's how small. That's how little I care about it. But you weren't, just to divert for a second, you weren't as embedded in the computing stuff as I was when I was a kid. I mean, I knew who Dan Bricklin was when I was a kid because PhysiCalc was a big thing on the Apple too, and that was, you know, famous. And I knew who Andy Hertzfeld was from Mac and stuff.

So, I mean, I'd kind of grown up alongside some of these people. Yeah, and I grew up in fantasy worlds, and I had a computer, but I didn't. know any of the other players, I just played with my own brain. At the time, none of these people were famous, except I'm probably the most well-known one was Bill Gates. So they were just working away oblivious to, you know, the public or the press or whatever. You said that they were great programmers. Were they great programmers or were they just lucky to be in an industry that was growing that fast?

Good question. I think it was some of both. But what they all, I think, demonstrated was a risk-taking. and a willingness to experiment with a platform that, if you read Andy Hertzfeld's interview, he talks about how he proposed studying the PC in graduate school, computer science. And his advisors all said,

what, why are you doing that? that the PC is setting our field back 20 years. It's a terrible idea. And he saw the ability of it to provide a single creator control and freedom because they all had to get time on these time sharing machines. You know, they were all looking for a way to get out of the, that dependency in order to have more creative control. It's a little bit like today with the cloud and the massive corporations.

They were looking for a way to get some freedom. We seem to go from computers that are smart to computers that are dumb and the information is in the cloud to the computers that are smart and local and back and forth, like a pendulum. Except now both the computers at home are super smart and the cloud ones, but everyone just shoves everything on the cloud anyway.

Right. I hope that's going to change. I think the time is ripe for that. I mean, the barriers, the cloud erected, you know, with infrastructure costs and distribution, And,

and engineering teams of, you know, yes, privacy. Those things in a way are coming down with, you know, the new tools that are available today and the platforms. But, you know, there's a long way to go. But there is an opening, I think,

for the individual, for a revolution. I hope there's a revolution of an effort to put the personal back in personal computing and an appreciation

for that one of the things I noted is that there are no women in the book. Yes. But there were women programmers who were well known. Grace Hopper being the obvious choice

and there were women who were adjacent to the folks you interviewed, Heidi Rosen, was a developer and a co-founder with her brother, Peter Rosen. Yes. Do you regret that? A little, yes. And it's hard to imagine what it was like back then. I mean, I spent my career with the only woman in the first.

the room. So it was quite a different world. That's not a reason not to include people like Grace Hopper. Honestly, Grace Hopper, and those guys were like, one, they worked on mainframe. So our filter was more we wanted people that were involved with personal computing. But we didn't, I didn't even shoot that high. She was famous. I did interview a woman for the book, and unfortunately, I had technical problems with the recording. We did it in a restaurant, and nothing didn't work out. And there were other, a few other people, too, that didn't get included in the book. And I wish we could have taken some time and gone back and redone some things,

but that's the way it works sometimes. One of the people that comes to mind since you, you like video games and work in video games, is Roberta Williams from Sierra Online from the King's Quest series. Yeah, there were a few. It was, you know, Carol, Shaw, Roberta Williams. There were a number of women working in that area. One of the reasons I bring it up, and it was a different time, and I don't know everything that surrounds it, of course.

The idea of seeing the human side of the programmers, the big part of the book that makes them human and makes programming both approachable and still a little magic. It was a feeling for the interviews that I liked. It was the, I know these people. I've met these people. I've hung out with these people. Not necessarily these particular engineers, but the archetype of the programmers, archetypes because they're definitely different flavors.

And there's the idea that it's easier to become something you can picture yourself as, that you can see represented. And I could imagine a young Chris Feck picking up the book and saying, oh, yeah, I get it. This is fun. I can do this. And so when I ask about the women, it isn't really an attack on the time or the book. because things change.

It's more a, I want young women to be able to see themselves doing this too, because it's not, there's nothing inherently masculine about it. I agree, especially now. And I think you're absolutely right that young women benefit from reading the stories and seeing the paths of other women. And if I did it today, there would be a lot of effort and options in that way. How did you...

So you said you found the programmers mainly through your work and then ways lead on to ways. People introduce you to more people. I completely understand that. It happens a lot with this show too. How much research did you do about them before you talked to them? And how many questions did you come prepared with versus decided on the spot? I did research, but my approach was more to stay in the background and get them talking.

So I tried to ask very open-ended questions and just see where it took us in the conversation. Because a lot of these people were very, they could go on for hours in a deeply technical way. but my goal was to get them to reveal more about their motivations and their interests and the top level, meta level of what they were doing. And the goal of the book was really to help young programmers understand what programming was or young would-be programmers. And so I did preparation, but we also asked the same questions

of a lot of the interviewees. And that was the model of Paris Review also. And that way you kind of can, you know, have a common ground in a way to sort of relate and evaluate the different interview ease. As we've learned on the podcast over the years, some people are difficult to, what's the word I want to use?

To get to open up. It's difficult to get them to talk much. Sometimes, you know, answers are monosyllabic or you have to really pull. Did you, and it's a skill, right, to get people to answer questions sometimes, even if they're questions they want to answer. It's not that they're being evasive. they're just not used to answering questions. Did you encounter that a lot?

Was that it something you had to develop as an interviewer to try to get that kind of freedom of the conversation going? Yes, that was something I encountered. That's why not all the interviews made it into the book also. And sometimes that works. like the Toru Iwatani interview, who, you know, he created Pac-Man, and he was so distilled and brief in his answers, you know, that type of, and clear, I mean, it's a beautiful interview. And he, so you need to be able to accommodate, and that's, that's, that.

That's the good outcome. And then I think I just tried to give them, you know, prompt them, but also give them an opening and a comfort level to open up. And plus, I didn't know anything. You know, it was like they wanted to tell me because I didn't have an opinion about stuff and a lot of knowledge. So that was kind of one of my benefits of being a blank slate they could talk to. Of course, there's the opposite problem, too. where you ask one question and then three hours later they're still talking. Yes, that's true.

But I wasn't doing a podcast. Right, right. I could edit. You can take all that in, yeah. We did edit, though, along with the interviewies. So we would give it back, you know, do some back and forth trying to make it make sense for everybody. Did you have any interviews where you couldn't get that? them to speak in a language that made sense.

Not language language, but... Too technical to... Immediately jumped to too technical every time. And like, well, like the person who was talking to me and I'm like, I understand robotics. Put it to me in that. And he just acronymed everything. And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm just nodding at this point.

Yes. many the Jaron Lanier interview I had no idea what he was talking about you know back then he had a company called visual programming languages it was a startup he was doing

after he worked at Atari and he started talking about people speaking and breathing programs and how, you know, the computer is an empty mind, and we're going to fill it up with, you know, thought and information. It depends on who's really futuristic things that are happening today. But I was sitting there just not knowing and just trying to take it in and go with it

and not disrupt his chain of thought because, you know, I just thought there must be something valuable here that he's discussing. And, yeah, I try to steer it, but sometimes I had no idea where we were going. I feel that. I feel that a lot. Okay, so the book is coming out in a 40th anniversary. Why 40th? It's been 40 years.

Oh, sorry. Yes. Traditionally, these things are done on the 50s. Ah, well, I might be dead by them. Or the 32s if you're in computer science. It was a happy accident, really. I think it's partly driven by this time of disruption. And, you know, all this change and the feeling that there's a revolution happening in

computing and how people interact with computers. And then it just so happened. It's also the 40th anniversary. But we were approached by 8080 books. That's a new imprint. I've been approached a number of times over the years, but this time it worked out. and I'm happy it's happening.

It's a book that I think in some ways it's dated. It might seem quaint to people who are in the technology field, but I do think it helps people understand that the world hasn't always, been the way it is today. And, you know, these individuals changed our world. And it can happen again. I mean, so I'm optimistic.

And some of the advice is still incredibly relevant. It's advice I give all the time. Things like know what you're building. Understand the interfaces. Start with the interfaces before you start with the implementation, for sure. And, well, there were just so many things that I underlined. I'm like, yes, yes, of course, this. Yes.

I agree. I mean, now I have a lot more perspective on that because I ran some software groups after I wrote that book. But Butler Lampson, he is just so clear in talking about system design. and programmers that are effective and programmers that can screw things up, and they might both be brilliant, but there are approaches that work better than others.

And I really think his interview and also Gary Killedalls are helpful for people that are working with AI platforms. now, you know, where it's the design, front-end design part that's key to get straight as you figure out how to manage these new tools who do the coding. I was amused at the somewhat common theme of, I don't get to program anymore, I only get to program in night, because my job is managing or leading or architecting. You had one person who described their work-life balance, and it sounded so not balanced.

I go home, I have dinner, and then I program all night. Yes. That was Bob Frankston? I did not keep as good. I mean, I have notes in the book, but who said what? Yeah. Well, Robert Frankston, a lot of them worked late at night because that's when they can get on the time sharing for cheap. So it's sort of like what's happening with these token things to think.

It's uncanny to me the number of sort of similarities to the state today and the state that many of these people were trying to get out of. through the personal computer. I'm just hoping one of your listeners can create a PC or some kind of fingernail computer or something that protects all of our intellectual humanness and gets us making some money off these things as all these AI tools suck up everything we know. And these were mostly, I mean, they were young people at the time too, right?

They were a lot of them in their 20s. Yes. and didn't, I mean, knew what they were doing, but didn't know what they were doing, or just making it up as they went along. I remember being in my 20s and wanting to program all night, and now the thought repulses me, but, you know, the 20s are different. Right. And I think some of them talk about the cost it had with their marriages and things, too.

Like, they had to dial it back. It was later, you know, most of them were in their 20s, so they weren't quite, you know, they were still had crazy schedules. With the 40th anniversary book, you wrote a new preface, but you didn't make any changes to the interviews or to the descriptions of the programmers, did you? Not in the book, no. And the reason for that was twofold. I look at the book as a time capsule in a lot of ways through the firsthand interviews with these people. And so I wanted to maintain that. A lot of publishers had approached me and wanted me to add in three or four interviews.

from people today, things like that. And I want, I'd love to do that kind of book, but I want it to be a different book, you know, a different set of interviews with a different type group of people with a different mission. So, yeah, I didn't want to touch it. It could be like opening,

creating a lot of work and unwinding of things. And they wouldn't, like new interviews in this book wouldn't sit. I mean, yeah, it would be a jarring contrast perhaps. Yes, I agree. I did want a second half of where did they end up. I mean, but I looked it up on Wikipedia. It was sufficient.

I didn't. It was a curiosity for me. like, okay, so this person ended up a billionaire, this person ended up an academic and had won the Turin Award, this person had their business and kind of faded from sight. That part was neat. Yes. I have that on our website. Oh, Programmers at Work.net.

We discuss there I do an updated bio and... information about the course of their careers and where they're at, that sort of thing, whether they're living still, along with excerpts. Cool. And I mentioned at a show recently about how some of these people turned out not to be nice. Right. And by that, let me just draw the line at Epstein Files. and go from there, not worry about the definition of nice or jerks.

Does the advice stand the test of time if the person doesn't? I believe that's really hard to sort out. I read an Ezra Pound poem the other week in the New York Times, and he turned out to not be so great. Wagner, Woody Allen. I watched a Woody Allen film recently, and it was almost as if he was enacting in his film what he was doing in his personal life.

So I can't, I don't defend those people. Everybody makes mistakes in life, some worse than others. I'm sure most of those people have learned a lot and regretted what they did, I hope. So I think Bill Gates, I saw something in the news a week ago or something, that he is advocating for governments to, that he sees a big discus. disruption, you know, destruction happening, and he wants the government to tax robots and tax different, you know, corporations and things. So I don't know. You know, people do good things and

they do bad things. And you have to decide who you listen to. There's plenty of choices to make out there. And it's the similar question to separate any art from the artists, and sometimes that's doable, and sometimes it's less doable. But there's a lot of artists who are not the greatest people, but are still revered as artists. And yeah, it's a difficult, difficult thing to unwind. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think it's a binary, you know, for most people. Some people, you can, like, there's a few artists. I'm like, nope, I'm done with that. But yes, it is. It's generally difficult. True, right. If there was a crystal ball that allowed you to figure out where people would have ended up and who they would have become, 20s aren't even adults, sorry for everybody who's 20. would you have wanted that? Would you have wanted to see before you interviewed them?

Or was it really about a time capsule now and don't try to prognosticate? No, I wouldn't. I didn't. I don't think about that with anybody as far as what the future holds for them. I guess I live in the moment. for the most part and the immediacy of an interaction and a relationship. And I try to make sure I surround myself with good people. I had no idea, especially some of the young, most of the people in the book,

I would never have expected we'd be talking about them today. Yeah. And especially the young people, the idea that Michael Hawley, who I was interviewing, that he had like on his sunglasses and his biker shorts while I was interviewing them. And a keyboard by his side. And he was at Lucasfilm, Troy, working on the audio, first audio, digital audio film film. technology. He was a fascinating guy.

Would I ever have predicted that he ends up running the MIT Media Lab and being the first one to die? No. So he ended up, of course I could see he was multi-talented, he was multi-talented, powerful thinker. But those people don't always, you know, land on their feet in the long run. When you were working on this book when you were interviewing these people, you were at Microsoft, which was very small. But you became editor-in-chief of Microsoft Press.

How long did you do that? That was a short amount of time. Then, like a year or something, or two years, then I became head of a new division. At the time, CD-ROMs were just beginning to be incorporated into personal computers. And Microsoft wanted to launch into building encyclopedia and other products that would demonstrate. how information could appeal and be used on a computer in a way for the home users, for general kids and families. And I was in the right place at the right time in the sense that I had experience in publishing.

I also had written this book, and I was at that intersection and got tapped to run this group and begin experimenting with that. What it means to put information on a computer screen versus in print and how to make it interactive. of Bruce Atkinson, or Bill Atkinson at Microsoft at Apple, was working on HyperCard at that point. And we would go to Brown University because they had a lab, a research lab there. They invented the Hyperlink. So the idea of having a piece of text that you could click on and go to another entry. So those things were just happening at that time. And I just felt really excited to be a part of that, even though it was extremely difficult to get an encyclopedia to work on.

Little computer screen. It's funny because we have Wikipedia now. We're all used to having an encyclopedia anytime. I mean, some of us have it locally, parts of it. But anytime I want to know something, I no longer have to go to the library or try to find somebody who knows it or find the one book about whale calls that I'm interested in,

I can just search. And usually I end up at Wikipedia because that's the one I choose first. Right. But it was different then. It was so different. Right. And none of us would have predicted that Wikipedia would be the winner in the end because we were coming at it from the era of Encyclopedia Britannica

where every family had a... a thousand-dollar set of Encyclopedia Britannica on their bookshelves. So we saw that as a way of, okay, that is a really valuable thing. People will want to buy a computer in order to have it in digital form. And it'll be more functional and interesting than the print version. And then Wikipedia came along and they broke all the rules. They just let ordinary people write these articles. And, you know, they vetted.

Of course, they had a system. But we were like, what? You know, we've cut Encyclopedia Britannica. So that's what I love about this time period was rules were being broken. people were motivated for not, nobody really talked about, I want to make a ton of money or whatever. They did do it to earn a living or be successful.

But a lot of them said, I want to make people happy. That is what they talked about in their interview. The era was very pure. in some ways. They were just fascinated with what was possible with personal computers and the freedom that it gave people and the individual control. When do you think that started changing? I feel like it was the early mid-90s when the startup culture started to be turning to startup culture and stock options became something people talked about a lot. I mean, it wasn't as

prevalent as it is now, of course. But I feel like it was, the times were starting to change in the 90s. Yes, I agree. It was crazy. A big shift at that stage. And now, yeah, it's out of control, I'd say. There's too much power concentrated in a few companies. Back to programmers at work, how did it affect your career?

I mean, it turned into a much bigger book than I would have predicted, which is not saying much. Did you expect it to have, did you expect a 40th anniversary edition? Because that seems like a long plan. Yeah, no. No. did I expect we didn't have any idea how this book would do when it came out in the first place. It was one of the first books about software to be covered in the New York Times. It got a review in the New York Times.

That was unheard of. So, no, I have no sense that here we would be 40 years later, talking about this, except that it was a revolution. They were laying the seedbed of what we're experiencing now. And so only in looking back, could I say this is a story that people will get something out of and in a historical sense. And then also in a sense of these people were coding in a very constrained environment and doing you know, groundbreaking things.

And Ray Ozzy, I talked to him recently and we were talking about constraint-driven engineering and what they had to deal with back then. And his response was like, today we don't have constraints or programmers don't have enough constraints to help them to focus and make decisions. And he was, I think, considering AI tools and how they allow anybody in all kinds of AI slop to be created. So he was calling for, we need constraints today to help guide people. And if you see one thing in this Programmers at Workbook, all of them were guided by, they had to distill their ideas because of the constrained environment that they were working within.

And, you know, that's the other acronym I like, keep it simple, stupid, is, you know, something that really tested their efforts. and I think it's true today too. We benefit from that. We need more constraints on everybody. Unfortunately, so many of our engineering constraints are do it faster and do it cheaper, which are not the same kinds of constraints. That just means do it worse

because you can't have all three. Yeah. But what about your career? Has it affected your career? The book? Yeah. Well, it certainly enlightened me, and it was inspiring, spending time with these people, because they were just putting themselves out there, taking risks, pursuing their ideas.

And, I mean, in a way, I've always been that way. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. I have seven sisters and one brother. My dad died when I was a kid. I mean, basically, we had to make our own way and, you know, get out in the world and make something happen. So I saw that in them, and that was inspiring. And it probably helped me get up.

the courage to, you know, found Headbone Interactive in the 90s. And I got venture capital for that company. Not many women were doing that. Heidi Roizen was, but not a lot of women out there getting funded. And, you know, we had a great time at Headbone. So who knows, how your life ends up. It's not, it's hard to predict. Okay, so you mentioned Headbone Interactive and games that are coming back. Yes. This company I had was in the 90s, and we published a lot of CD-ROM games. Elroy goes book Zerk, Elroy hits the pavement, Elroy King of the Jungle, a series for kids

called Gigalbone Gang, another one called Is and Augie. We were creating, my idea was to create new intellectual property. So we were developing the characters, writing the stories, all of that, and animating. And the idea was we were going to put it out on CD-ROM, on the little Internet that was happening, and in television. And so it was called a new media company. and those games were really fell into the almost cartoon interactive game category and we had a team of animators and many of them actually have gone on from Headbone to work at Pixar or down in L.A. and places like that.

we had a lot of success in terms of winning awards and all of that. And we were riding high and then the bubble, 2000 bubble happened. And that was when we had to wind things down. But oddly enough, I don't know why this is happening, But this year, some fans, this guy Keith is a big fan of ours. Some other people started asking us, can you bring the games back? And I think all these people are hitting their 30s, and nostalgia is really big, big right now. And retro gaming is big.

And these, if you watched El Roy, it's very charming and good. hearted and a little bit quirky and fun. And I think people are wanting that sort of thing. So we're put together, it's like getting the band back together or something. And we've worked on the games this past year, and we're putting them out on Steam. The first one is up on Steam right now. Elroy goes bug, Bugserk. is going to launch this fall.

And that's the first of what we'll be doing. And it's been an interesting coding project, too. So we're using modern tools and able to bring them forward for these new platforms. Neat. It's got a Steam page and everything. Awesome. The programmers who were in the book, do you still talk to many of them? Any of them?

I do since this project, and occasionally over the years, but especially since I've been working on it. They're excited. I mean, they're surprised and they're excited. Did any one of them say they wanted to change what they had said? They all went back and read their interviews, and then they would write me back and say, I guess I didn't sound too bad.

That's not so far. Or Scott Kim was like, yeah, I was, you know, my ideas are happening now, you know, things like that. So it was fun. Susan, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I think the main thought I have for your audience is really, you know, the personal computer revolution was not built by institutions. It was built by like individuals who had, you know, this new platform, these tiny little machines that had just enough power to let them imagine something new.

And they brought enough coding discipline to make that work. So I think, you know, we are told right now to fear what AI will take away. But, you know, I've seen this moment before, and last time it, you know, liberated everything. And maybe there's a chance that we can really change how we relate to the cloud and all these other things that are, you know, taking away the personal, from personal computers. and I think the garage is open again, and people should take advantage of this inflection point to make people happy again. Our guest has been Susan Lammers,

author of Programmers at Work, now in a 40th Anniversary Edition, available very soon from wherever you get your books. Thanks, Susan. Thank you. Thank you to Christopher for a person. producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Chris Feck for the introduction. Thank you to our Patreon listener Slack group for some of their questions, and of course, thank you for listening.

You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm, or at the contact link on theembedded.fm website, where there will be show notes that include links to lots of things. And now quote to leave you with from programmers at work. This is in the Michael Howley interview. Howley says, if people are adventurous about their learning, they'll go out and explore old technologies as well as the new, so they can appreciate both and understand how everything fits in the big picture. There's a big risk of making shallow use of computer technology without fully appreciating what's behind it and where it came from.

But I have a fair amount of faith that people will do more or less the right things. Sometimes it's scary.