Sublime

“You had a set of folks running these machines who were the priesthood of hardware, and the rest of us were railing against it,” says Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time. “We wanted a playground where we could go to freely try things out.”

“We had worked on many possible new features for years, but no one ever made decisions about them,” he said later. “Suddenly, we had this guy making rapid decisions.”

The scientists could move from one project to another, which meant, member Chuck Thacker recalled, the best projects attracted the best people and “as a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to wither.”

“Computers require an immense amount of detail . . . I’m a mathematician, not a programmer. I may be accurate, but I’m not precise.”