Talk:Bob Wallace (computer scientist)

Friday night dinner
What does "His home in Marin was the location used in many of the Friday night dinners" mean? 128.255.246.183
 * The term "Friday night dinner" was originally wikilinked to an article that was put up for deletion and subsequently removed  due to claims that it was unverifiable and original research--even though the content was allegedly posted by Bob's widow.  The deleted text can be found here.  For archival purposes, the article states: "The Friday night dinner is a semi-monthly secret dinner in the San Francisco Bay area that is attended by many academics, researchers, authors, and others involved in the study of psychedelic drugs. The dinners are potlucks organized by a mailing list, and are known for short as "fnds". Admission of new people is on a selective basis; current members may invite new people they feel they can trust. Drug use is explicitly forbidden at the dinners."  According to the same article, regular attendees included: Alexander Shulgin (godfather of MDMA; inventor of 2C-B); Jean Millay (the scientist who led the inquiry into Yuri Geller); Anne Shulgin; Dennis McKenna (brother of Terence McKenna); Bob Wallace (before he died in 2003); Dale Pendell; Myron Stolaroff; Mike Crowley; Erik Davis; Melanie Crowley; and William Leonard Pickard (now serving life imprisonment).  The same article states that other notable attendees were Genesis P-Orridge, Albert Hoffman, and Terrence McKenna.  --Viriditas  | Talk 07:57, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Bellsoft
How Bob Wallace came up with the name Shareware: In 1982/3, Bob and I left Microsoft, we both worked in the languages group. Bob worked for my company, located in Bellevue Washington, and named Bellesoft (which became Bellsoft, which became Popular Programs). Bob worked on our program editor ES/P - the Entry System for Programs - which involved writing programs in a template oriented fashion. Bellesoft made templates for various programming languages including Pascal - Bob's specialty. We were (deservedly) blown out of the water by Borland's outstanding TurboPascal. Bob got our permission to do a word processor - PC-Write - using the really efficient data base structure he developed for Bellesoft. We were discussing the challenges of marketing the program in the expensive word processing space - especially the expense of getting market share. Bob said he didn't want to do freeware but instead "marketshareware" - we laughed and said we should call it "shareware" and that everyone would think it referred to sharing - but we knew it was a strategy for achieving market share. We talked about it, but knew that the magazine "SoftTalk" had a column by that name, so Bob wrote to the columnist (a famous guy but his name slips my mind) and got permission to use the name...

While I am on the subject of Bob's computer industry names, my wife Anne named the organization that Bob founded, organized to entice people to talk to him about software marketing, calling it the "Software Marketing Forum", which became the Washington Software Board, which became the Washington Software Association. Bob was SMF/WSB president (the first of three Bobs) and I was the first head of the programmers group. Bob and I remained close friends, and I held Bob's wake after his untimely death in 2002 after his return from Burning Man. He lived in Sebastopol CA but the wake was in Seattle at the Seattle Aquarium. I made his famous glowing "electric pickle" for the event.

I hope you enjoyed this reminisce. - Richard


 * The above comment was made by 24.41.57.105 20:02, 4 December 2007. I moved this from the article to this talk page. -- SWTPC6800 (talk) 21:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Bob was awesome
This is hardly encyclopedic, but Bob & I had some righteously epic flame wars on alt.drugs in the 90s. We were probably 2 of the most arrogant assholes on the internet drug scene... but that said, all along, I have to admit to a deep deep respect for the man and his commitment to the community. We probably butt heads because we were more alike than either would've admitted at the time. Bob was awesome, and if there's an afterlife and a God, I hope Bob's up there flaming God and raising hell. Miss you, you fucking asshole. Thanks for Promind and all the other work you did for our scene. Murple (talk) 11:29, 3 February 2011 (UTC)