Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [30]
I used some of the pictures when I was asked to speak at Jim’s memorial service. I knew my emotions would get the better of me on the day, so I planned to get myself out of an actual speaking role. I used Microsoft’s Movie Maker to load my collected snapshots of Jim. The software allowed me to drag and drop in special effects, such as fading from one photograph to the next. I wrote a script that I voiced-over the pictures, and concluded with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”
It took more than a week to create. When it was shown at the service, tears welled up in eyes all over the auditorium, including mine. My e-memory, working alongside my bio-memory, told the story of Jim and me, how our paths had crossed, and how rich my life became because of him.
There are many ways to create stories. My mother spent several months typing the story of her family, the Gordons (I’m named after her). It’s about twenty-five pages long and it’s chock ful of stories about her family and about growing up as wonderful twentieth-century inventions like the automobile, electricity, and telephony became a part of her life—things we would have never known without those twenty-five pages. There’s only one thing wrong with it. I should have had her record it in her own voice.
That’s the kind of omission that will soon be a thing of the past.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 4
WORK
I like working. About six thousand people worked for me when I was head of research and development at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1972 to 1983, before it became a part of Hewlett-Packard. I’ve been involved in more than a hundred start-up companies—that’s an average of about four a year since I started. I’ve served on government panels, offered my thoughts in think tanks, given talks to all kinds of audiences, and met with countless young entrepreneurs to hear pitches for my involvement in their great new ventures.
As an angel investor, my interests are both literally and figuratively all over the map, so it is a juggling act keeping up on all the different technologies, business plans, and people whizzing in and out of my orbit. I’ve been vowing for a couple of decades to reduce my travel, but still end up with more than fifty thousand air miles every year (at five hundred miles per hour that is two hours per week in the air—far from extreme in our frequent-flyer age). And then there’s my day job, working to advance Microsoft’s technology for e-memories, Total Recall, and data-intensive science. So my calendar is usually full, and it’s a challenge to get everything done.
At DEC, I used to get out of the office and go home when I wanted to actually accomplish anything because I was so inun dated with interaction at headquarters. My schedule was kept in calendar notebooks, in pencil. My home and work offices used to be crammed with filing cabinets, bookshelves, and great teetering heaps of paper covering most of the available horizontal space. It wasn’t actually as chaotic as it probably looked to others. I had a system in place—I am an engineer, after all—but still, the thought of ever going back to that way of organizing things sends a different kind of shiver down my spine.
In those days I was a “piler”—I created a pile of paper for each problem or topic that came my way. I wish I had a photo of the pile wall of my home office in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where I lived. The wall was roughly twenty-five feet long. It had six rows of shelves, providing room for around two hundred problem piles. When a memo, report, article, or something relevant to the issue came in, I merely stacked