Two good friends died last week. I want to share my experiences with both.
Bill was William English. He is the real father of the modern computer. But New York is so arrogant and blind to the rest of the world, his obit could never convey that reality.
Bill and I served on the Board of the Point Foundation for three years along with Huey. Point was the final money from the Last Whole Earth Catalog.
Bill ran the Xerox computer lab called Xerox Park. Xerox Park developed everything of significance about the modern computer. The mouse is mentioned in the NYTimes obit. The really important things were the software for editing writing, the software for drawing and painting and the entire screen-user interaction. Steve Jobs admitted that everything in the early Apples came from Bill's Xerox Park.
Bill developed a typing systems for Japanese and Arabic. Xerox joined with Fuji to promote the Japanese typing system. I stayed at Bill's (and Roberta's) house in Tokyo. Roberta had great taste and later opened an art gallery with plenty of Japanese art. Bill's typing system was never adapted by the Japanese. I don't know what happened to Arabic.
Bill was a quiet engineer. Subdued, gentle, attentive, energetic and deeply honest. My girl friend and I had dinner at Bill and Roberta's home on the side of Twin Peaks. At the time they were on the mouse diet. Mice fed only 30% of a normal diet lived longer. I left very hungry.
At that time Bill was on the Board of Sun Micro Systems which was jointly, with Apple, suing Microsoft for stealing the technology of screen-human interaction. Bill was widely known in the tech community as the father of the technology. I suggested that Bill was now in the position to force a settlement of the lawsuit. He did.
Huey was Huey Johnson. The four stories about Huey, give you a good sense of the man. In the first, Huey wanted me to see an elegant garden on a cliff over the Pacific. The matron wanted to donate it to the Nature Conservancy which Huey was running at the time. She pointed out some esoteric flower that Huey later told me she got wrong. I asked why he didn't point out the error. He said he dealt with donors all the time and it was always best to let them believe they were the experts.
In the second story, Huey outlined his idea for an urban-suburban land trust. I told him how to start it and explained the legal details. He wanted me to help him pick out his treasurer. I did some interviews and found the right man. It is the Trust for Public Land, and is gigantic.
In the third story Huey took me wild pig hunting on a private reserve near Santa Rosa. I went off on my own into a beautiful hillside at dawn's light. A pig ran past me and I shot it through the heart. I walked around and couldn't find it. When we met later I told Huey about it. In his mind he doubted I, an intellectual banker, could shoot accurately. He didn't know I had earned a Sharpshooters badge in the Army with the same M1Carbine. He told me that wild pigs can run a quarter mile after being shot in the heart. Now he tells me. He also may not have been willing to walk far down the hill to look for the animal because we didn't have the equipment to haul it the mile or so up the steep hill.
Huey loved being a greenie but always bugged fellow greenies with the fact that he loved hunting.
Lastly, Huey met me, in the early 1990s with my coffee group in North Beach when he was running Resource Renewal. I told him I had recently figured out that the population explosion was over and invited him to the party I was throwing to celebrate. He turned red and told me not to mention my findings to anyone. The fear of the population explosion was his most potent fund raising tool.
I miss both Bill and Huey.