"There's a need for detailed technical reference. But there's also a need to make information accessible and practical without going all the way into the guts of an operating system."
Age: 50
Current Position: Chairman of Interactive Development Environments, Inc.
Years in the Industry: 25
Place of Birth: The Bronx, New York
Junior High Schools Attended: 5
Car He Drives: '88 Acura with 46,000 miles. ("I try to use public transportation as much as possible.")
Children: A daughter (9) and a son (23)
Favorite Non-Work Activities: Biking, tennis, and running
Pet Open Systems Peeve: "People who knowingly create a proprietary environment and then declare it to be open. That's not right. Actually, the Web is probably the best example of openness right now. You can connect to your service provider and then pull up pages from anywhere in the world, regardless of what system is installed at the other end. The same can be true in corporations where they put in a lot of bridges and routers. But I don't like non-open systems referred to as open. I just don't like misrepresentation in any form."
By Richard Cole
You don't often encounter a distinguished professor who turns his back on tenure and enters the turbulent seas of business, especially the rough waters of high technology. Many people have disappeared into those depths. But Anthony Wasserman did just that in 1987 when he left the University of California at Berkeley to found Interactive Development Environments, Inc. (IDE), a software development firm. What's more, he has lived to tell the tale, grow the company to $25 million in revenue, and continue his career in interactive software research.
"It was like jumping off into the deep end when you don't know how to swim," Tony says now. But he would take the plunge again. "Business is a great reality check," he says. "In the academic world, you concentrate on abstractions. But in a company, especially when you have to pay people twice a month, you're forced to concentrate on what works and which products the customers are actually going to buy."
Wasserman's first experience with business involved watching his father. The senior Mr. Wasserman worked in retailing, then as now a tough industry with strong competition and low profit margins. The family moved around the country many times as Mr. Wasserman worked in various stores--five times during Tony's junior high school days alone. After graduating from high school in Coral Gables, FL, Tony headed to the San Francisco Bay Area and enrolled in UC Berkeley.
By today's standards, the 1620 was "laughable," says Tony. "We're talking maybe 8K here." But at the time, it represented some of the most advanced technology available for numerical calculation. (Back then, even the IBM 360 was still in development.) "It [the 1620] was an interesting machine," he recalls with an equal mixture of fondness and amusement. "It had variable word length. It was cute--that's the word for it."
Tony began learning the fundamentals of computing on the 1620, writing ALGOL programs. As a double math and physics major, he also had free access to the computer, day or night. "That was great," he says. "Here I was, a lowly undergraduate, being able to write programs alongside physics grad students doing cloud chamber experiments."
Tony earned his bachelor's degree in 1966. Since UC Berkeley didn't have a computer science department at that time, he moved to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to work on his doctorate. There he had his first encounter with the state of the art: a Burroughs B5500, a computer he remembers fondly. "It was the best machine that had ever been created. Stack architecture, virtual memory--it was wonderful." Even by today's standards, he declares, the 5500 was a superb machine to program on, even if the software was fairly basic. "This was when the first time-sharing systems and utilities were being introduced," he recalls. "It was entertaining."
At Madison, Tony also began work on what was to become a major theme in his research: interactive programs. "Today, you see a lot of thought given to usability and interfaces," he says, "but at the time, it was rare to see programs that were designed for people who knew nothing about computers." It's safe to say that the computers at that time were not exactly "intuitive." On the Burroughs machine, for example, the "user interface" was a teletypewriter that could produce 10 characters per second (capital letters only) on a roll of yellow paper. "You had to really press down on the keys to make a letter," Tony says. "Not exactly touch-typing." He received his doctorate in 1970 and returned to the Bay Area.
Tony was among the first instructors, teaching students from a variety of backgrounds, only some of whom had degrees in computer sciences. "It was at UC San Francisco that I actually became a computer scientist," he says. "Teaching in the program made me a generalist." He designed and taught courses in data structures, operating systems, software engineering, and database management. At the same time, he held a lecturer's appointment in computer sciences at UC Berkeley. That appointment allowed him to stay in contact with other researchers and continue his own research.
Tony and his colleagues began work on a project called User Software Engineering. This centered around the design of interactive information systems, a continuation of his research at Madison. The project also had strong ties to his work in medical information systems. Tony could see that in hospitals and clinics there was an important need to develop easy-to-learn information systems for users who were not computer professionals, such as nurses and lab technicians. Could a system be built that they would actually use? More specifically, how could a system be developed that would allow these users to design an interface themselves to support their needs?
In attempting to answer these questions, Tony and his colleagues came up with several ideas that were new at the time. The most important was rapid prototyping of interactive systems. He explains, "We built tools that allowed users to mock up an interface, animate it, and try it out. User Software Engineering actually became a methodology for building these interfaces, and we built tools to support the methodology."
At this point, Tony realized that he had the makings of a commercial product. The powerful Sun workstations gave his group the ability to build an easy-to-understand graphical editor for the User Software Engineering interface. They also set about designing a number of graphical software design tools that could run on the workstations.
In 1987, Wasserman and his colleagues negotiated a license agreement with the University of California that gave them the right to commercialize their software tool and support the companies who were already using it. The result was IDE.
Initially, they funded the company by developing the Unix for Programmers course for Sun. Sun realized that many IT programmers were coming to Sun workstations from mainframes and minicomputers and needed a basic introduction to Unix. Having worked with Unix for several years, Tony had the technical background as well as the teaching experience to put together a comprehensive lecture course on Unix and open systems technology.
Today, IDE offers Software through Pictures, a family of products that includes tools for database design, test case generation, and object-oriented analysis and design.
Perhaps more importantly, he knows both the theoretical and practical aspects of IT, a point he raises in talking about the current state of technical publishing. In bookstores today, he says, a professional can find many product-specific titles, such as a book on HTML syntax or Visual Basic release 4. There are also many general and abstract books available. But Tony feels that more titles are needed that concentrate on the area between high-level theory and the nuts and bolts that will help the professional in dealing with real-world decisions.
"When your management tells you to integrate the entire corporation, you can't just call up the vendors," Tony says. "You need the right information to help you understand the principles, but in a practical way so you can make the right choices."
Tony also mentions on-line publishing. He would like to see the Press use the World-Wide Web as both a marketing tool and a way for readers to preview books and receive updated material. For instance, the Press could put up a table of contents or a sample chapter from current titles, as well as updates as appropriate. In the future, entire books might be downloaded, although Tony doubts that readers will throw out their hard copies. "I don't think we'll ever evolve into a paperless office, at least not judging from my office," he says laughing.
In 1995, Tony was selected to give the inaugural Stevens Lecture on software development methods at the CASE convention. On that occasion, it was said of him that "more than almost anyone else, he has successfully bridged the research community and the commercial world." Such talents will be appreciated--and required--in his new duties as editor-in-chief.