What’s the worth of the one who wrote (or, wrought) the software that made my writing of and your reading of this possible? It’s a mere US$1 billion, according to Forbes magazine. In my book that number, compared to the difference Charles Simonyi has made to human life and work, for you and me, is a mere token of our appreciation of the contribution to our lives of the father of WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get; the acronym is pronounced WIZ-e-wig) application software.
Charles Simonyi, former chief architect at Microsoft, is a computer software guru who as head of Microsoft’s application software group oversaw the creation of Microsoft’s inimitable and most successful applications: Word and Excel. Now head of his own company, Intentional Software, his aim is to develop and market the radical concept of ‘intentional programming’.
Mr. Simonyi is reckoned the most successful ‘pure’ programmer in the world. Richer ones like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Google’s Larry Page are so because they founded and manage techno-leviathan business ventures. Mr. Simonyi’s wealth accrued solely from writing codes. He devised the programming method that Microsoft’s software developers have used for the last quarter-century.
But Dr. Simonyi, 58, was important even before he joined Microsoft. He ranks among the fabled supergeeks who invented personal computing at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, where he wrote the first modern application, a word processor called Bravo. The word before “Word,” it displayed text on a computer screen as it would appear when printed on page. Indeed, WYSIWYG!
Simonyi was born in Budapest, Hungary to Károly Simonyi, a professor of electrical engineering at Technical University of Budapest. While in secondary school, he got work part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory with a large Soviet Ural II mainframe computer under its watch. Here it was that he became strongly attracted to computing and learned programming from one of the laboratory’s engineers.
By the time he left school he had learned to develop compilers, computer programs for translating high-level programming language into machine code. He sold one of them to a government department. In 1966, Simonyi went to work in Denmark for A/S Regnecentralen, from where he moved to the United States in 1968 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics, specialising in Mathematics and Statistics, in 1972.
Next, Simonyi proceeded to Stanford University for graduate studies, where he was hired by Xerox PARC in its heyday. He worked alongside programming leading lights like Alan Kay and Robert Metcalfe. It was with another Xerox alumnus Butler Lampson that he developed Bravo. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1977. His dissertation was on a software project management technique called “metaprogramming”. This is the theoretical framework for Simony’s whatever-you-can-do-I-can-do-it-meta approach to life and work.
At Metcalfe’s suggestion, in 1981, Simonyi applied—directly—to Bill Gates for a job. His coming would lead to the development of what became Microsoft’s most profitable products. At Microsoft, Simonyi introduced the techniques of object-oriented programming that he had learned at Xerox. A patriot to the core, he developed the Hungarian notation convention for naming variables that has been widely used inside Microsoft and is today one technique among many that helps programmers produce better code faster. Simonyi stayed on at Microsoft throughout its meteoric rise and became one of its highest-ranking developers, only to leave abruptly in 2002 to co-found a new company that markets concepts he had developed at Microsoft Research.
An active philanthropist, he endowed the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science chair at Oxford University in 1995. It was first held by now retired rave-making scientist, Richard Dawkins. He also endowed a Charles Simonyi Professor for Innovation in Teaching Chair at Stanford University. In January 2004, Simonyi created the USD $50 million Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences through which he support arts, science, and education.
Simonyi received the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award in 2004 for his “innovative work in information technology that has impacted the industry greatly”. His hobbies range from classical music to outer space; he became, in 2007, the fifth space tourist ever.
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