wjs@fred.cs.washington.edu (William Shipley) (03/13/90)
In my posting a few weeks ago on the developer's course here at the UW, I made a few factual errors which have been pointed out to me. I should stress that the purpose of that posting was to give a general view of what the whole experience was like, and that any information in the post was provided as examples, not as verified facts. In a number of places I said that a NeXT person said something and gave the general idea of the quote without actually checking my facts. I internally justified this by thinking that the posting wasn't intended to give specifics, it was just to provide a broad impression. This was irresponsible of me. My only explanation is that I'm fairly new to the net, fairly young, and fairly eager. Specifically, my quote about the color board was just plain wrong. I totally misremembered what was said. The point of my quote about support was mainly that NeXT already treats academics like they are developers, which I thought was an incredibly smart policy. NeXT has, from the beginning, treated universities as if they had brains, and I just wanted to emphasize they're still doing it. Finally, the only person who mentioned (briefly) internal NeXT projects around me was the one who didn't know that I was not a campus support person, and therefore hadn't signed a non-disclosure. I didn't know this at the time of my last posting. He also mentioned at the time that he wasn't saying anything that wasn't already considered common knowledge. I should have mentioned this in my last posting. Also, I messed up some of the positions of people who worked for NeXT Seattle. Most strangely, the lady that I thought was in charge isn't. I don't know how I got the impression she was. She's still a neat lady, though, and her enthusiasm and good humor was typical of the other NeXT employees, which was my main point. I apologize for the errors. In the future I will be much more careful when posting to the net. Note that I still stand behind the overall impressions I gave, it's just some of the specifics I fouled up. -william shipley university of washington