2001-01-13 (Saturday, 13:14:23)

For some reason, sitting here in my attic on this rainy afternoon trying to fix some stupid mouse-tracking bug for the umpteen-millionth time in my career as a software developer, I started thinking about old friends at Polytron back when it was first getting started. It occurred to me that an Internet search engine might show what they're up to. Here is what Google reported. Richard Kinnaird, who was president of Polytron back in 1988 or so, still seems to be more or less retired; it looks like he maintains a web site for his wife's new-age pharmacy. Don Kinzer and Eric Johnson, who left Polytron with Milo Wadlin sometime around 1990 or 1991 to found Premia, appear to have sold Premia to StarBase for $25 million. Doug Root, who was Polytron's VP of marketing at around that time, must have joined them after trying to start a company with Alex and Olga Khain in the early 90's. Skip Russell, Adam Simantel, and Sue Taylor still seem to be back at whatever Polytron has now become -- Merant, I think -- working on PVCS. I couldn't find anything about Robert Odell or John Elliot, although I hear from Chris Pearson, who seems to be doing very well at Intel, that John is there too. I could find precious little about Clark and Stephanie Rasmussen, although guessing from this and this, I'd say they're probably still in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jim Besemer seems to be consulting still. I heard at a Christmas party this year that Carol Carmick has moved to Berkeley to study theology, but I couldn't find anything recent about her on the web. Howard Mercier seems still to be at Step Technology. Dianne Jenkins and Bill Babcock are apparently still married and running their company together. Gordon Johnson must still be in the area -- he still maintains his enigmatic web page -- but I couldn't find anything else about him.

That was a fun time.