I Sing the Body Electronic
by Fred Moody · first published 1995
9mentions
2recommended by
3HN commenters
2014–2022first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
Moody follows a team of Microsoft developers as they work on a children's compact disc to be called Explorapedia.
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In Fred Moody's "I Sing The Body Electronic"[0], there is a passage where the author gets to read such postmortem documents and is surprised by the brutal honesty, but does not give any quotes. Now I see what he meant. [0] which I highly recommend,…
on “Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0 Postmortem (1989) [pdf]” ↗There is an entire book on the creation of Explorapedia, I sing the body electronic: A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier by Fred Moody (my copy is ISBN 0-340-64927-5). It's fascinating for its insights not only on the messiness of the design process, but also the process…
on “I Miss Microsoft Encarta” ↗A couple of years back I was lucky enough to get a copy of Fred Moody's "I Sing The Body Electronic" for cheap. It is fairly old, obviously, but it was a very interesting read. (The problems it describes are slightly different from the ones you or the blog post describe, but not totally unrelated,…
on “My Microsoft Experience (2013)” ↗There is a very interesting book, "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody, who had the opportunity to observe a team at Microsoft very intimately over the course of a project. Back then, apparently part of the problem was that good managers were very rare, and…
on “Why you should not develop apps for Windows 10” ↗Not sure if it fits your bill, but I found "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody a very interesting read. Moody was able to get some pretty intimate insights into the development of a software product at Microsoft at the beginning of the 1990s (1992-1993, I think).…
on “Four DB2 Code Bases?” ↗I can recommend "I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier" by Fred Moody. It is pretty old, and I think it's been out of print for a while, but if you can get your hands on a copy, it is well worth the effort.…
on “Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?” ↗"Draw me a house," with the gotcha if you don't ask questions, is described by Fred Moody in I Sing the Body Electronic. That's early 90s Microsoft.
on “Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?” ↗Reminds me of a story from "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody where a programmer leaves a playful entry titled "Slayer Sucks Live A Vacuum" in an almost-relase-version of Microsoft Encarta. Fortunately, the good people at Microsoft knew that Slayer…
on “A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)” ↗Who doesn't love a good pun? As a a Slayer fan, programmer and Windows admin, I really dig the name. ;-) In "I Sing The Body Electronic", Fred Moody describes Alice Cooper visiting the Microsoft campus (which is home to a fair share of metal heads, apparently). "Why are you guys called Microsoft? Wouldn't you rather be called Macro-Hard?"…
on “SLAyer” ↗