Programmers at Work

Programmers at Work… does for budding software writers what the Paris Review interviews did for would-be fiction writers. It provides comfort, inspiration, and a sense of community with those who have already succeeded in the field… it is not to be missed.” - Erik Sandberg-Diment, The New York Times

They had 64 kilobytes. They built the world.

At the outset of personal computing, the engineers who invented it had almost nothing to work with — and used that nothing to create everything. The Programmers at Work 40th Anniversary Edition brings together landmark interviews with nineteen of the most influential software architects who ever lived: Charles Simonyi, who shaped modern productivity software at Microsoft; Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented the spreadsheet; Andy Hertzfeld, who conjured the original Macintosh and fifteen more who wrote the code that changed how humanity thinks, works, and creates.

These interviews are not just retrospectives. They are primary sources — candid, technical, alive — capturing how these minds actually worked: how they designed under pressure, wrote code in memory-starved machines, and solved problems that no one had ever encountered before. Their insights are both a history of a revolutionary era and a masterclass in constraint-driven engineering.

As edge computing, IoT, and robotics once again demand that developers do more with radically less, the discipline forged in the 64KB era turns out to be exactly the discipline the future requires. Complete with original program diagrams, algorithms, and code samples, Programmers at Work is the rare technical book that is also a remarkable story — and the rare history book that is also a working manual.

List of software architects included: Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson, John Warnock, Gary Kildall, Bill Gates, John Page, C. Wayne Ratliff, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Jonathan Sachs, Ray Ozzie, Peter Roizen, Bob Carr, Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, Toru Iwatani, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, Michael Hawley.