Much lore revolves around Microsoft’s past. For those that have never been to our corporate location in Redmond, WA, Microsoft’s campus has a place called “Building 92”, also known as “The Commons” where we house a variety of fun things like our company store, more than a dozen restaurants, our company library, cellular carrier outlets for all 4 major phone vendors, a bike shop, etc.
“THE FOUNDER PHOTOS”
One of the things they have there is the Visitor Center, which is sort of like what used to be the Microsoft Museum. It’s one of my favorite places because they have so many old memories of the computing industry from the past that has shaped our present today. A classic is a photo they have on display of the early employees or “founders’ of Microsoft – the one everyone is familiar with. What’s special however about the display however is that they did two things:
- They identified all the people pictured in the photo.
- They took another photo of what they look like today.
For those paying attention, you’ll notice two differences in the photos from “then” & “now”.
- Bob Wallace is missing from the ‘now’ photo.
Sadly, Bob passed away in 2002. Employee #9 at Microsoft, Bob was known for having engineering a solution for printing software manuals from the fledgling Microsoft back in the day. He was a leader of the Shareware movement of the era and went on to create the highly popular PC-Write word processing software. (God – I remember that program so fondly as being on every Shareware floppy in the known universe.)
Bob Wallace, 53, Software Pioneer, Dies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/business/bob-wallace-53-software-pioneer-dies.html?sec=&spon= - Miriam Lubow was not in the original ‘then’ photo.
Who is Miriam Lubow you may ask? Microsofties remember her as the original matriarch of Microsoft. In a company of geeks, she kept the company operational with her common sense, for example, making sure Bill remembered to eat and wear a clean change of clothes to business meetings. Miriam sadly passed away soon after this photo was taken in 2008.
Miriam Lubow: 1935-2008: Microsoft loses the ‘Mama’ of its early years
http://www.seattlepi.com/business/373123_lubowobit01.html
There’s also a cutout with ‘the founder’s’ signatures on it:
I have quite a few photos from my last trip so I think I’ll post a few more things about our campus that I think people would be interested in reading about.
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 
