Link to the Show / Show NotesAn interview with John Nordlinger of Microsoft Research.
Dave and John pretty much talked about how gaming can change everything from computer science, to university curricula to the whole darned world. If you are at all interested in such topics you can find out a lot more here.
John Nordlinger is currently Program Manager at Microsoft Research. John got his start with computers earning money to pay for his Philosophy degree at Northeastern University. [in between or during classes he played arcade games] He was then hired by Digital Equipment Corporation to troubleshoot and work on VAX/VMS and DEC OSF/1 as a Principal engineer. [inside Digital, folks in engineering, including John, played Moriah on VAX/VMS].
Around the time Digital management thought adding posix to VAX/VMS justified the rename to OpenVMS, John coincidentally left to live in North Conway, NH, where he hiked, climbed ice and jumped started friend's cars for all but the three weeks of summer - he also played Tombraider and Pitfall during the long dark and cold nights. One muddy spring day in Northern NH, John found a copy of the new magazine Wired in a convenience store, next to the beer and hunting ammo, he decided to return to high tech and sent a mail to his friends at Oracle.
As a technical director for the Digital product line, John was hired by Oracle to work on 64-bit Oracle and then to launch the Oracle 64-bit VLM database (on Digital's Alpha) using SAS Insight on the frontend. The event, at the Equitable in NYC, was a huge success, largely due to the successful demos and Larry Ellison's stage presence. . Microsoft's SQL Server marketing group noticed that event, and invited John to do a similar (but much larger) event a year later, including the 64-bit SQL Server database, special supporting versions of WindowXP and SAS Insight, again on the front end. Also this time there were five other high end Back Office demos, (again in the Equitable building in NY) at Microsoft's now renown Scalability Day. There and elsewhere John, working with MSR's wizard Jim Gray, launched Terraserver; Thousand of Billions byte database and map of the US and other KGB interested regions. Despite early predictions of its demise, Terraserver remains a very popular web resource.
John had little time for games while in SQL Server, so he left Microsoft, and traveled in India, Thailand and Italy for a couple of years, eventually returning 2.5 years later to work in MSR University Relations. John now is responsible for influencing CS curriculum to inspire future cs students with the use computer gaming themes and technologies. On the weekends or late at night, he sometimes plays Everquest2.
John will be speaking at the upcoming FuturePlay conference in Toronto.
Music in this episode from Unlce Seth and the Robert Farrell Band. Both bands performed at PAB 2007.
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