The Industry choice

[Scott David Daniels]

Bulba! wrote:
> .... The Americans show the French engineers a working prototype.
> The French engineers scratch their heads and ask warily:
> "OK, it works in practice; but will it work in theory?"

I once worked with a computer built by two graduate students who formed
a company.  The scuttlebutt was that they were very different people.
Of one it was said, "his designs are beautiful and provably correct,
but they have the nasty habit of not working when you wire them up."
The other's story was more like, "its amazing, you can prove his
designs cannot possibly work, but every time he builds them, they
seem to work in defiance of every engineering principle."  Both of
them had some version of the social skills of your average technical
genius, that is to say, less than the world normally requires.

When it became known these two were working together, the generally
accepted view was that this company would either produce a
spectacularly fast machine, or at least one of them would be dead.

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org