Steve was an incredible product visionary and had an uncompromising sense of product design. Aldus and desktop publishing came about because Steve had a vision of what was possible by marrying a plain paper copier to a computer to make the Apple Laserwriter.

When the Laserwriter was introduced it cost $7000, more than twice as much as the HP Laserjet. And there were no applications that could make the Laserwriter do anything more than the Laserjet could do.

But the potential was there and PageMaker unlocked it. Steve brought a product to market knowing that someone would take advantage of it, but not knowing who that would be.

I remember Steve as the most persuasive person I ever met. We used to joke about it. After a meeting with Steve, during which you would be totally convinced of whatever he was telling you, we’d walk out of the building and look at each other and realize there were flaws in his logic that were unseeable while he was speaking. We called meeting with Steve “entering the reality-distortion field.”

Regardless of the flaws in his arguments, his vision was more right than not. The sales pitch to third parties—like Aldus—was often self-serving and we didn’t always listen. But he was always working to advance his vision and could be very persuasive in getting third parties like us on board.

I remember his unhappiness when we decided to port PageMaker to Windows. We had a frosty relationship for a year or so at that time. But desktop publishing was so important to Apple—many believe it saved the company—that we worked through it.

History will look kindly on Steve. As I write this on my iPad connected to the Internet through my iPhone on a ship in the middle of the Adriatic, I think his vision for mobile computing is just coming into being. We will be talking about Steve’s impact on the world for a long time.

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Although an attentive observer can see a steady stream of news articles from UW Computer Science & Engineering, with more than 40 faculty members and 750 students, there is more going on than is reported. When I was given an opportunity to occupy an office inside the Paul G. Allen Center, I was excited to take a closer look.

One of the most visible gems in CSE is Oren Etzioni. Etzioni has been the technical wizard behind at least four commercial products or services. Most famously, he was involved with Farecast, a web service to help people to decide when to buy airplane tickets at the best price. Farecast was sold to Microsoft and now is a key part of Bing Travel. Etzioni was the technologist behind Go2Net, Netbot, and MetaCrawler, all cutting-edge web services that became commercial products. Now his latest project, Decide.com, just went live, a service for deciding the best time to purchase consumer electronics equipment. The core technology behind Farecast and Decide.com is his approach to indexing and analyzing very large collections of text documents, searching for information to help people make better decisions.

Shwetak Patel is another sparkling gem in CSE. Patel, who specializes in sensor technology, was in the news recently because his company Zensi was sold to Belkin, a maker of computer and consumer electronics products. Through Zensi, Patel commercialized signal processing techniques for measuring electricity, water, and natural gas usage within a house without having to instrument every appliance. One sensor per house is enough to identify what device is using electricity, when it is using it, and how much is being used. The same techniques with different sensors work for water and natural gas. Patel also made a Hollywood appearance by selling a system for detecting the illegal copying of movies by digital cameras in movie theaters, which he sold to the Motion Picture Association of America. Currently he is doing compelling work with networks of low-power sensors that can be easily and cheaply deployed for residential and commercial building monitoring. Patel’s sensors are hidden inside a wall or under a water heater to detect and alert a homeowner, or an insurance company, when a sensor detects water leaks, fire or carbon monoxide. These sensors will be able to save the lives of many homeowners, and save insurers hundreds of millions of dollars; water damage claims now surpass fire claims and natural disasters and are very expensive to settle.

The UW CSE computer security team recently won gleaming accolades at the national collegiate cyber defense competition in April, evidence of the world-class expertise in this area at the UW. The challenge for teams from colleges across the company was to take control of and run an IT system while defending it from attack by professional “hackers” over a three day contest, and the UW team won the competition. Yoshi Kohno, a UW gem focused on computer security, has made news recently for exposing security holes in equipment we use every day. Kohno’s work highlights the potential for hackers to gain control of automobile systems, pacemakers, or baby monitors. Kohno not only exposes security holes, but develops tools and techniques for secure computing.

During my short time in CSE, I have discovered … Next Page »

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