Dave Plummer

The actual really tight code to do the real work of transferring data to and from the cache was 68,000 assembly.

Everything else was C.

Okay, this is like file system IO?

Device block IO.

So any block that gets serviced from the drive would go through my cache first, and it was an N-way associative cache.

And so it would try to match the geometry of the drive and do prefetch based on you're trying to read a whole track at one time, that kind of thing.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I think I started on Usenet and some of the Amiga forums posted, here's my trial version, try it out for 30 days, see what you like.

Okay.

And eventually got picked up by a few retailers.

And I remember I was with my now wife in her car and she had a cell phone because her dad was very concerned about her safety.

And so this is late 80s and she's got, you know, the antenna on the roof and the big box in the trunk, the whole deal.

But we got a call from one of the software retailers that wanted to buy 50 copies at 20 bucks, which to me is a thousand bucks, which in 1989 or whatever year it is, was a big deal.

And so eventually a number of companies just bought inventory.

At the time, it was the single most potent assemblage of smart people that I've ever been a part of.

And I've been in academia and I've been in industry to a certain extent.

And...

You know, when you're working at a regular computer company, the one guy who actually knows what he's doing, his smarter friend, he probably works at Microsoft.

So when you get there, you're the big cheese from your small town.

You think you know a lot.