The Original Remote Developer | CoRecursive Podcast
CoRecursive #069<br>The Original Remote Developer<br>With Paul Lutus<br>Listen Now<br>Podcast Player
Today’s episode is about remote work. Well, sort of. I found someone with a different perspective on remote work and a fantastic story to share, Paul Lutus.<br>I think that he might be the original remote software developer.<br>He left California behind for a lower cost of living in Oregon. And from Oregon, he developed software for Apple. But the kind of surprising thing is he did this in the 1970s! And he did it so well he became rich and even briefly quite famous.
Guest<br>Paul Lutus<br>@p_lutus
Table Of Contents
Transcript<br>Famous for Writing Software in 1976<br>Adam: Hello, and welcome to CoRecursive. I’m Adam Gordon Bell. Each episode, a guest shares the story behind a piece of software being built. Today’s episode is about remote work. Well, sort of. I’ve been working from my home office for almost exactly 10 years now. And when everyone started working from home, I felt like I had some tips to share, like to break up the Zoom meetings you can just go for walking meetings. Just call in on your phone. It makes a big difference. But I’m not totally sure we figured out all that remote work can be. So I found someone who has something to teach me about remote work. I think that he might be the original remote software developer. He left California behind for a lower cost of living in Oregon. And from Oregon, he developed software for Apple. But the kind of surprising thing is he did this all in 1976. And he did it so well he became rich and even briefly quite famous.<br>Paul: That’s 60s artist, whose name escapes me, said everybody is famous for 15 seconds. I was famous for slightly longer than that. But during that time, it was nuts. People would show up and try to ask for autographs and stuff. It was weird. I mean, it never occurred to me that people would want the autographs of a computer programmer. I mean, that’s just not like the normal, famous person kind of an image I have in my mind.<br>Adam: That was Paul Lutus. He built Apple Writer for the Apple II. And he thinks there’s something that we, as a profession, are missing, something that we’ve forgotten. But to understand his story and how he got on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, how he got interviewed for national TV programs and all for writing software, we need a little background.<br>A Dropout Wires the Space Shuttle<br>Adam: Paul grew up poor and was always into electronics. People would bring him old broken TVs or radios to tinker with. And he’d try to repair them. He dropped out of school and he traveled around the US for a bit, living a somewhat nomadic life. Then he moved to San Francisco around 1967.<br>Paul: I would be on the street in San Francisco going, “Oh, this is kind of cool. I could just live here and I can go find somewhere to find some food.” And a person walked up and said, “I hear you know about electricity. We need to have a light switch,” blah, blah, blah. And I would do that. And that ended up being some way I made a lot of money without actually being officially hired by anybody. People just knew that I was out there and that I could do that kind of work. So that ended up being something that tided me over, even in those times when I was, for all practical purposes, a street person in times when being a street person was still romantic, which that’s obviously gone away now.<br>Adam: Yeah. I can’t imagine having a problem with electricity here and getting somebody from the street to just monkey around.<br>Paul: It’s a little bit different in the Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. It was pretty obvious to a lot of people at the time that there were a lot of very skilled people out there who were there by choice. They weren’t necessarily all teenagers or all druggies or whatever. That was actually the summer of love. That was the last time when living on the street was regarded as a romantic idea. And it lasted about 12 months. And then it was increasingly a lot of people who were into hard drugs or who were dealers or whatever, a bunch of other weird things. 1967 was that a golden moment where you could live on the street in San Francisco and people would come around and they’d give you the benefit of the doubt. And people were pretty well-behaved. But after that, it all went downhill very quickly.<br>Adam: So let’s fast forward to the early 70s. The 60s are gone. Street living has lost its romance and Paul needs a job. And he sees an interesting job listing.<br>Paul: This was a contractor for NASA who was charged with the responsibility to create all the lights on the NASA space shuttle. And the contract called for them to create dimmable, fluorescent lights, which hadn’t been done until then. And when I read that, I went, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” And it was something that...