I had a chance to catch up with Peter Coffee, who recently ended his 18 years at Salesforce to focus on philanthropy and pro bono consulting. I first met Peter in the mid-1980s, when he was working for a defense contractor in IT, and I had just left working for an insurance company’s IT department. Both of us were living in LA and both of us were part of the advance guard of installing PCs around our companies. I had taken a job with PC Week, writing my little corporate IT heart out, and I had just hired Peter to be part of a team of product reviewers and in-house analysts.
Back in those days, there were many different PC makers, each running a slightly different collection of hardware and operating system. MS DOS, the Microsoft version, hadn’t yet become a standard, and there were also other operating systems that have since either died (like CP/M) or have morphed into major big deals (like the early versions that became Linux). Peter recalls one debate that he had in person with Bill Gates in those early years, where he argued that MS DOS might be the technically superior product, but other DOS versions put more tools in the box. Those were the days where you could buttonhole Gates in person.
Before we came to PC Week, Peter and I would examine these products and make recommendations to our corporate user base and management about which ones would become the company standard. Given that both of our companies were huge IBM customers, you might think that IBM had the PC world locked up, but this wasn’t always the case.
Peter and the rest of my team at PC Week Labs were early to do product reviews and write about the issues that we saw in terms of our corporate context. “We created an entire new way of breaking news by doing tech investigations and analysis. We would write short pieces that were published the following week, originating this content from our technical backgrounds,” he said, giving me credit for creating this journalistic model that has since flourished and now seems in decline. We also did numerous stunts, such as testing which network topologies were actually faster (Ethernet) and why early Windows was a bust (it ran on top of DOS rather than replacing it) or about the 386 CPU. They were heady times, to be sure. It was a model that I brought over to Network Computing magazine, which I began in the summer of 1990.
Peter reminded me that many tech pubs — including most of the overseas ones — had a pay to play model, where the writers would offer up glowing reviews of the products of the major advertisers. What we did was having strong opinions and having the technical chops to back them up.
But times have changed. Now everyone is familiar with PCs, and takes them for granted. You don’t need a degree in Computer Science to be able to program, “because computer literacy is more about thinking about a problem than learning how to write code,” as Peter told me. “It is about finding the right tool to do the job, and assembling connections and anticipating the questions and problems that lie in the future. That has changed the whole notion of technical expertise into tying data sources and algorithms and understanding what the ultimate user wants to know.”
Several years ago, Peter and his wife started a non-profit foundation that will occupy their full-time attention. The foundation will focus on funding local efforts to improve climate, STEM education and other matters. His goal is to bootstrap these efforts into a better position to obtain national or international support. He said, “These are problems that could exponentially bloom into major issues, but they need help when they are still small and solvable.” I wish them well.
Thinking of the old days made me remember when we relied on trade publications for computer news and that time John Dvorak reported on the “Chang Modification”.
The good ‘ole days!
How fun to see Peter Coffee’s name appear. I always eagerly awaited that PC week analysis you guys did when when I was a student and even more so during my own career at Microsoft. The Watcom compiler was indeed good..the benchmark we used in our early work on the 32bit compiler. It would take some time for Microsoft to counter it well; it came about the time I switched at Microsoft to work on early email from the tools group. I very much disagree with Peter’s view of the value of computer science. It’s more valuable than ever I would say; and frankly your quoted comment makes the point. understanding data architecture, security, algorithms, human computer interaction is as important as it ever was. The avenues of learning computer science of certainly broadened; and while one could probably take the ACM recommended curriculum and get it entirely from youtube; few will complete it that way. The good news is if we give students a good foundation in computational thinking they can learn what they need in their chosen field, though there is still lots of room in the field of computer science and great tools avialble to bolt great solutions together.
Finally, on windows; I think a key point is missing; which is windows having tremendous backward compatibility (not sure it’s quite as good today as it was through the Windows XP days). Working with what you have now and what you want to work with in the future is key aspect of a killer software product. Indeed, its ultimately the reason in the 90s Windows NT cleaned the clock of Sun and Netware. Though point taken that other than as a great runtime for Excel (was there ever a better desktop app?–one could argue Lotus Notes but it didn’t have the staying power) Windows 2.x still left some room to grow!
Yup, we grew up the good old days- I was fixing Apple IIe and the big floppy disks..and the 1200bps modems. I started with IBM mainframe OS JCL, Tandem and the JCL cards , Cobol, Fortran.
I still have old Macs in my basement and keeping them running:
https://chrisgoh.com/old-macs/
Wow! Brings back great memories!!!! What a wonderful catch-up.
I met Peter when we were both doing project at the well-heeled 1990’s PC Magazine Labs. I remember him well. Great guy! Great that you have helped us catch up on Peter’s whereabouts.
When you mention Peter Coffee and “… the days where you could buttonhole Gates in person,” it brings up a personal memory.
It was in early 1990 at the Comdex convention. I had been invited to one those fabulous Spencer F. Katt PC Week parties. This one was held in the Man o’ War room at the Sands Hotel, which was more like a ground-floor apartment than hotel suite.
Peter and Bill G were in a heated discussion. Like others, I drifted over to possibly join in their conversation, but both were so engaged in talk that neither one made as much as eye contact with anyone else in the room. As was clear, though, that they were discussion OS/2. Peter wrote an outstanding column in PC Week at the time on the subject.
Around that time, we had finished conducting a large-scale survey of IT managers about their current and planned use of OS/2 and other operating systems. The results weren’t favorable for OS/2 and as you might imagine, management at IBM and Microsoft were keenly interested.
It wasn’t long after that IBM and Microsoft parted ways on the partnership.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Those were heady times, when a front row seat could be found more easily and in many places.
It’s good to be reminded of Peter and to hear how he’s giving back.