REDMOND, Wash. (New York Times) — In a twist on the trend of failed Internet startups sending workers back to former employers, Microsoft's first official hire is returning to the fold.
Marc McDonald, an early programming whiz originally hired in April 1976 by an Albuquerque company then known as Micro-Soft, rejoined it recently as part of the company's acquisition of a 5-year-old Seattle electronic publishing company called Design Intelligence.
McDonald, 44, will be working in the e-books division on technology that automatically massages electronic content to fit differing screen sizes, formats and capabilities. The initial target will be the Microsoft Reader program featured on hand-held computers using Microsoft's PocketPC operating system, but the project could also have applications for wireless phones, tablet PCs and other devices for access to the "data cloud" of ubiquitous computing in Microsoft's .NET initiative.
McDonald said in a telephone interview that he was excited about working for his former employer, but noted that today's global enterprise bore little resemblance to the scrappy startup of his past.
"It felt kind of weird coming back," he said. When he left in 1984, the company had fewer than 500 employees, was based on Northup Way in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue and was more than three years away from becoming the world's No. 1 software power.
At his new office on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, he said, "I logged onto the network and there were 4,000 nodes," adding, "It's just so massive." Microsoft's head count today is 39,900. Although the corporate culture is still highly driven, "you don't see too many sleeping bags in offices any more," McDonald said.
Like other established companies in the high-technology arena, Microsoft has been rehiring workers lured away during the last two years by the promise of instant wealth in the dot-com boom. More than 200 former Microsoft employees are back with the company, a spokeswoman said.
The full circle that McDonald has come had considerably greater circumference. Graduating from the Lakeside private school in Seattle a year behind Microsoft's co-founder, Bill Gates, McDonald was recruited by Gates to help adapt the BASIC programming language to new microprocessors in the nascent personal computer market. He considered his starting pay of $8.50 an hour "a pretty good wage for the time."
The two, and a third Lakeside colleague, Microsoft's other co-founder, Paul G. Allen, liked to race through the streets of Albuquerque to a restaurant or theater. McDonald, who had a supercharged Saab Sonnet, dodged the question of whether he could beat Gates, who drove a Porsche 911.
"He could beat me in the straightaways, but I could do some things in the corners" because of the Saab's front-wheel drive, McDonald said.
McDonald went on to develop a file-allocation table, or FAT, for a disk-based version of BASIC and an early operating system he was working on called MIDAS. FAT caught the eye of Tim Paterson, developer of 16-bit QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System. When Microsoft purchased a refined version of QDOS from Paterson's company, Seattle Computer Products, for the original IBM PC, McDonald's technology evolved into the standard way that PCs store and organize data.
McDonald worked with Allen on later editions of DOS. Not long after Allen left Microsoft after a bout with Hodgkins disease, McDonald left as well.
"I was just looking for a change," said McDonald, who felt he had been at Microsoft "a long time." Cohorts at the time said McDonald was also tired of "butting heads" with Gates, whose enormous energy and drive took a toll on even close associates.
"It was a challenging environment, but not necessarily in a bad way," said Steve Wood, chief executive of Wireless Services Corp. in Bellevue and another of the "Albuquerque 11" featured in a subsequently famous photograph taken just before Microsoft moved from New Mexico.
McDonald spent a year doing contract programming and "taking some time off" before becoming the first employee at Asymetrix, a company Allen founded in 1985. After a decade with Asymetrix, McDonald was lured to Design Intelligence as its first employee by the founder, Mike Orr, another early Microsoft hire. Orr also rejoined Microsoft with the acquisition.
"I always have to be No. 1," McDonald joked.
McDonald, who said he sold the last of his initial Microsoft options grant "some time ago" but remained an active investor, sold all his Microsoft shares when the stock "was still in the $90 range." He estimates his current net worth at "around $1 million."
Terms of the Design Intelligence acquisition were not disclosed by Microsoft, which said it would have no material impact on earnings.
"What makes you stick with this business is you eventually always find something new and interesting," McDonald said. His new technology aims to alter text size and styles automatically, enlarge and then reduce segments of a document depending on which part is being read at the time, and give a "look and feel" to displays based on user preferences. "If they're a picture-and-bullet-item person versus a long-dry-paragraph person, you can dynamically adjust the results based on that information," McDonald explained. The technology will use XML, or extensible markup language, and other software standards to provide universal descriptions of document traits needed to make the system work.
McDonald hinted that "adaptive applications" like his could help restore the software upgrade cycle that drove the personal computer revolution but seems stalled today.
"You have incredible speed and horsepower, but not the applications that require it," he said. "We can change all that."