Which Walter Smith am I?
There’s no shortage of people named Walter Smith. Fortunately, I have a few distinguishing features.
Jackson Fish Market
I am helping to start a new company called Jackson Fish Market. We’re still very much in the bootstrapping stage. Please follow along on our blog as we figure out what we’re doing.
Microsoft
I worked for Microsoft from mid-1996 to early 2007 as a developer, architect, and development manager (sometimes simultaneously).
During the first couple of years, I worked mostly with Steve Capps in cooperation with the Internet Explorer and Windows Shell teams. This mostly consisted of suggestions, discussions, and internal UI prototypes, some of which made it recognizably into a product (e.g., the history, favorites, and search bars in IE).
After that, I was the start-up architect for the “PC Health” team in Windows. We analyzed Windows support calls and created various features (such as System Restore and System File Protection) to address the underlying causes. The timing was such that we shipped these features in Windows ME, but they eventually found their way into XP and Vista as well.
Then I joined the newly-created MSN Explorer team and helped to ship three versions of that product. As part of that project I initiated a technology known as SQM or CEIP, which is now used throughout Microsoft’s products to gather (anonymous!) real-world usage data. (I love real-world data.)
Next, I went back to Windows, where I worked on new communications and Explorer features for Longhorn. That made my team one of the primary clients of WinFS, so I spent a lot of time trying to explain databases to UI developers, and vice versa. Most of this work didn’t make it into Vista after the “Longhorn reset”.
We took some of those ideas and started the Microsoft Max team, where we continued to work on new ways to organize, visualize, and share data. We shipped several incremental releases of Max that showed the power of peer-to-peer file sharing and WPF UI, but were only beginning to reflect our full intentions.
The next reorg eventually stopped work on Max the product, but left the team and general vision more or less intact, this time in Windows Live. I left Microsoft a few months after that, but I’m still looking forward to using the Live features the team is building.
Newton
From 1988 to 1996, I worked for Apple Computer on Newton, a platform for little personal computers (also known as Personal Digital Assistants). The Newton technology was cancelled in 1998, a casualty of Apple’s refocusing after the Second Coming of Jobs, but it still has a small yet dedicated community of users, and even a few developers. Who knows, maybe Apple will open-source the stuff someday…it would be a nice gesture. All the official Newton web sites at Apple have vanished. There is still a lot of information available on the web. Try your favorite search engine to find the various archives. My main technical contributions to Newton were:
- The unified data model that ties the Newton software together
- The compiler, interpreter, and runtime library for NewtonScript, the language used to write Newton applications
- The Newton object store, where all the persistent data in a Newton resides
I also helped with a bunch of other stuff, like the OS kernel abstractions, and the interaction between the view system, object model, and language (all of which are pretty cool, so you should read our papers).
Other things I’ve done
In October 2002 I was part of Game Control for Shelby Logan’s Run.
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