Stanford Engineering Hero Charles Simonyi talks about creating first WYSIWYG software, space travel and challenges of making a profit

Computer Science alum shares stories about working with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and his two flights to the International Space Station.

Modern word processing software makes it easy to design and print attractive documents. But it wasn't always so, and much of the credit for this convenience goes to pioneering computer scientist Charles Simonyi, who was recently honored as a Stanford Engineering Hero.

Since 2010 the Heroes program has recognized Stanford engineers who have profoundly advanced human, social and economic progress through engineering.

On May 12, Simonyi joined the select group of Heroes that includes Stanford's visionary former Dean of Engineering Frederick Terman, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, and the founders of Yahoo and Google.

Simonyi's contributions involve the critical era in which computers first evolved from giant machines to personal devices, and his personal odyssey brought him from Hungary back in the days of the Iron Curtain to Stanford, where he completed his PhD in Computer Science in 1977.

But even before then, as a junior researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s, Simonyi was helping to lay the foundations for personal computing. Other PARC researchers created the bit-mapped computer screen, which enabled the precise control of all the pixels on a computer screen; the mouse, which enabled point-click-and-drag control over the bit-mapped screen; and the laser printer, which faithfully rendered whatever appeared on the screen.

Stanford Engineering Hero Charles Simonyi talks about his early days with Microsoft and developing software for the first Macintosh computers. (Video: Stanford Video)

Simonyi co-developed the first text-editing software that put all these capabilities in the hands of users. Simonyi and his colleagues code-named this software Bravo. The software made it easy to create attractive documents on a computer screen and then print out a copy that looked just like the on-screen design.

Users gave these software features a nickname: WYSIWYG, for what-you-see-is-what-you-get. That improbable acronym stuck, and WYSIWIG software became one of the first "killer apps" of the personal computer era because it freed users from the drudgery of having to learn complex coding in order to create attractive print designs.

"No one in the audience under the age of 55 has any clue of what that world was like, and they have no clue thanks to Charles' work, " Persis Drell, the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, told several hundred alumni, faculty and students who gathered at NVIDIA Auditorium to honor Simonyi.

While PARC was a legendary hotbed of innovation, it was not successful at commercializing the technology it invented. In 1981, Simonyi joined Microsoft Corp., where he worked with Bill Gates and, later, Steve Jobs to create Microsoft Word, Excel and other software that has become part of the fabric of everyday work and life.

In a speech titled "Memories of Future and Space," Simonyi offered highlights of his career in computer science and his lifelong fascination with space exploration, starting with the contest he won as a teen that gave him a chance to meet Soviet astronauts; then how he decided to learn English so he could read more about what was then called the space race; and how this decision to learn English prepared him, before he was 18, to emigrate from Hungary first to Denmark and then to the San Francisco Bay Area, where a series of fortuitous events brought him to PARC at just the right moment.

In a taped interview that has been released as a series of brief videos, Simonyi recalls meeting Gates when the latter was in his early 20s and being awed by the business acumen of one so young.

"Bill has two among his many principles that I remember well: one is that we are patient people, and the other is that profitability is not a natural state," Simonyi recalled. "Profitability is a constant struggle. You have to struggle and work very hard, and you have to think in the long term."

During that same early 1980s period, Simonyi also worked with Steve Jobs, who was then leading the Macintosh rebellion inside Apple Computer Inc. and relying on Microsoft engineers to help his team develop software applications.

"Steve had maybe a dozen people working on software for the Mac, and Microsoft had just about the same number," Simonyi said. "When the Mac came out, Microsoft Word came out with it, and then later Microsoft Excel established the Mac as a serious business computer, and the rest is history."

Later in life, while Simonyi engaged in various philanthropies, he also indulged his own lifelong fascination with space by taking two flights to the International Space Station.

While he hopes human space flight may one day become commonplace, he thinks that, for now, exploration without human crews makes the most sense.

"I believe humans will have to go to space, but I think we should just take that as an aspiration," he said, "and make sure the people who are doing the science get funded first."

That pragmatism is something Simonyi has learned through a lifetime of observing commercial undertakings that weren't profitable, such as PARC, and those that were, such as Microsoft.

"I think it's very important at any point in time to take stock of what is at the edge of what's possible and then push the boundary a little bit further," Simonyi said in his interview. "I'm not saying that Hail Mary jumps into the middle of the unknown don't sometimes work out, but they shouldn't be our focus."

It all boils down to the concept of prudent risk. Or as Simonyi said in reflecting on his own odyssey: "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity."

View a series of brief recorded interviews with Charles Simonyi or watch the 74-minute video of the Stanford Engineering Hero ceremony.

Last modified Thu, 25 Jun, 2015 at 10:37