I sat back in my chair the other day, and my eye happened to fall on a bookshelf with some old A4 binders in it. The brain works in mysterious ways, well mine does certainly. I’d been brooding recently on the thought that the real breakthroughs in software are all made by individuals, not teams. Teams, by their very nature, try to perpetuate the status quo, not change it. I was struck with the strange urge to see what was in those old A4 binders.

A dimly remembered individual had, in 1980, carefully and neatly bound the documentation and source code of a program called STOIC, written in 1977. That person was me. It came flooding back, the memory of that wonderful craftsmanlike code that I used to pore over. It taught me so much. STOIC was a language, like a rationalised and tidied dialect of FORTH. STOIC code was written in RPN, and most of the language itself was written in STOIC with just a small kernel in machine code. The program had been written on a Nova Minicomputer and Cross-assembled for the new 8080 chip, ancestor of the current Intel and ADM range. It was written by John Sachs the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, (part of the Health, Science and Technology Division) in February 1977. It had a built-in Operating system, assembler, floating-point package, interrupt handler, and display editor. It was a work of brilliance. I wondered what happened to John Sachs, programmer. Is he now a grey bearded professor at MIT? I had the urge to contact him and thank him for the great help he gave me when I was a novice programmer.

A quick ‘google’ brought up the fact that the famous programmer who created the first modern spreadsheet, Lotus 123, and thereby launched the first PC revolution, was also called Jonathan Sachs. (Visicalc was the first spreadsheet as such) Single-handed, he had worked for almost a year, crafting it from machine code. When launched, it was bug-free and ran on any old PC. It sold so fast that it caused a shortage of ring-binders for documentation. Jonathan Sachs had been a co-founder of Lotus Corp. Sachs, left Lotus in 1985, less than three years after the program was launched. He now develops photo-editing software such as PictureWindow for his own company, Digital Light and Color.

I was curious. Could this be the same programmer who, five years after writing STOIC, went on to write what is generally acknowledged to be the definitive PC application? I was so intrigued that I asked him via email. The reply came back ‘Yes, I am the same one’. So, thirty years later than I should have done, I thanked him for writing such wonderful code as was in STOIC. I read all through it again. It was just as great as I remembered it.

It set me thinking that behind many of today’s applications lay stories of individual feats of creativity and intellectual endurance. It would be a great idea to try to tell some of these stories and dispel the myth that truly great applications could ever be written by a committee.