Tandy Trower
Encyclopedia
Tandy Trower is an engineer and software developer who has had a long career in the IT industry. He has worked at Microsoft
for the last 28 years
where he has been involved with over two dozen products, many of them well known in the market. In his most recent role he formed the Robotics Group and has spoken extensively at conferences
and universities about the future of robotics.
in the personal computer division, which was the newest of the businesses at the time, and just after Atari's acquisition by Warner Communications from Nolan Bushnell. Starting out by evaluating software product for possible acquisition, he quickly worked as a product manager for a variety of different educational and entertainment products for the Atari 400 and 800 computers, and recommended to executive management that Atari acquire a license for Microsoft BASIC
, since at that time Atari's personal computers ran a BASIC created by Shepherdson Microsystems, and was not fully compatible with the BASICs that was featured on other early competitive PCs like the Apple II and Commodore PET. Bill Gates himself came down to the Atari office in Sunnyvale and negotiated the features in the spec.
, Microsoft's then acting HR manager, to join the company. At that time there were about 90 employees. He joined as part of a new product marketing team which included Jeff Raikes, Chris Larson, Carl Stork, Mark Deutsch, and Mark Ursino. Assigned responsibility for marketing all of the various BASIC products which included an OEM version of BASIC that IBM was shipping with their new PC, known as GW-BASIC. It also included a variety of BASIC interpreters for 6800, 6809, 6502, Z-80, 8080, and 8086 processors as well as BASIC compilers. In addition, he was responsible for the few games (Microsoft Decathleon, Adventure); educational products (Typing Tutor); a couple of hardware products including the already shipping Z-80 based SoftCard and RAMCard for the Apple II computers; muMath (a symbolic equation processor); and muLisp (a LISP interpreter). His first manager at Microsoft was Nigel Smith.
Within 3 months, responsibility for marketing COBOL and Microsoft Sort 80, a file sorting utility, were also transferred to him. About 6 months later he was also given responsibility for marketing Microsoft Pascal, FORTRAN, MacroAssembler, and the responsibility for launching the first Microsoft C compiler for MS-DOS. At this time he shed responsibility for the hardware products, and the games and educational products, but not before managing the release of the very first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator
which was created for Microsoft by Bruce Artwick.
During the following 3 years he built a small marketing team around the programming languages family and extended the family to include the first BASIC Interpreter and Compiler for the Apple Macintosh.
. IBM had rejected licensing Windows in favor of their own character based windowed app manager called TopView, but Microsoft continued with development of a graphical user interface. Windows 1.0 shipped in fall of 1985. That version of Windows bears a scant resemblance to today's version since it had to run on CGA cards which had a resolution of 320x200 pixels, and prior to Tandy taking over it had been decided to use tiled windows rather than overlapping ones as it had in its original design.
Tandy wrote the specs for a set of desktop applets including a Paint program, simple word processor called Windows Write, Calculator, Reversi game, Notepad, File Manager, and Calendar program. He also defined a way to change system parameters using an app called the Control Panel.
He stayed on to manage Windows 2.0 and shifted the interface back to overlapping windows. It became the platform for one of the first significant applications to run on Windows, Microsoft Excel
. By then a company called Aldus had also created a Windows version of their popular page layout product, Pagemaker, which took advantage of a printer driver for the HP LaserJet printer. (At the time most printers were dot matrix).
By that time, there was a Joint Development Agreement with IBM (who still rejected licensing Windows) where Microsoft and IBM would work together on a new OS called OS/2 that would include its own window manager called Presentation Manager. The UIs for Windows and OS/2 Presentation Manager had to be kept in sync so users could move smoothly between them and Tandy became the liaison to negotiating features between the products in an effort to keep them operational compatible.
When Windows 2.0 shipped in November 1987, Tandy proposed the creation of a new group at Microsoft that would do usability testing, app interface design, publish UI guidelines, and create prototypes of new UIs. Subsequently he founded Microsoft's first usability test labs and wrote most of the guidelines for designing Windows applications that were published by Microsoft Press. he was also a featured speaker on application interface design at early user interface conferences.
Around this time Steve Jobs left Apple and they decided to sue Microsoft over Windows, having sued and negotiated settlement with Digital Research over the graphical UI. Tandy was involved in depositions and tasked with creating videos and other educational elements for the Microsoft legal team to use in court. Eventually the matter was settled out of court.
was being created within Microsoft Consumer Applications Division. Having met with team to evaluate the design work, Tandy felt the design approach had the right motivation and a good conceptual model based on the research of Stanford professors, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass
, which confirmed through a number oe experiments that humans react to social stimuli, even when presented from non-human sources. However, he disagreed with the implementation that the Microsoft Bob team was developing. In response, Tandy hired a contract developer to create an interface for on-screen character agents, called Microsoft Agent
which enabled any Windows developer to incorporate interactive characters into their application or Web pages. In addition to the code to support interaction, four characters that developers could license, including a robot (Robby), parrot (Peedy), wizard (Merlin), and genie (Genie), as well as a tool that enabled developers to create their own characters and animation sequences. In a paper presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 1997, Tandy discussed how to create conversational interfaces for interactive agents.
It was later used by the Office team to support the Office Assistant and replace the original Microsoft Bob code that had been used. However, the Office team created their own set of characters including the infamous Clippit (aka "Clippy"). Microsoft Agent was also included in the user registration component of Windows ME and featured in a number of Microsoft Research projects as well as third-party applications and websites. The code was later dropped out of both Windows and Office due to the unsatisfactory user acceptance of the technology and despite his efforts to improve the way the interface could be use, the project as discontinued at Microsoft.
's organization where he was responsible for the user interface team for Windows Media Center which subsequently was shifted under Will Poole
's Digital Media Division. After building the initial team and specifications, he recruited Joe Belfiore to replace him and moved back to work for Mundie, this time with the mission of coming up with an application scenario that could demonstrate the value of the concurrency work that Mundie was incubating under a project called BigTop. BigTop's objective was to fulfill Mundie's vision of helping developers with the need to shift development from single threaded single processor based development to asynchronous, distributed processing without the conventional complications of managing threads, locks, and semaphores to manage interaction between the simultaneously running code modules. This eventually became the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) and DSS (Decentralized Software Services) that were later included in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and CCR & DSS Toolkit
). However, in this first attempt to identify a compelling scenario, Tandy investigated bio-inspired technologies like neural networks, genetic algorithms, and swarm processing, but eventually proposing a project to build a conversational dialogue software engine that would support integration of multiple simultaneous analysis of language to process language input and enable natural conversation. However, the project was cancelled.
During this time Tandy was invited to meetings with different parts of the robotics community, including researchers in universities, vendors like ABB and KUKA
in the industrial robotics sector, and a LEGO VP who was looking for software for their new robotics kits, etc. There appeared to be a common message despite coming from diverse parts of the technology world: robotics was on a new "disruptive" course and moving toward a new personal form.
After talking with a number of leaders in the robotics community and assessing the available resources, Tandy discussed robotics with Bill Gates
. This led to a proposal to create a development kit that could provide a consistent platform and tools that could be applied to a wide variety of robots. Gates requested review and input from Mundie and MSR Senior VP, Rick Rashid and the proposal was approved to move to a prototype phase and would integrated the concurrency work that Mundie had been incubating. Nine months later after a subsequent review the project was approved for product development. with the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) shipped in June 2006 called Microsoft Robotics Studio. The official release of V1.0 was in December. The 2.0 release in November 2008 was renamed the product to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. The product has helped Microsoft to be recognized as a significant player in the early emergent market.
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
for the last 28 years
where he has been involved with over two dozen products, many of them well known in the market. In his most recent role he formed the Robotics Group and has spoken extensively at conferences
and universities about the future of robotics.
Early career
After teaching himself to program, first on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 and later an Apple II, Tandy switched careers from working as an engineer in the semiconductor industry, and moved to developing software in 1979, when he was hired to work at the San Francisco office of Wicat, a company developing education and curriculum based products for schools. There he worked for Dr. Jim Schuyler on a classroom curriculum management package for the Apple II being developed for SRA. In 1980, he was hired by AtariAtari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
in the personal computer division, which was the newest of the businesses at the time, and just after Atari's acquisition by Warner Communications from Nolan Bushnell. Starting out by evaluating software product for possible acquisition, he quickly worked as a product manager for a variety of different educational and entertainment products for the Atari 400 and 800 computers, and recommended to executive management that Atari acquire a license for Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first BASIC, and the first high level programming language available for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist microcomputer....
, since at that time Atari's personal computers ran a BASIC created by Shepherdson Microsystems, and was not fully compatible with the BASICs that was featured on other early competitive PCs like the Apple II and Commodore PET. Bill Gates himself came down to the Atari office in Sunnyvale and negotiated the features in the spec.
Transition to Microsoft
In late 1981, Tandy inquired about possible openings at Microsoft and was invited up to interview and was offered a position by Steve BallmerSteve Ballmer
Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer is an American business magnate. He is the chief executive officer of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000. , his personal wealth is estimated at US$13.9 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.-Early life:Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan to...
, Microsoft's then acting HR manager, to join the company. At that time there were about 90 employees. He joined as part of a new product marketing team which included Jeff Raikes, Chris Larson, Carl Stork, Mark Deutsch, and Mark Ursino. Assigned responsibility for marketing all of the various BASIC products which included an OEM version of BASIC that IBM was shipping with their new PC, known as GW-BASIC. It also included a variety of BASIC interpreters for 6800, 6809, 6502, Z-80, 8080, and 8086 processors as well as BASIC compilers. In addition, he was responsible for the few games (Microsoft Decathleon, Adventure); educational products (Typing Tutor); a couple of hardware products including the already shipping Z-80 based SoftCard and RAMCard for the Apple II computers; muMath (a symbolic equation processor); and muLisp (a LISP interpreter). His first manager at Microsoft was Nigel Smith.
Within 3 months, responsibility for marketing COBOL and Microsoft Sort 80, a file sorting utility, were also transferred to him. About 6 months later he was also given responsibility for marketing Microsoft Pascal, FORTRAN, MacroAssembler, and the responsibility for launching the first Microsoft C compiler for MS-DOS. At this time he shed responsibility for the hardware products, and the games and educational products, but not before managing the release of the very first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator is a series of flight simulator programs for the Microsoft Windows operating system, although it was marketed as a video game. It is one of the longest-running, best-known and most comprehensive home flight simulator series...
which was created for Microsoft by Bruce Artwick.
During the following 3 years he built a small marketing team around the programming languages family and extended the family to include the first BASIC Interpreter and Compiler for the Apple Macintosh.
Windows
Late in 1984, Steve Ballmer, who had become Tandy's boss, asked him to take over retail marketing responsibility for Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
. IBM had rejected licensing Windows in favor of their own character based windowed app manager called TopView, but Microsoft continued with development of a graphical user interface. Windows 1.0 shipped in fall of 1985. That version of Windows bears a scant resemblance to today's version since it had to run on CGA cards which had a resolution of 320x200 pixels, and prior to Tandy taking over it had been decided to use tiled windows rather than overlapping ones as it had in its original design.
Tandy wrote the specs for a set of desktop applets including a Paint program, simple word processor called Windows Write, Calculator, Reversi game, Notepad, File Manager, and Calendar program. He also defined a way to change system parameters using an app called the Control Panel.
He stayed on to manage Windows 2.0 and shifted the interface back to overlapping windows. It became the platform for one of the first significant applications to run on Windows, Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
. By then a company called Aldus had also created a Windows version of their popular page layout product, Pagemaker, which took advantage of a printer driver for the HP LaserJet printer. (At the time most printers were dot matrix).
By that time, there was a Joint Development Agreement with IBM (who still rejected licensing Windows) where Microsoft and IBM would work together on a new OS called OS/2 that would include its own window manager called Presentation Manager. The UIs for Windows and OS/2 Presentation Manager had to be kept in sync so users could move smoothly between them and Tandy became the liaison to negotiating features between the products in an effort to keep them operational compatible.
When Windows 2.0 shipped in November 1987, Tandy proposed the creation of a new group at Microsoft that would do usability testing, app interface design, publish UI guidelines, and create prototypes of new UIs. Subsequently he founded Microsoft's first usability test labs and wrote most of the guidelines for designing Windows applications that were published by Microsoft Press. he was also a featured speaker on application interface design at early user interface conferences.
Around this time Steve Jobs left Apple and they decided to sue Microsoft over Windows, having sued and negotiated settlement with Digital Research over the graphical UI. Tandy was involved in depositions and tasked with creating videos and other educational elements for the Microsoft legal team to use in court. Eventually the matter was settled out of court.
Interactive Software Agents
As user interface design and usability assessment became more common practice and integrated into the product teams at Microsoft, Tandy shifted to primarily focus on promoting good design practice and new UI innovations. It was during this time that the ill-fated Microsoft BobMicrosoft Bob
Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, which provided a new, nontechnical interface to desktop computing operations. It was one of Microsoft's more visible product failures...
was being created within Microsoft Consumer Applications Division. Having met with team to evaluate the design work, Tandy felt the design approach had the right motivation and a good conceptual model based on the research of Stanford professors, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass
Clifford Nass
Clifford Nass is a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction. He is also known for his work on individual differences associated with multitasking. Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at...
, which confirmed through a number oe experiments that humans react to social stimuli, even when presented from non-human sources. However, he disagreed with the implementation that the Microsoft Bob team was developing. In response, Tandy hired a contract developer to create an interface for on-screen character agents, called Microsoft Agent
Microsoft Agent
Microsoft Agent is a technology developed by Microsoft which employs animated characters, text-to-speech engines, and speech recognition software to enhance interaction with computer users. Thus it is an example of an embodied agent. It comes preinstalled as part of Microsoft Windows 2000 through...
which enabled any Windows developer to incorporate interactive characters into their application or Web pages. In addition to the code to support interaction, four characters that developers could license, including a robot (Robby), parrot (Peedy), wizard (Merlin), and genie (Genie), as well as a tool that enabled developers to create their own characters and animation sequences. In a paper presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 1997, Tandy discussed how to create conversational interfaces for interactive agents.
It was later used by the Office team to support the Office Assistant and replace the original Microsoft Bob code that had been used. However, the Office team created their own set of characters including the infamous Clippit (aka "Clippy"). Microsoft Agent was also included in the user registration component of Windows ME and featured in a number of Microsoft Research projects as well as third-party applications and websites. The code was later dropped out of both Windows and Office due to the unsatisfactory user acceptance of the technology and despite his efforts to improve the way the interface could be use, the project as discontinued at Microsoft.
Windows Media Center and Beyond
In 2004, Tandy transferred to Craig MundieCraig Mundie
Craig James Mundie is chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft. He started in its consumer platforms division in 1992, managing the production of Windows CE for hand-held and automotive systems and early console games. In 1997, Mundie oversaw the acquisition of WebTV Networks...
's organization where he was responsible for the user interface team for Windows Media Center which subsequently was shifted under Will Poole
Will Poole
William Starling Poole is an American football defensive back who is currently playing for the Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League. He was drafted by the Miami Dolphins in the fourth round of the 2004 NFL Draft...
's Digital Media Division. After building the initial team and specifications, he recruited Joe Belfiore to replace him and moved back to work for Mundie, this time with the mission of coming up with an application scenario that could demonstrate the value of the concurrency work that Mundie was incubating under a project called BigTop. BigTop's objective was to fulfill Mundie's vision of helping developers with the need to shift development from single threaded single processor based development to asynchronous, distributed processing without the conventional complications of managing threads, locks, and semaphores to manage interaction between the simultaneously running code modules. This eventually became the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) and DSS (Decentralized Software Services) that were later included in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and CCR & DSS Toolkit
Concurrency and Coordination Runtime
Concurrency and Coordination Runtime is an asynchronous programming library based on .NET Framework from Microsoft distributed with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio...
). However, in this first attempt to identify a compelling scenario, Tandy investigated bio-inspired technologies like neural networks, genetic algorithms, and swarm processing, but eventually proposing a project to build a conversational dialogue software engine that would support integration of multiple simultaneous analysis of language to process language input and enable natural conversation. However, the project was cancelled.
Gates Strategic Staff and Research into Robotics
As a result, in 2005, Tandy transferred to work as part of Bill Gates' strategic staff, with the role of helping Gates keep up with ongoing internal and external developments.During this time Tandy was invited to meetings with different parts of the robotics community, including researchers in universities, vendors like ABB and KUKA
KUKA
KUKA is a leading German producer of industrial robots for a variety of industries - from automotive and fabricated metals to food and plastics...
in the industrial robotics sector, and a LEGO VP who was looking for software for their new robotics kits, etc. There appeared to be a common message despite coming from diverse parts of the technology world: robotics was on a new "disruptive" course and moving toward a new personal form.
After talking with a number of leaders in the robotics community and assessing the available resources, Tandy discussed robotics with Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
. This led to a proposal to create a development kit that could provide a consistent platform and tools that could be applied to a wide variety of robots. Gates requested review and input from Mundie and MSR Senior VP, Rick Rashid and the proposal was approved to move to a prototype phase and would integrated the concurrency work that Mundie had been incubating. Nine months later after a subsequent review the project was approved for product development. with the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) shipped in June 2006 called Microsoft Robotics Studio. The official release of V1.0 was in December. The 2.0 release in November 2008 was renamed the product to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. The product has helped Microsoft to be recognized as a significant player in the early emergent market.