Owen Densmore

Bio

Owen Densmore stumbled into computing by getting a research programming job at Xerox Webster Research Center (the other PARC) in 1972 after being a Peace Corps volunteer, a hippy and a graduate student in Physics (GaTech & Syracuse Univ). Working with Rocherster U's Henry Baker (later of Lisp Machines) he got involved with "critters" --alternative computing devices. In order to liberate the amazing Alto from Xerox, he went to Apple to build the Lisa and later the Mac, focusing on the Printing Architecture. Escaping back to technology, he then went to Sun Microsystems, where he worked until the beginning of 2003. He's currently "retired", working harder than ever in Santa Fe's Complexity community.

Owen is writing here because computing can be so annoying. He hopes to get billions of small devices to work well together, hopefully without annoying the folks that depend on them. He prays annoyance is not a property that scales with system size, or at least is very sub-linear, and he thinks Math may be the Next Big Thing."