Tandy Trower is the current CEO of Hoaloha Robotics LLC, a robotics company based in Seattle, Washington, developing an autonomously mobile, socially interactive robot, to empower senior citizens to live more independently.
Mr. Trower previously worked at Microsoft for 28 years[1] where he was involved with over two dozen products, many of them well known in the market. In his last role at Microsoft he was the General Manager of the Robotics Group[2] and spoke extensively at conferences[3] and universities about the future of robotics. After leaving Microsoft, he founded Hoaloha Robotics.[4]
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 Atari in the personal computer division,[5] 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.
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 Ballmer, 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. (See the end of the video on Channel 9[6]).
The team was 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 Decathlon, 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.
Windows
Late in 1984, Steve Ballmer, who had become Tandy's boss, asked him to take over retail marketing responsibility for Microsoft Windows. IBM had rejected licensing Windows in favor of their own character based windowed app manager called TopView, but Microsoft continued with the 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 320×200 pixels, and, prior to Tandy joining the team, 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, a 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.
Applications for Windows were slow in coming to market at first. In July 1986 Tandy, as Director of Marketing for Windows, had to admit that there were less than a dozen third-party apps.[7]
He stayed on to help manage Windows 2.0 and the interface shifted 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 sued Microsoft over Windows. 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 Bob 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 of 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.[8] In addition to the code to support interaction, four characters that developers could license, including a robot (Robby), parrot (Peedy - borrowed from MSR Persona Project[9]), 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.[10]
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 used, the project was discontinued at Microsoft.
Windows Media Center and beyond
In 2004, Tandy transferred to Craig Mundie'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 dialogue software engine that would enable natural conversation. However, the project was canceled.
Gates Strategic Staff and Research into Robotics
Simulation of a KUKA youBot mounted with a Microsoft Kinect device in Webots
In 2005, Tandy transferred to work as part of Bill Gates' strategic staff,[11] 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 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 Craig Mundie and MSR Senior VP, Rick Rashid and the proposal was approved to move to a prototype phase and would be integrated the concurrency work that Mundie had been incubating. Nine months later, after a subsequent review, the project was approved for product development.[12] with the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) shipped in June 2006 called Microsoft Robotics Studio. The official release of V1.0 was in December 2006.[13]
The 2.0 release in November 2008 was renamed to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. After the 4.0 release in 2012, Microsoft discontinued the product and closed down the Robotics Group.[14] Since then there has been some work on Robotics within Microsoft, including on ROS (Robot Operating System) for Windows, but Microsoft's involvement in Robotics has been minimal.
Post Microsoft
Tandy Trower resigned from Microsoft in November 2009 to pursue a new venture to create software and services to support robotic solutions that can enhance the lives of an increasing worldwide population that require assistive care. The new venture named Hoaloha Robotics ("hoaloha" being the Hawaiian word for "friend"[15]) was launched in September 2010.
Related Research Articles
The graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicators such as primary notation, instead of text-based UIs, typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.
OS/2 is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 relative to Microsoft's new Windows 3.1 operating environment, the two companies severed the relationship in 1992 and OS/2 development fell to IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987 and newer versions were released until December 2001.
WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Corel, with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the dominant player in the word processor market, displacing the prior market leader WordStar.
GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.
The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers, and e-mail.
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.
Microsoft Agent was a technology developed by Microsoft which employed animated characters, text-to-speech engines, and speech recognition software to enhance interaction with computer users. Thus it was an example of an embodied agent. It came preinstalled as part of Windows 98 through Windows Vista. It was not included with Windows 7 but can be downloaded from Microsoft. It was completely discontinued in Windows 8. Microsoft Agent functionality was exposed as an ActiveX control that can be used by web pages.
Claris International Inc., formerly FileMaker Inc., is a computer software development company formed as a subsidiary company of Apple Computer in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint, in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and operating systems activities.
GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language, by Frank Ostrowski. The name is derived from the company, which distributed the software. In the mid-1980s to the 1990s it enjoyed popularity as an advanced BASIC dialect, but has been mostly superseded by several other programming languages. Official support ended in the early 2000s.
NewWave is a discontinued object-oriented graphical desktop environment and office productivity tool for PCs running early versions of Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Hewlett-Packard and introduced commercially in 1988. It was used on the HP Vectras and other IBM compatible PCs running Windows.
Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding" is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers' confidence in their own products.
VisiCorp Visi On was a short-lived but influential graphical user interface-based operating environment program for IBM compatible personal computers running MS-DOS. Although Visi On was never popular, as it had steep minimum system requirements for its day, it was a major influence on the later development of Microsoft Windows.
DeskMate is a software application that provides a graphical operating environment. It originally was for Tandy Corporation's TRSDOS Operating System for their TRS-80 line of computers, but eventually shifted to MS-DOS. Like GEM from Digital Research, it is not a full operating system, but runs on top an existing system. Initial ports only ran on Tandy's PCs such as the Tandy 1000, but later became available for true IBM PC compatibles and competed with early versions of Microsoft Windows.
Xara is an international software company founded in 1981, with an HQ in Berlin and development office in Hemel Hempstead, UK. It has developed software for a variety of computer platforms, in chronological order: the Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Z88, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and more recently web browser-based services.
A user is a person who utilizes a computer or network service.
Windows 1.0 is the first major release of Microsoft Windows, a family of graphical operating systems for personal computers developed by Microsoft. It was first released to manufacturing in the United States on November 20, 1985, while the European version was released as Windows 1.02 in May 1986.
Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predecessors. Later updates would expand the software's capabilities, one of which added multimedia support for sound recording and playback, as well as support for CD-ROMs.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single, non-technical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific, or engineering-oriented computers of the time, such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were word processing, playing video games, and programming.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
