James Gordon Letwin (born July 2, 1952) is an American

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invo ...

and one of the eleven early

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

employees who posed for an iconic staff portrait taken in Albuquerque in 1978. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked for

Heathkit Heathkit is the brand name of kits and other electronic products produced and marketed by the Heath Company. The products over the decades have included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateu ...

, porting ''

Colossal Cave Adventure ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' (also known as ''Adventure'' or ''ADVENT'') is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the ...

'' to the computer and working on

HDOS HDOS is an early microcomputer operating system, originally written for the Heathkit H8 computer system and later also available for the Heathkit H89 and Zenith Z-89 computers. The author was Heath Company employee Gordon Letwin, who later was ...

and Benton Harbor BASIC. Letwin's first project at Microsoft was writing a

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

compiler. He is most noted for being the lead architect of the

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/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 r ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

on the Microsoft side, with

Ed Iacobucci Edward E. Iacobucci (September 26, 1953 – June 21, 2013) was an Argentine-American businessman who founded VirtualWorks and co–founded Citrix Systems. He is also known for his work as the architectural designer of the OS/2 and IBM DOS syst ...

being the lead architect from IBM's side. Letwin contributed much of the design and code for several core components, including the HPFS

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

. Letwin left Microsoft in 1993 to "kick back" with his wife. While at Microsoft he had become a millionaire, with a 2000 ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and event (philosophy), events that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various me ...

'' article estimating his worth at around $20 million. Since leaving Microsoft, Letwin has donated substantial amounts of money to environmental causes via the Wilburforce Foundation, a charitable foundation created by him and his wife, Rose.

References

Bibliography

* Letwin, Gordon (1988). ''Inside OS/2''. Microsoft Press. .

External links

Long Usenet post by Letwin explaining what happened to OS/2 from Microsoft's point of view
- August 1995

- 1980
What Happened To The People In Microsoft's Iconic 1978 Company Photo
- Business Insider, January 2011 {{DEFAULTSORT:Letwin, Gordon Microsoft employees OS/2 people Living people 1952 births

See also

References

Bibliography

External links