Legato Systems

Subject: keeping up with the correspondence overload

You clearly have little to do at Stanford, judging by the length and frequency of electronic missives I receive from you. We at Legato are allowed ten minutes a day off the job. Normally, I use this time to get some fresh air, rinse my body of its Bad Humours, and maybe geta bite to eat. Today, I will instead sacrifice all and try to recover some writer's pride.Yes, we found the Last Bug. This is not Hubris. But you perhaps don't understand that there is a Last Bug every day (on good days, there are morning Last Bugs and afternoon Last Bugs), each new and different, often generated by fixes to earlier Last Bugs. Got it?

Big news is the favorable press we are getting. Byte Magazine voted us best backup software product by far, and did a big spread on how technically wonderful we are. Great publicity. The best, however, is an article that appeared in a respectable Networking newsletter entitled "Legato's In-House Espresso Machine Gives New Meaning to the Daily Grind". Seems the reporter who visited us last month to talk aboutNetWorker really liked the cup of coffee from our $3,000 espresso machine (John, you would love it), and wrote an appreciative article about it. It may have been a funny article, but the phone has been off the hook ever since - seems like everybody wants to come over and try it out. Now we have no trouble attracting journalists to tell them about our plans and latest releases.

Another computer quirk: I shared my office two weeks ago with a programmer from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), who was "porting" our NetWorker software product to DEC's computers. During the week, she noticed the "Sam Edwards" on the door, and asked me, "Say, did you have anything todo with Sam Windows?" Now, here at Legato, that is the name we use for the windowing system I developed for the latest NetWorker version - but this was supposed to be an internal name. Somehow, probably through a salesperson, it leaked out all the way back to Maynard, MA, where DEC enquired about our interface and got the enigmatic answer, "Oh, that's the Sam Windows interface". How fickle is fame...

Just learned from Caren on the phone that Apple likes her, enough to pay her the last consulting fee they owe her, and even sign her up for a much bigger contract. Only possible downer: it may require some full-time work, and she's still hooked on D.J. (and vice versa).

We also enjoyed the Academy Awards, especially Billy Crystal. We only saw about three movies last year, and it was nice to see them all mentioned and even win a few awards. How come I hadn't heard of any of the five foreign film nominations? I still think Thelma and Louise was nothing special, but agreed on Silence of the Lambs (I would have liked it bettear without the insect guy at the end) and Streisand's wonderful tear-jerker (after all, the violinist's son did go to Andover). Remember when the "li' ole southern guy" took the Strad and held it over the balcony? Good stuff!

Sue Kelman, Caren's younger sister, has finally moved to California, sharing a jointly-owned condo with her boyfriend Ed. She has an impressive job as head of one of the intensive care wards in an exclusive, private hospital that caters to the Rich and Famous who want to be Discrete. Apparently this was the only hospital that could meet her Boston salary requirements. She and Ed eventually hope to move to northern California, but that won't happen for a coupla years.

Oops, here comes the boss. Time to cut some floppy disks...

Sam