Everyone's a Programmer

"Software is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. Charles Simonyi’s solution? Programming tools that are so simple that even laypeople can use them. Few software experts have had as revolutionary an influence on the development of computing as Charles Simonyi, and few have been so richly rewarded for their efforts. As a scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Simonyi invented Bravo, the first word-processing program that showed on-screen exactly how a document would look in print—a concept commonly referred to as “what you see is what you get.” Simonyi then joined Microsoft, when it was still a startup with three dozen employees. There he became the company’s chief architect, piloting the development of both Word and Excel. Along the way, he also became a billionaire: Forbes recently listed him as the 209th richest person in the United States."