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There really was nothing like it at the time. We had good ideas for implementation, so we proceeded. I think it was an excellent solution to the reliability issues with existing search engines.

People constantly face problems they've never seen before, and they have to solve them somehow. So a million people come up with a million solutions that are just a little bit different. If computing is being done by fewer resources, there will be enormous security gains by pushing things into standard practices.

One of the things that's interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.

Everything is getting bigger. The way to go now is to program in a little more sophistication.

If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.

One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible.

I think there's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think about what's possible on the computer. Of course, it's also a great liberating force that makes possible, you know, publishing and so forth, and standards, and so on.

We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.