July 15, 2011, 1:26 PM —
Charles Petzold
If you were a Windows programmer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most likely you had a copy of Programming Windows by Charles Petzold on your bookshelf. The book, in its many editions, was so common a reference among Windows programmers that it was simply called, Petzold.
Charles Petzold has been writing about Windows programming since there has been Windows. Yet, in addition to having written volumes about programming to the broad landscape of Windows frameworks in languages such C, Visual Basic and C#, Charles has written books on how to code for IBM’s OS/2 operating system as well as books such as Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and The Annotated Turing that deal with the nature and history of computing. His latest book, Programming Windows Phone 7 takes Petzold from the desktop computer to mobile devices.
Charles Petzold’s technical writing reflects the evolution of computer programming over the last 20 years, particularly in the Microsoft programming environment. He has influenced more than a generation of computer programmers.
We had the pleasure of catching up with Charles recently on a summertime Saturday morning to talk about coding, computing, electronic music and surprisingly, office romance.
ITworld: Hi Charles
Charles Petzold: Good morning!
ITworld: Let's talk about your technical history. Tell me, what was the first computer that you bought?
Petzold: The first one that I actually bought was an Osborne 1. I think it was in 1982. But prior to that I built a Z-80 based machine in my apartment.
ITworld: You built one?
Petzold: For several years in the late 1970s I put together a digital electronic music synthesizer and a Z-80 based computer to control it. It no longer exists but I have photos, and someday I'll put together a web page about it.
ITworld: So, is that how you came into computers, through music?
Petzold: I first learned programming in 1971 as a freshman at Stevens Institute of Technology, which was the first college to require all freshmen to learn programming, in this case Fortran on a PDP-10. And when I started working in 1975 I used Fortran on an IBM 1130, and later a 370 with TSO. But I really got into computers fanatically through electronic music and building my own instruments, a project that started out rather modest but got totally out of hand!
ITworld: Out of hand?
Petzold: In the sense that the eventual computer-controlled synthesizer was a monstrosity of about 20 S-100 wire-wrapped boards, and two huge power supplies, and a 5-octave keyboard, and 32 potentiometers going into ADCs. It's amazing that it worked at all. But it was a great learning experience.
ITworld: And today we can bang away at a keyboard on an iPad.
Petzold: Yeah, although I still haven't heard the same sounds I got out of my machine. I was generating 80 sine curves in hardware, combining them in pairs using FM synthesis, so I was able to generate 40 voices simultaneously.
ITworld: So you seem to be one of the many musician/programmers out there.
