David Baron opened our first meeting with 'everything we told you was a lie'

Who this is

David Baron was a thoughtful Blyth VP with a prodigious IQ and a growing family — which meant he could not afford to lose his job, which is the fact that gives his opening line to Jonathan Hare its weight. First week, first meeting, September: 'I want to apologize for helping recruit you. Everything we told you was a lie.' The rewrite from Pascal to C++ was a converter run. The class libraries were as flat as Kansas, the GUI 97 percent Apple's frameworks. The installed base was rebelling because Omnis 5 — the product they all ran — had been dropped for the glamour of Omnis 7, while the real talent sat in Suffolk with the founder who had written most of the code that mattered himself.

Baron was the deep throat in both directions: he told Hare the truth when telling it was dangerous, and he told Walt Smiley that the one person everyone was afraid to talk to — Minor's protégé — could be trusted with it. The revolution routed through him twice, and the record marks the courage of a man who risked precisely what he could least afford.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

• His account, in his own words
• What he was VP of — the dictation says 'something or other'