Everything Louder Than Everything Else

In the '80s at an industry conference I was sitting across a crowded table from my good friend Steve Leighton and I began to speak. Steve interrupted, "Excuse me Bob but this is important," and went on to speak his piece. What he said didn't seem all that important to me. It wasn't the speech, but the speaker who was more important. I was suitably chagrined. Steve worked for the company Bob Metcalfe founded, what was it, 3Com? Or maybe I misremember that. Perhaps it was Cisco. These were early days. But Bob (I look at his wikipedia page today and I wonder, who is that white-haired guy?) used to say something that was actually important. He said he maintained an all-time heroes list. You got on the list by achievement, like so many lists, but the difference in Bob's list was: once you got on the list, nothing you could do afterward would remove you from the list. I heard later that Steve developed some bad habits and had got fired. The habits may explain his rudeness, but it doesn't explain his opinion of his own importance, he always had that. It was one of the best things about him. Outside a tight circle of friends and loved ones, there is no goddamn point listening to people who don't have anything important to say. The odd thing is, in those early days of networking, Steve was wrong about almost everything. He thought we (in the mid-80's) could produce network routers for $300; the actual cost was about $5K. Now, of course, you can buy a router at Best Buy for $75 and it will do wi-fi in the bargain. He picked the Xerox protocol. When it became obvious that was a bad choice, he picked the OSI protocols, condemning me to the hell of three years of Corporation for Open Systems meetings. There were only three choices, but TCP/IP eluded him. Maybe I'm too hard on him. Who in the '80's knew that networking would converge on the internet? But the big thing he understood to the depth of his soul was that networks were a fulcrum on which you could rest a lever with which you could move the world. Maybe you can tell from the title, but I've been listening to Meat Loaf on my iPod. Meat Loaf grabs you by the throat and says, "Listen! What I have to say is important!" He does that for every song, good or bad. That's the curse. I guess the point of this post is, Steve, you're on my all-time heroes list. Don't know where you've got to, but nothing can ever take you off.