Not Taking Credit

On December 20, on the radio on my way home from work, I heard that Jack Goldman died. I knew that name, but why? Oh yeah—the guy who worked at Ford when I was a teenager growing up in Detroit. We talked about him in my earth science class because he was a physicist who worked for a car company and invented a battery for an electric car that went over like a lead balloon.

That’s all I remembered at first. But the story went on to tell how Goldman left Ford to become head of research at Xerox, which had just purchased the computer company Scientific Data Systems. He formed a research center called PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) that developed computer technologies. Some examples of the crazy ideas they came up with: the laser printer, object-oriented programming, Ethernet, the mouse, the graphical user interface—pretty much the personal computing world as we know it.

Xerox never pursued these developments commercially, but Goldman’s work did inspire Steve Jobs’ Macintosh computer and Bill Gates’ Windows operating system. So how come Jack Goldman died quietly in Connecticut without the fanfare that accompanied Steve Jobs’ death in Palo Alto a couple of months earlier?

It just proves the old saying: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” I, of course, am not as good a person as Harry Truman or whoever it was who said that. I hate it when someone else takes credit for something I’ve done or fails to acknowledge my <ahem> “truly exceptional abilities”.  Kind of makes me wonder what I could have accomplished if I hadn’t wasted so much time and energy fuming and trying hard not to show it. Well, at least I hope to get credit for not showing it . . .