A dozen programmers in a Cape Town wine valley type commands into computers on another continent and wait a third of a second for each letter to appear. Chris Pinkham had asked to go home; Amazon gave him an office instead, a long way from its founder. What his team wrote lets one machine pass itself off as many, an idea IBM invented in 1967 and then tried to cancel. With Willem van Biljon's ten-cent hour, the week Animoto needed 3,400 computers, and one county in Virginia.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Chris Pinkham, Benjamin Black, Christopher Brown, Willem van Biljon, Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos, Robert Creasy, Mendel Rosenblum, Werner Vogels
- The idea it builds
- Virtualisation: one computer imitating several copies of itself, with a supervisor stepping in only when a guest reaches for something that cannot be shared.