Man, Penguin, Dog Color Picker for X11 (1989)

I wanted a color picker that I could *want* to use, so I created "Man, Penguin, Dog" -- where you could freely move the man, penguin, and dog icons around to find your favorite RGB value. Reminiscing a bit, I now recall that during this era, icons were stored as #include .h files for C programs. There was a lot of resourcefulness back then as nothing had been made yet. One lesson I learned back then was that people can do strange things. As an MIT junior, I had written an interface toolkit for X11 that duplicated most of the functionality provided by the Mac toolbox. A random fellow sitting next to me in the computer lab liked it, and asked me for the code. I emailed it to him and never saw him again.

A year later I bumped into him in a bathroom at the MIT student center. I asked him how he was doing, and then noted how he became slightly nervous. His reply was that he had accepted a job at Sun. "Doing what?" I asked. "User interface."