Appendix B. About the Author

Photo by Lucy Simon

Solving people’s problems and inventing reliable methods to produce solutions have been Indi’s passions since youth. After earning her BS in computer science from Cal Poly in 1987, Indi took some graduate courses at Colorado State University in Fort Collins until she discovered that a master’s in Computer Science would only set her up to be a good compiler writer. Instead, she set her sights on solving the ease-of-use problem inherent in all software of the day. Oddly enough, she began by designing the graphical interface to an edit-compile-debug environment written for a Unix-based supercomputer. After that, she pursued the more user-friendly pen-based arena, designing several handy applications for the various start-ups involved, such as Go and Slate. When AT&T killed the pen-based GO OS in 1992, Indi moved on to an operating system that had captured the majority of users and had a thriving developer community. (Yes, Windows.) Luckily, the Web came along soon thereafter.