In other words, the main difference between the former cases and the latter case, is that Ken was a king in his own kingdom, however small it may be.

All successful endeavors are like this. You have your Gerald Bulls, your William Shockleys, your Ed Halls… Kelly Johnsons, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edisons, Henry Fords… guys who act like they are kings of their own castles, and who other guys who also want a slice of kingly power tended to consider assholes.

Large bureaucratified entities mediate interpersonal conflict by giving every constituent the feeling that they are all getting a slice of kingly power – ie, committees, procedures, ‘meetings’, et cetera – that everyone involved are equal collaborators. But that’s not how things get done.

The correct response to conflicting personalities is to either split them off into different teams, or make it clear that one is subordinate to the other, and who has the real authority to enforce that ordination. ‘We need to concentrate all our resources onto one thing to maximize its chances of success’ is a mental trap that doesn’t really correspond to the reality of what actually succeeds, or at the very least is much farther down the list of real limiting factors that one may encounter over the course of an endeavor than is commonly thought by practically anyone. As you can see, remarkable results can be achieved by even very small teams, by even one single guy alone, as long as they have proprietary freehold over their business.

ANSI C added a boatload of commands to the basic language, and vastly expanded the “runtime library”, which technically isn’t part of the C language, but is integral to any useful C program. Then came all the modern impedimentia, and C++.

C and its cousin C++ are very powerful languages that allow you to stick in your fingers with the engine running. So very suitable for writing an Operating System such as Unix/Linux/Windows, but too error-prone for writing accounting software.

Computers require an operating system for the same reason. Programming straight to the hardware is much too detail oriented, and everyone prefers to have an operating system that has figured out the hard parts of writing files, updating the display and protecting memory.

The story above sits in that inflection point where computers went from one-per-company to one-per-department and on to individual work stations. Requiring a huge shift in speed, flexibility and price that the old bureaucracies such as IBM could not meet.