Tandy Trower's guest appearances

Tandy Trower

ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast

Talking Robots - The Podcast on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Jason Moore

Michael Phillips

Jason Scott

Henrik Lund

David Young

Steve Robinson

Scott Adams

Dave Johnson

Ben Smith

Hod Lipson

Robin Murphy

Michael Katz

Peter Shankman

Nolan Bushnell

Rodney Brooks

OwlTail

Tandy Trower, Atari product manager    Tandy Trower started at Atari evaluating software titles, then moved on to the position of product manager, managing new titles including Missile Command, Asteroids, and the port of Microsoft BASIC for the Atari. Then, he left Atari for Microsoft, where — once again, he managed Microsoft BASIC for the Atari. Tandy also wrote the Character Set Editor program which was sold by Atari Program Exchange.    This interview took place May 13, 2015.    Teaser quotes:    “The Atari executives were so impressed with Bill [Gates] at the time that they flew up in their corporate jet to Seattle and offered to try to acquire Microsoft. But Bill and Paul [Allen] were not interested in selling at all at that time.”    “If you had a title, you had to make sure there was an engineer who was available and interested in doing it. So if you couldn’t talk an engineer into writing it — unless you were going to write it yourself. Except for me, there were very few people in the marketing department that could write their own code.” 

Tandy Trower, Atari product manager Tandy Trower started at Atari evaluating software titles, then moved on to the position of product manager, managing new titles including Missile Command, Asteroids, and the port of Microsoft BASIC for the Atari. Then, he left Atari for Microsoft, where — once again, he managed Microsoft BASIC for the Atari. Tandy also wrote the Character Set Editor program which was sold by Atari Program Exchange. This interview took place May 13, 2015. Teaser quotes: “The Atari executives were so impressed with Bill [Gates] at the time that they flew up in their corporate jet to Seattle and offered to try to acquire Microsoft. But Bill and Paul [Allen] were not interested in selling at all at that time.” “If you had a title, you had to make sure there was an engineer who was available and interested in doing it. So if you couldn’t talk an engineer into writing it — unless you were going to write it yourself. Except for me, there were very few people in the marketing department that could write their own code.”

ANTIC Interview 77 - Tandy Trower, Atari Product Manager

In today's episode we talk to Tandy Trower, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who is now the General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group. In this year's January edition of Scientific American, Bill Gates predicted a "Robot in Every Home" after having told Tandy Trower "to go on an extended fact-finding mission and to speak with people across the robotics community". As a result, Microsoft launched their "Robotics Studio" in 2006 without losing a split second. Tandy Trower tells what it's all about, why Microsoft is interested in robotics, if we'll ever see anything close to open source and if we are we really going towards a robot in every home.

Talking Robots: Tandy Trower - Microsoft and Robotics