A well-known computer scientist parachuted from a balloon near the top of the stratosphere on Friday, Oct. 24, falling faster than the speed of sound and breaking the world altitude record set just two years ago. The jump was made by Alan Eustace, 57, a senior vice president of Google.
The Times reporter John Markoff was at the abandoned runway at a New Mexico airport where Mr. Eustace lifted off — in a balloon filled with 35,000 cubic feet of helium — and wrote about Mr. Eustace’s feat in Saturday’s paper. Here he gives Insiders a full sense of the story behind the story.
Google and Me: A Short History
Since Google’s days in a garage in Menlo Park, Calif., I have had what might be called a “nuanced” relationship with it.
I was invited to the garage on Willow Road in 1998 and may have been the first reporter to speak with Sergey Brin and Larry Page about the search engine they were building. At the time it was impossible to pick which company would be the premiere search engine, and beyond vague memories of a jumble of computers, the meeting didn’t leave a huge impression. And, because there were so many other search engines bouncing around Silicon Valley at that moment, I chose not to write about Google in its earliest start-up phase. This is one of my biggest regrets as a reporter.
Several years later, Google was growing rapidly and was anxious to hide this fact from the world (and mostly from Microsoft).
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