I was there for the 30-year reunion, where my photographer recreated the original shot. (And also, despite my pleas that people wanted it as originally posed, did a bizarre setup that confused people, too.) Then I did a group interview. The tone was very upbeat and warm, though clearly there were some underlying issues. But I think that the group was simply happy to look back at an exciting time. We were all sad that Bob Wallace was missing (I knew him and really like him--he was at the first Hacker Conference!) There was a lot of laughter and good natured fun-poking. And at the time Miriam Lubow, the office manager (den mother) of the group, knew she had cancer, but had come to terms with it, and was loving the reunion. She died not long afterward. For me, it was an amazing experience to moderate the group discussion of these people coming together 30 years after they worked at an obscure startup, and were now on the campus of an historically huge and powerful corporation they helped launch.
And yes, I am under the impression that MS paid expenses for this reunion. (But I didn't confirm that explicity.)
Every time I see the original picture my heart skips a beat.
I worked with Bob Wallace before he worked at Microsoft. In his too-short life, Bob did a lot of amazing things. In addition to his graduate work at the University of Washington, he was the first editor of the Northwest Computer Club's newsletter.
He was the publications manager for Seattle's Retail Computer Store (ca 1978). He conceived of the portable computer and actually built one using a motherboard and video card from The Digital Group. When asked to write some accounting software in Altair Basic, he refused. And then went on to write a preprocessor that let him use long variable names and better control structures. And wrote the accounting software in that, instead.
Bob worked on Microsoft's first Pascal compiler (I wasn't there and have no idea what else he did).
After leaving Microsoft he founded QuickSoft, invented the concept of shareware, and made a comfortable living off of contributions from users of his text editor / word processor.
And yes, I am under the impression that MS paid expenses for this reunion. (But I didn't confirm that explicity.)