Boundary Pushers

Looking Glass’ tendency to push at the boundaries was present in its founders from day one. Edward Lerner tells a story about cofounder Paul Neurath spending half a year rewriting the Apple II’S operating system because he wanted to get a little bit more power out of it. “If we had gone to Apple and said, ‘By the way, we rewrote Steve Wozniak‘s operating system and we made it 20 per cent smaller and faster, I think we could have gotten rich, but it took ten years to realise that was probably a lot more valuable than all the other work we did!” says Edward.