Richard Brodie
Encyclopedia
style="font-size: larger;" | Richard Brodie
Nickname(s) Quiet Lion
Hometown Kirkland, Washington
Kirkland, Washington
Kirkland is a city in King County, Washington, United States. It is a suburb of Seattle on the Eastside . The population was 48,787 at the 2010 census makes it the 9th largest city in King County and the 20th largest city in the state...

World Series of Poker
World Series of Poker
The World Series of Poker is a world-renowned series of poker tournaments held annually in Las Vegas and, since 2005, sponsored by Harrah's Entertainment...

Bracelet(s) None
Money finishes 5
Highest ITM main event finish None
World Poker Tour
World Poker Tour
The World Poker Tour is a series of international poker tournaments and associated television series broadcasting the final table of each tournament. It was started in the United States by attorney/television producer Steven Lipscomb, who served as CEO of WPT Enterprises , the firm that...

Titles None
Final tables 0
Money finishes 6


Richard Reeves Brodie (born November 10, 1959) is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 computer programmer and author. He was the original creator of Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

. After leaving Microsoft, Brodie became a motivational speaker
Motivational speaker
A motivational speaker or inspirational speaker is a speaker who makes speeches intended to motivate or inspire an audience. In a business context, they are employed to communicate company strategy with clarity and help employees to see the future in a positive light and inspire workers to pull...

 and authored two bestselling books.

Early Life

Brodie was born in Newton, Massachusetts
Newton, Massachusetts
Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States bordered to the east by Boston. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population of Newton was 85,146, making it the eleventh largest city in the state.-Villages:...

, the older son of Mary Ann Brodie and Richard Brodie, a child psychologist. He graduated from Newton South High School
Newton South High School
Newton South High School is one of two public high schools in the city of Newton, Massachusetts, the other being Newton North.-Mission statement:Newton South High School, a community of students, parents, faculty, and staff,...

 and entered Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

 in the fall of 1977 concentrating in applied mathematics with an emphasis on computer science. Brodie left Harvard after his sophomore year and moved to Palo Alto, CA to work for Xerox Corporation's
Xerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...

 Advanced Systems Division (ASD), where he met Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-American computer software executive who, as head of Microsoft's application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship Office suite of applications. He now heads his own company, Intentional Software, with the aim of developing and marketing his...

 and helped develop the Bravo X word processor for the Alto computer. Simonyi became a mentor to Brodie while at Xerox and took Brodie with him when he moved to Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 in 1981.

Microsoft

Simonyi hired Brodie in 1981 as Microsoft's 77th employee&em;and a founding member of the Microsoft Application Division.

Brodie distinguished himself at Microsoft by creating the first version of Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

 in less than seven months. In addition to primary authorship of Microsoft Word, Brodie wrote Microsoft's first C compiler, the original version of Notepad, and Word for the IBM PC Jr.

Brodie's success as a programmer brought him to the attention of Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...

, who made Brodie his technical assistant in 1983. Brodie's primary accomplishment as Gates's assistant was the management of the Cashmere project, which would be released as Word for Windows.
Brodie left Microsoft after the company went public in 1986, but returned in 1991 as Chief Software Designer and Lead Developer of the Omega project, which would be released as Microsoft Access
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of...

 in 1992. He left Microsoft again in 1994.

After Leaving Microsoft

Between his stints at Microsoft, Brodie embarked upon a personal self-improvement quest. He took numerous courses and participated in retreats, looking for an answer to the question of "why money and success didn’t make me happy." He wrote about his experience in his first book, Getting Past OK: The Self-Help Book for People Who Don’t Need Help, first published in 1993. The book became a regional bestseller and was republished by Warner Books. Brodie followed Getting Past OK with Virus of the Mind in 1995. Virus of the Mind explored the new field of memetics
Memetics
Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is essentially a "unit of...

, but from a practical point of view. Hay House bought the rights to both books and currently publishes them. Both books are in print in many languages worldwide.

Brodie's books and the subsequent book tours landed him interviews on both The Oprah Winfrey Show
The Oprah Winfrey Show
The Oprah Winfrey Show is an American syndicated talk show hosted and produced by its namesake Oprah Winfrey. It ran nationally for 25 seasons beginning in 1986, before concluding in 2011. It is the highest-rated talk show in American television history....

and Phil Donahue
The Phil Donahue Show
The Phil Donahue Show, also known as Donahue, is an American television talk show that ran for 26 years on national television. Its run was preceded by three years of local broadcast in Dayton, Ohio, and it was broadcast nationwide between 1967 and 1996.In 2002, Donahue was ranked #29 on TV Guide's...

.

Poker Player

Apart from his careers as a programmer and author, Brodie has found creative ways to integrate his love of sports and games into his professional life. In 2003 he joined the professional poker
Poker
Poker is a family of card games that share betting rules and usually hand rankings. Poker games differ in how the cards are dealt, how hands may be formed, whether the high or low hand wins the pot in a showdown , limits on bet sizes, and how many rounds of betting are allowed.In most modern poker...

 circuit. He has finished in the money in five World Series of Poker
World Series of Poker
The World Series of Poker is a world-renowned series of poker tournaments held annually in Las Vegas and, since 2005, sponsored by Harrah's Entertainment...

 events and six World Poker Tours. Until Black Friday, he played as a Full Tilt Poker
Full Tilt Poker
Full Tilt Poker is an online poker card room that opened in June 2004 with the involvement of poker professionals Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Andy Bloch, Mike Matusow, Jennifer Harman and Chris Ferguson...

 pro under the screen name Quiet Lion. He appeared on NBC's
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

 game show Identity
Identity (game show)
Identity is a reality/game show, hosted by Penn Jillette and produced by Reveille where contestants could win money by matching 12 strangers one-by-one to phrases about their identities.-Format:A contestant is introduced to twelve strangers...

and played himself in the movie The Grand
The Grand (film)
The Grand is an improv comedy film directed by Zak Penn. The film has an ensemble cast including Ray Romano, Woody Harrelson, Chris Parnell, Werner Herzog, Jason Alexander, Dennis Farina, David Cross, Gabe Kaplan, Michael Karnow and Cheryl Hines along with several real Las Vegas poker...

.

Brodie currently resides in Kirkland, Washington
Kirkland, Washington
Kirkland is a city in King County, Washington, United States. It is a suburb of Seattle on the Eastside . The population was 48,787 at the 2010 census makes it the 9th largest city in King County and the 20th largest city in the state...

.

Writings

  • Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
    Meme
    A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...

    , Hay House, 2004. ISBN 978-1401924683
  • Getting Past OK: The Self-Help Book for People Who Don't Need Help, Hay House, 2009. ISBN 978-1401926977

External links

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