I really liked Mesa. My wife worked as a developer at XBS (Xerox Business Systems) first in El Segundo and later in Palo Alto after we moved to the Bay Area and I was very envious of XDE, the Xerox Development Environment. At the time I was stuck using a 25 line by 80 column terminal to do code development on and seeing how effective and useful all that screen real estate and tools were on here Dandelion (the Xerox workstation that was the basis for their Star systems) I thought, "Wow, it would be cool to work in an environment like that." Relatively shortly thereafter I ended up going to Sun where I got to use Sun Tools which, no surprise, had many people from both XBS and PARC working on it at Sun and so had many features that I admired about XDE as part of it.
She went to Tandem after Xerox. Mostly to follow her manager and partly because it was painfully obvious to pretty much everyone that XBS didn't understand how to productize the computers and technology that PARC came up with. By then it was clear that Apple was going to do that with the Macintosh.
That is cool. I wonder if she worked in the Tandem buildings on Tantau? It was in one of these buildings (post-Tandem, post-Compaq, post-HP) that I think Apple set up some iPhone radiation testing back when I was at Apple. The buildings had large Tandem red color panels on the front. The buildings are gone now, replaced by the Apple Visitor Reception Center.
