"Monomaniacal perfectionism." Yep.

One day, Ron (a hardware engineer from Xerox) gave a talk about the theoretical performance of an Ethernet file transfer. He calculated the end-to-end latency and data-rate including disk latency, network latency, the number of clock cycles necessary to send and receive the data, etc.

He had (overhead projector) slides that showed all his assumptions and calculations. Finally he displayed a slide with a graph showing this theoretical maximum, the actual performance of the 3Com network stack, and (IIRC) the Novell stack. As I recall, actual performance was about an order-of-magnitude lower than the theoretical max.

His point wasn't that our software division should be able to achieve the theoretical max. It was that if we (for example) got halfway there, we would know that Novell would never ship software that was twice as fast as ours.

He was very nice and scholarly about it and did not mean offense. I and many others weren't offended. But a surprising number of people were.

I'm sorry to hear that he passed.