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===Legendary Programmers===
===Legendary Programmers===


Without programmers there would be no microcomputer software industry today, and personal computers would have remained confined to the small fraternity of hobbyists knowledgeable enough to create their own programs. Without programmers like the ones discussed in this chapter, a software- using community never would have existed to make folk heroes out of these unlikely cultural explorers.
Some of them live like hermits, and others are as gregarious as rock stars. All of them love to tinker with abstractions. Some are intellectuals, many are artisans, and a few are true geniuses. I know dozens of these characters, but I've picked three to discuss here: Paul Lutus was chosen because of his outright eccentricity and the size of the fortune he made for himself; [[Bill Budge]] is included because of the artistry of his work and because he is a prime example of the software creator as pop star; John Draper's story shows up here because he was probably the first legendary software person, given his earlier notoriety as a different kind of technological folk hero.
Paul Lutus is either the most entrepreneurial of the software eccentrics or the most eccentric of the software entrepreneurs. Certainly he has one of the most unusual backgrounds of anyone in the software industry. In the late 1960s, he was a vagabond who spent several years actually living under the bushes in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and later, on various Lower East Side rooftops in New York City. He experimented with psychedelic drugs, was a street musician, and became a minor celebrity because of his skill at blowing soap bubbles. By the mid-1970s he was back in California, pursuing a relatively mainstream lifestyle and working for NASA. Then he moved to Oregon and lived alone in a tiny cabin on Eight Dollar Mountain. It was there that he taught himself how to program. In the early 1980s, he was still a hermit, albeit in a much more sumptuous retreat, and he had grown accustomed to receiving royalties of two or three million dollars a year from the sales of his programs.
Paul is an independent fellow, but he goes far beyond the normal bounds of independence one comes to expect from programmers, both in what he demands and what he succeeds in getting. He does his own carpentry, his own programming, and his own contract negotiations. He loves music and plays a number of musical instruments. He loves to fly and even pilots his own plane. He even grows his own food, and his brain still seems to generate ideas far faster than he is able to articulate them. To this day he wears clothes that would best be described as "comfortable." His once-tangled head of hair is thinning, but his beard is full and bright red, and he still talks as fast and as passionately as humanly possible when he really gets wound up.
I've seen Paul only a few times, but of course I knew all the Lutus legends long before I first met him. Hearing about Paul Lutus was one of the mandatory initiation rituals in the software industry. Not long ago, I finally saw him on his own turf and asked him, face to face, which of the Lutus stories are
true and which are fictional. In the summer of 1984, he invited me up to his latest mountaintop retreat, in southern Oregon. When I got there, he told me the highlights of his strange story.
To get to Paul's place I flew into the small airport in Medford, Oregon. Had he not picked me up in a four-wheel-drive Subaru station wagon, I never would have found his house myself. We got off a main highway and headed for the nearest forested hills, where we crossed a covered bridge, followed a steadily deteriorating roadway that runs alongside a stream, turned off through an inconspicuous and unmarked gate onto a gravel road, and drove straight across a rough landing strip. Then we drove past a "No Trespassing" sign and a "Warning: Protected by Guard Dogs" sign, and after the "Radiation Hazard" and "Mine Field: Contact Commanding Officer for Map of Area" signs, we finally arrived at a large house built into a mountain- Lutus Central.
Paul claims that his independence and his reclusiveness began during his unpleasant childhood in San Jose, California. "My family is very peculiar," he told me. "Even when we were living in the same house, we didn't talk with each other." Paul's father, a machinist, worked for IBM, and when Paul was young his father sometimes brought home obsolete computer parts. Paul remembers retreating into his workshop and his imagination, putting the components together in different combinations and pretending that they made a real computer. In the fifth grade, when his teacher wanted to put him in a class for slow learners because he always seemed to be dreaming or doodling in some world of his own, a test revealed that he had a genius IQ.
In high school, he was the classic example of a brilliant but emotionally tortured nerd. Only a few years before, he had been considered "slow," and now he found himself regarded by his peers as a "brain," which made him more of an outsider than ever before. Although he did have a few friends, he was pretty much of a loner who entertained himself. He built his own ham radio and an oscilloscope that he traded to a friend for a used bicycle. He remembers riding his clunky bike to and from school whereas his classmates drove their cars to football games and dates. "I was the most socially unacceptable person who ever went to that high school" is the way he remembers it now.
At sixteen he dropped out of school and got a job as a television repairman. Then, some years later, attracted by the countercultural ethic, he decided that making money wasn't a decent goal in life and quit the television repair business to live on the streets and make it as a folksinger during the height of the Haight-Ashbury and East Village scenes of the 1960s. Several years later, facing a winter on the streets of New York, he finally decided that having a job and a regular address wouldn't be so indecent after all. Establishing a modus operandi that was to serve him well for years to come, he walked into the instrumentation laboratory at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital and, with typical verbal persuasiveness, talked his way into a job building electronic equipment for medical research.
In the spring of 1974, after about a year at Mount Sinai, Lutus decided to ride his bicycle from New York to California. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no attachments and no particular plans for the rest of the year, to say nothing of the rest of his life. In Boulder, Colorado, he took some time out to learn hang-gliding, then bought a motorcycle and continued westward. The motorcycle and his money gave out somewhere around Sacramento. He hitchhiked to San Francisco, picked up a newspaper, and saw an ad for a job he knew he could do. He cleaned himself up as much as possible and performed a bit of his patented verbal razzle-dazzle on the personnel officers of an aerospace contractor.
He told a tale about a technical education he never had, but, showing that he knew what he was doing when it came to electrical and electronic design, he talked his way into a contract to design part of the complicated lighting system for the first Space Shuttle. His brilliant solution to this technical problem won him a bonus and a certificate of recognition from NASA. The aerospace contractor offered him other projects, but Lutus declined and in fact quit the job right then and there.
The subcontractor was reluctant to see him go, since he had turned out to be the star performer whenever NASA officials showed up to see how the lighting project was progressing. He had a knack for filling blackboards with equations and deftly fielding all technical questions with extemporaneous dissertations on the details of his design. But Paul was determined to get himself some breathing and thinking space. He had lived on the streets and in the parks, he had been a hobo and an aerospace engineer, he had traveled and dealt with too many people, and now it was time to find a place to be alone with his thoughts. And so he took his NASA money, told his former employers that he would be back to work for them as soon as he needed more money, and left San Francisco for the deep back country of Oregon.
In the spring of 1976, Lutus backpacked construction materials to the top of Eight Dollar Mountain, a wooded ridge 400 feet above a wilderness valley in Oregon, and hand-built a 12- by 24-foot cabin. After the cabin was finished, the provisions and modest furnishings were packed in, and the wood was chopped for the winter, the one thing he had in abundance was spare time, so he taught himself programming. At the time, he undoubtedly fit the classical definition of a poverty-stricken "hermit," but eventually his self-taught programming skill would eliminate his poverty and make him a rich hermit instead.
To most people, hackers are just the latest and perhaps the scariest variety of mad scientist. Weird computer guys, in the minds of the nonprogramming majority, are exactly like other weird technocultists. But people like Paul Lutus turned a much more favorable light on the public image of the programmer when they showed how much their arcane skill was worth on the open market. Some of the early entrepreneurial hackers of the microcomputer age came up with something that no previous variety of obsessed scientist had procured- vast amounts of money. As for Lutus himself, it is ironic that after he painstakingly worked himself into a position of bucolic solitude and lived a lifestyle that took a lot of manual labor to maintain but paid him very little in terms of money, one of the first things he did to amuse himself ended up making him rich.
That first winter, when he found himself alone with his thoughts in his wood-heated, waterless cabin, Paul started toying with one of the few items he had brought with him- a sophisticated battery-powered Hewlett-Packard electronic calculator. He told me that he had brought the calculator up to the cabin in the first place to help him with basic arithmetic. Higher mathematics had always interested him, but he had never bothered to memorize even the multiplication tables.
"The law said I had to attend school, so I was physically present in the classroom after the seventh grade" is the way he puts it, "but I wasn't there in any intellectual sense. I was in the back of the room with my own books. At home I built radios. I didn't know my multiplication tables, but I sure as hell knew how to think."
And as it happened, by setting up equations in proper sequences, he figured out how to create a limited variety of programs on the calculator. As an exercise, he made a pocket-calculator model of the solar system and wrote an article about it for publication in an electronics hobbyist magazine. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote Lutus to tell him they were using his calculator model to help perform their own calculations for the <i>Viking</i> Mars-lander mission.
"I realized that my calculations were more than exercises," Lutus told me. "I saw a way to capitalize on my unique way of thinking about things. Programming started out as fun, but I certainly didn't object to making money from it." (This is a familiar refrain. Many other software entrepreneurs, me included, were disbelieving when we first learned that people were actually willing to pay us to mess around with programming. I remember how I felt when I saw my first royalty check for <i>Galactic Empire</i>.)
Paul then became more and more interested in programming for microcomputers. Although eventually he would write a little science fiction software himself, he was mostly interested in building tools for computer owners- word processing programs and graphics programs that people could use to make their own discoveries. Tools of this nature help people win their independence and offer a very attractive kind of profession to someone like Paul, for whom making his own discoveries has been one of the most dominant themes of his life and work.
And so, after the HP calculator, Paul bought himself one of the early Apples, which he connected to his generator. Having low serial numbers is quite a status symbol among Apple fans, and Paul always points out that his Apple II was number sixteen. One of the things he thought about in his mountaintop retreat was how to create programs that were compact enough to fit into the very limited memory space of these early machines. It was the perfect kind of intellectual puzzle for him: After a life of drifting between art, technology, and vagabondage, he had finally found a pursuit so absorbing that he could pass entire nights solving a programming problem without noticing that sunset had turned to dawn. He sent more than thirty cassette-based programs to Apple, which bought most of them-for anything from $100 to $500 each.
But few of the programs Apple purchased were ever distributed. Of the few that were published, one of them, strangely enough, had initially been rejected by Apple. It was a simple music program- a tone generator. It was finally printed and attributed to Paul, whose name was nevertheless misspelled in Apple's famous "Red Book"- their first, terribly written, technical reference manual. (Software publishing was a lot looser back then; nowadays, a mistake like that would lead to a lawsuit.) Lutus then sold some programs to other companies, but he never made more than a few hundred dollars per program until the spring of 1978, when he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to work on another Space Shuttle job. He brought with him a cassette that would enable the Apple to understand a few spoken commands. He asked Apple for a thousand dollars up front. Apple offered him one of their new disk drives in return for the program.
When he got back to Oregon, late in the spring of '78, Paul turned out a variety of small programs for different manufacturers, and he thought he would attempt a more ambitious program- a word processor. He had been trying to write an article about Albert Einstein and resented all the time he lost retyping drafts. What he needed was a computerized writing tool- a program that would enable his Apple to do what fancier word processors on bigger computers could
do. By the end of the summer, he had a crude working version of Apple Writer. He didn't know it at the time, but this was the first version of the program that would make him a millionaire.
Lutus took this version of <i>Apple Writer</i> down to Apple and demanded a flat fee of $7,500- far and away the most money a programmer had ever asked for thus far. Having sold only about 5,000 of the new Apple IIs by the fall of 1978, Apple was still a small enough company to consider $7,500 to be an issue for serious deliberation. The Apple people finally agreed, but they kept asking him to make changes, additions, and fixes on the program. After a while, he decided that he had no obligation to continue fixing the program until he ended up upgrading it to a new version (something every programmer has a right to charge for) for free. He then began to conceive of new features for a completely revamped word processor, and he started writing the program that eventually
became <i>Apple Writer II</i>.
By 1979, Lutus programs were selling for between $5,000 and $10,000 apiece. He was now earning more money in a single month than he had made in all of his vagabond years combined. Over a year had passed since he had sold the first version of <i>Apple Writer</i>. At about this time he had completed another word processing program that he claimed was a radically new product. Because Apple still paid flat fees instead of the royalty arrangement Lutus now wanted, he began to look around for a publisher. Having once met [[Peter Jennings]] of [[Personal Software]], publishers of [[VisiCalc]], Paul wrote him a letter and proposed that [[Personal Software]] publish the new Lutus word-processing program under the name <i>LexiCalc</i>. [[Dan Fylstra]], whom Lutus had not known previously, immediately took over and asked Paul to "refrain from serious negotiations with anyone else" during [[Personal Software|Personal Software's]] forty-five-day evaluation period.
Lutus was to receive $1,500 for the waiting period, during which, according to Lutus, [[Dan Fylstra|Fylstra]] asked for various modifications in the program. He began to sense that he was creating a whole new version before he even had a contract. Although he swears that he never initiated negotiations during the option period, Paul was contacted by Apple, which told him they had heard about his program via a friend inside [[Personal Software]]. The software people at Apple, who were not willing at first to meet Paul's demand for a royalty arrangement rather than a flat fee, were nonetheless eager to see his program. Somehow, word of this traveled back to [[Dan Fylstra|Fylstra]], who immediately launched into an acrimonious dispute with Lutus over the phone and via letter.
Lutus eventually sold his program to Apple, but this time he received an advance against royalties instead of a fee. Since Apple was selling considerably more than a few thousand machines by this time, Lutus started receiving royalties that soon amounted to more than $5,000 a day. Whereas <i>Apple Writer</i> had been only a modest success, <i>Apple Writer II</i> remained the best-selling word processor for the Apple for five years; his 25 percent royalty on this one program made Paul a millionaire.
The first wave of successful Apple programmers made more money in a few years than almost any mainframe or minicomputer programmer normally makes in a lifetime. For example, Paul Lutus earned more than a million dollars a year during the 1980-83 boomtime, and the word-processing program he created with his generator-powered Apple earned him nearly 3 million dollars in royalties in a single year.
Before long he had enough money to indulge his long-time dream of flying his own plane. He even moved out of his old cabin at Eight Dollar Mountain and donated it, along with his first airplane and thousands of dollars, to The Nature Conservancy, a wilderness preservation group. He became the sole source of financial support for Planned Parenthood in southern Oregon. (Because, he claims, his own childhood was so miserable.) After building a series of progressively larger cabins he finally moved to a real house- one that he didn't even pack in and assemble himself. He has an airstrip now, as well as two airplanes. He writes articles, continues to support charitable ventures, flies around making speeches to school children, publishes slim volumes of poetry, and is still one of the best programmers in the business.
Paul's current house- the one he invited me to recently- is a rambling, white stucco and terra cotta tile affair in the Spanish style, with a central courtyard and a thick, ornately carved front door. If you can envision a slightly scaled-down version of President Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, and put it in rolling hills surrounded by Douglas firs instead of on a cliff that overlooks the Pacific, surrounded by palm trees, you get the picture. The house, which was originally built by a survivalist, even had a moat around it when Paul first moved in, but he filled it in and planted a garden.
If the original cabin on Eight Dollar Mountain was the epitome of spartan, his latest place could easily be described as luxurious. There are massive rock fireplaces and high ceilings; he has electricity now, and a state-of-the-art stereo with speakers in every room. Not exactly the kind of hermit he once was, he now entertains an occasional friend. He even has girlfriends but retains a passionate distaste for the institution of marriage. He still makes his own music- I saw a recorder, a lute, a guitar, and a piano at his house- and one night during my stay he and a girlfriend treated me to a flute duet for several hours. When he needs more intensive solitude, he takes off in one of his planes.
I spent a morning flying around southern Oregon in his Super Cub with him. While he practiced "touch and gos" on isolated mesa tops and tiny airstrips, we talked about his future in the software industry. Or at least, I tried to talk to him about it. Lutus, like many programmers, avoids thinking about long-term or large-scale strategies for securing his position in the industry. Job security was never his goal in the first place. The computer is a device with which he and many programmers have an intensely personal relationship- a relationship that exists independent of their relationship with the software marketplace. They program because programming is in itself pure entertainment for them, and because real life seldom produces the kind of immediate feedback and instant rewards that programming can provide.
Paul needs that kind of relationship, but only as long as it continues to be a liberating rather than a confining force. For that reason, he absolutely rejects any attempt to stereotype or pigeonhole him. That's why he devotes so much of his time proving both to himself and to others that he is much more
than a rich programmer. He is an aviator, a musician, a political activist, an outdoorsman, a poet. He is utterly himself- irascible, brilliant, iconoclastic- and will not be trapped by the expectations or preconceptions that others may have about him.
One way people liberate themselves from others' expectations is by acting in as idiosyncratic a manner as possible. Once people define that behavior, however, even idiosyncracy becomes a cage. The existence of rich programmers like Paul proved that unorthodox people who relate to machines better than they get along with people still can be valued by our society. But Paul understands that the myth of the programmer can estrange him from the actual role of programmer. As he says, he is fortunate. His savings permit him to do whatever he likes. He doesn't have to program for the marketplace, and that feels good because he's not at all sure that he wants to create for the market, at least not the market that exists now.
Paul has his own inner vision of what the future holds for the software industry, and he'd just as soon program for that market. If the world catches up to him, that's fine with Paul. But if it doesn't, that's okay too. He never specified what the software market of the future looked like in his vision, and in our conversations he didn't talk about one specific kind of software he planned to produce. We'll all just have to wait to see what he comes up with next, I guess.
"The rich are different from other people," Scott Fitzgerald reputedly said. "Yes," Ernest Hemingway allegedly replied, "they have more money." By the same token, programmers are different from other people because they know how to write computer programs. For many people, the programming skill is as difficult to grasp and as distant from their daily experience as is fluency in Swahili or the ability to assemble a pocket watch.
But this difference between programmers and nonprogrammers will probably become very blurred in the near future because programming will no longer require facility
with the arcane amalgamation of abstruse mathematical calculations and painstaking logical puzzle solving. One key that will help to open the door to this coming populist revolution in software design is an exciting new kind of program, known in the trade as a program generator, that is already on the market. A lot of people in the software industry see these innovative products as the first step toward the creation of a programming-literate population that will number in the millions instead of in the thousands.
Program generators are partially tool-like, partially game-like, and partially lesson-like. A program generator brings the nonprogramming computer user to an intermediate stage between using a computer program that was written by someone else and generating a computer program of one's own. This stage is reached not through any formal education in programming principles but by means of a kind of transitional metaphor between the thinking involved in playing a video game and the kind of thinking needed to create a program.
One of the best and most successful program generators was written by a friend of mine named [[Bill Budge]], who has been a legend among Apple programmers since the earliest days of commercial microcomputer software. He is also probably the quintessential representative of the new breed of programmers who see themselves as teachers and artists as well as technicians and craftsmen. He is, in fact, a programmer raised to the level of a pop star. [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] current publisher, [[Electronic Arts]], is even promoting him in much the same way that record companies promote their artists- with personal appearances, posters, even full-page magazine ads that display photo portraits of the programmer as culture hero. In one of the first magazine ads on [[Bill Budge|Bill]], the copy next to his photograph claimed: "In a bedroom in a frame house in Berkeley, California, a guy who looks like he might have stepped out of a TV series family is playing with some ideas that could change your life."
[[Bill Budge|Bill]] does indeed look like he stepped out of "Leave It to Beaver." He could be one of Wally's friends, the kind of gangly but good-looking guy who is usually depicted with a basketball under one arm. He could even pass for one of the non-blond minority in a surf movie. Although there is a certain truth to the "nerd mythology" that microcomputer technology was first invented by a bunch of MIT types with thick glasses, bad complexions, and unsuccessful social lives, [[Bill Budge]] is evidence of the fact that an obsessive love of computer programming can strike even the tall, dark, and handsome boy next door. (Softalk, the magazine for Apple owners, once published a fan letter that described Bill as a "hunk." The letter was later revealed to be a hoax- composed by Corey Kosack, a sixteen-year-old programmer who happened to be doing some work for [[Broderbund Software|Brøderbund]] at the time.) As for the frame house mentioned in the [[Electronic Arts]] ad, it too exists, although it is considerably more than the humble student dwelling implied by the ad, and it is actually located in Piedmont, an affluent neighborhood a few miles away from Berkeley.
It is also true that [[Bill Budge|Bill]] is playing with ideas that are likely to change your life. His tools will put the power of computer programming into the hands of ordinary people. And he has yet to come up against the limits of his abilities. He's the kind of synthesizer and innovator who takes ideas from dozens of places and weaves them into brilliant and startlingly unexpected patterns. His past programming achievements, and the way he always seems to have his antennae out for sources of new ideas of every kind- from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to theories of dance notation- lead me to expect something even more spectacular from him in the near future. Certainly, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] will be among those people who are going to make the next decade of the microcomputer software industry even more interesting than the past decade.
[[Bill Budge|Bill]] was a famous programmer (in programming circles) before I ever owned an Apple- in fact, before I had even seen an Apple computer. I first learned of his name when on my journey west to visit my brother Gary- the trip that turned into a career- I stopped in Chicago to visit my aunt, who had an Apple II. Several diskettes containing demonstration programs came with the machine. One of the diskettes contained a game called <i>Penny Arcade</i>, which had a beautiful graphic opening sequence that struck me as a particularly provocative example of what one could do with an Apple. <i>Penny Arcade</i> had been written by [[Bill Budge]].
The first time I met [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1981. Since then we've spent a lot of time together, talking about the art and science and business of developing software, and on several occasions we have even talked about becoming business partners. I can remember one particular occasion when a conversation between [[Bill Budge|Bill]], [[Douglas G. Carlston|me]], and some other programmers actually led to [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] program generator and masterwork- <i>The [[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>, about which more will be said later on.
Like most great programmers, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] got into software at a young age. He was in exactly the right place at the right time to join the first generation of programmer-entrepreneurs. But unlike today's youngest programmers, who have learned to program with the more advanced computer languages that have come along in the past few years, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] started out the hard way. At sixteen, as a precocious student at Piedmont High, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was introduced to computers by his math teacher, who put a few exceptional students together with an old IBM 1401. The 1401 didn't have an easy-to-learn high-level language like BASIC, or even an older, harder-to-learn language like FORTRAN. Bill had to create his first programs in a language called 1401 Autocoder, a very primitive assembly language.
An assembly language consists of three-letter commands (like JMP or LDA) that tell the computer to perform very simple one-step-at-a-time operations. For example, where a command in a high-level language like BASIC might be able to say PRINT X + Y - Z, an assembly language program might require a dozen instructions to perform the same task. Assembly language instructions, however, can be converted into machine language-the code of zeroes and ones that instruct the computer to produce the on-and-off electronic
impulses that constitute a computer program in operation- by means of a special translation program or <i>assembler</i>.
Assembly language is a very tedious and complex language to create programs with, since the computer must be instructed in exhaustive and unambiguous detail about where to find the data to operate on, how to operate upon them, and what to do with them once they are processed. And if any single symbol is out of place, the whole program will fail. Because the assembly language instructions correspond so closely to the electronic activities of the computer hardware, assembly language is called a low-level language, or one that, as some say, is "close to the machine."
Most programmers prefer to write their programs in a high-level language because it is more like English and is easier to use than the complex assembly language. When one learns enough BASIC to write programs on a computer, the BASIC interpreter built into the BASIC language program works as the program runs to convert each line of the program's instructions into machine language commands. However, BASIC programs are never as compact or as fast-running as code written by a programmer directly in assembly language.
The speed of execution of a program is particularly important in computer games, because people don't want to wait for three minutes to see if their shot hit or missed the alien invader. Graphics and animated figures are possible only when a program runs quickly. For these reasons, then, an assembly language expert like [[Bill Budge]] had an edge over other programmers when computer games came along.
But long before that time, when [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was still learning assembly language programming in high school, he had the first "religious experience" of his programming career. His math teacher gave him a program for multiplying two numbers by repeatedly adding one of the numbers to itself and then stopping when the number of repetitions equaled the second number. This kind of instruction that starts the computer performing the same set of subinstructions over and over until a certain goal is accomplished is a basic programming technique known as "looping."
"I got real excited," [[Bill Budge|Bill]] told me when he recalled that first insight, "because the whole idea of programming became clear to me when I saw what a loop could do. It was an incredibly exciting moment. I wrote down the lines of the program, then checked them to make sure they were right. All of a sudden, I saw what a loop really was for, why there could be such a thing as a loop, and how you could do a lot of things with the right kind of repeated sequences of simple instructions. By the end of high school I thought I was the world's greatest programmer."
But although he had far surpassed his teacher's ability to show him anything new, he was still a novice, and there was no hacker subculture of other high school-age software prodigies, such as there is today, to initiate him into the deeper mysteries of programming. He was virtually on his own, and when he was graduated from high school, he realized that spending so much time with his programs had locked him away from his peers. He went to the University of California at Santa Cruz as an English major, determined to expand his horizons beyond his obsession with programming virtuosity.
"I was fooling myself into believing that I didn't want to program computers as much as I did," he remembers. "I didn't want to be a nerd. I wanted a social life. I wanted to date. So I started acting cool. I wanted to be a writer. But I didn't want to write. Then it became clear that although writing was a struggle for me, programming was still a pleasure. So I transferred to the computer science program in Berkeley and concentrated on learning as much about computers and programming as I could."
The year that [[Bill Budge|Bill]] went to Berkeley was 1975- a signal year in the history of microcomputers, since that was when the introduction of the MITS Altair brought programming out of the world of expensive mainframe computers and within the reach of hobbyists. Of course, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] didn't have to build a microcomputer from a kit to program. He could program on the finest equipment available at Berkeley. He wasn't interested in kid stuff like microcomputers, and video games were still in their infancy then.
Instead, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] wanted to create systems software and write compilers. It was the deep stuff of computerdom, and by now [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was more interested in his career goals in the mainframe world than he was in the kind of intense emotional involvement that had gripped him at sixteen, when he first discovered the loop. Then, in 1977, as a graduate student in computer science at Berkeley, he had his second "religious experience" when his friend and fellow graduate student Andy Hertzfeld showed him one of the earliest Apple computers. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] still gets a wide-eyed look when he talks about it: "What I saw was the graphical bandwidth that was possible with the Apple. Like the loop, it opened a door onto a huge universe of possibilities."
"Bandwidth" is simply jargon for a measure of the amount of information than can be transferred between the computer and the display screen, and between the display screen and the eye of the person looking at it. Think of bandwidth as the width of a pipeline of information. Morse code can transmit only one bit of information at a time, so it has a narrow bandwidth. A television image can convey millions of bits of information in less than a second, so it has a very high bandwidth.
When it comes to computers, bandwidth is a very important measure of how interactive the device is and thus is a direct indicator of how interesting the programmer or user will find the device. We humans are very information-hungry creatures, particularly when it comes to visual information. It takes a lot of bandwidth to attract and hold our interest. Think about the first, simplest <i>Pong</i> games, with the ball bouncing back and forth, with some primitive sound effects. Then think about something like <i>Pac-Man</i>, with animated characters in color and high resolution, moving fairly quickly in a rich visual environment. Finally, think about a television show and a wide-screen movie image. It's pretty obvious that one's interest increases as bandwidth increases.
[[Bill Budge|Bill]] got hooked on the Apple's bandwidth because it offered him something the mainframe computers he was using at Berkeley could not. Even though mainframes had vastly greater processing power than the first Apples, the way they communicated with the programmers was through a very low bandwidth device known as a terminal. Terminals allowed many people to share the services of a central computer- an arrangement known as time-sharing that was a revolutionary breakthrough in the early 1960s but that was old hat in computer terms by the late 1970s.
By entering commands on keyboards and receiving print-outs through a typewriter-like device, programmers on time-sharing systems could run their programs and see the results. But they couldn't interact with the computer at the same communication rate that they used when they interacted with people. It's very much like trying to carry on a conversation by means of a teletype machine. And so, since most programmers want to have a conversation with a computer, their hunger for high bandwidth is understandable.
The nice thing about the Apple that [[Bill Budge|Bill]] saw that day in 1977 was not that it had huge computing power, but that the power it did have was immediately available to the person using the computer, and the information that mediated the human-computer interaction was visible through the graphic display on the screen. That's what a personal computer is- a computer that is interactive enough, visible enough, and fast enough for one person to use. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was therefore so captivated by the Apple's interactive capability that he immediately sat down and wrote a <i>Pong</i>-like game for the Apple- his first microcomputer program.
To the faculty and the other students at Berkeley's computer science department, the Apple was an amusing toy, but certainly nothing for a sophisticated programmer to get serious about. [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] friend Andy Hertzfeld tried to declare personal computers as his academic subinterest, and everybody gave him a hard time about it. At the time, computer scientists, programmers, and the computer industry all saw them as smaller and far less powerful computers with bad or nonexistent software. To some extent, those were valid criticisms- but computer people, of all the different technological specialists, ought to have known how quickly crude prototypes can evolve into sophisticated devices.
Not too long after he left graduate school, Hertzfeld joined the Apple Corporation at a very early stage in that institution's history and later became one of the most influential software people on the Macintosh team. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] himself also worked for Apple at one time, but before that, while still a graduate student, he spent months just trying to buy an Apple at a discount. Computer science graduate students aren't wealthy people, unless they moonlight as professional programmers. By Christmas of 1978, in his second year of graduate school, he finally went as deeply into debt as he had ever been in his life and bought his own Apple at full price.
"I remember putting the whole machine back in the boxes every night after I used it, just to keep it as new as possible," he told me recently. It was an ironic reminiscence, considering the tens of thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment and audio gear that surrounds him in his workplace-playroom now. All of the models of Apple computer are scattered around the room, although the one that appears to be used the most is the 1978 Apple II, now battered-looking and only partially operational. And there's what appears to be a coin-operated video game machine in the corner. It turns out to be a customized programming device sent him by Williams Electronics, the coin-op giant, who evidently hoped that [[Bill Budge|Bill]] could be persuaded to write some coin-op games for them. (He couldn't.)
BASIC was the only high-level language that was available when [[Bill Budge|Bill]] got his first Apple, but he quickly realized that he couldn't write anything interesting in BASIC. So he started writing in assembly language. With the speed and precision afforded by assembly language, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was able to approach a new level of high-resolution graphics- indeed, his programs became known for their "high-res" effects.
"In early 1979," [[Bill Budge|Bill]] remembers, "everyone was discovering the tricks of microcomputer programming through trial and error. I'd turn on my machine and start fooling around with different locations in the memory, trying to figure out how to put dots on the screen and move them around fast."
Then, referring to [[Bob Bishop]], the first person to sell a lot of Apple software and actually make a little money for his efforts, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] said: "Nobody but [[Bob Bishop]] had ever written any high-res stuff. He was everyone's hero." "Everyone" consisted of the hard-core fanatic Apple programmers of that era. "When I first got my Apple, the first thing I did was to get a disk that had some [[Bob Bishop]] games.
"One of the games on the disk was called <i>Bomber</i>, a really famous game because it was in hi-res and had so much detailed animation. These tanks would go across the screen and you'd fly a bomber. When you released a bomb, it would make a parabolic curve as it fell, and if you made a hit the tank would blow up and pieces would fly up in the air then settle to the ground. It was a whole new level of realism from bouncing square <i>Pong</i> balls around a screen.
"I wanted to make cartoons and games. That's what I thought was really neat about these new little computers that you could plug into your television. I thought that computers by themselves were a lot less interesting than computers combined with other things- like entertainment or education or art. Despite my specialization in microcomputer programming, I've always been interested in a lot of different subjects. The Apple looked like a great vehicle for turning my programming abilities to a much wider range of applications than just science or business programming."
And after a while, it also looked like a fun new way to pick up a few bucks on the side. At that time, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was making about $4,000 a year as a teaching assistant- a stipend that paid for his tuition, but not much else. In the tradition of grad students everywhere, he was just getting by. Still, the prospect of making some money from his microcomputer dabbling wasn't his major motivation. At first, the primary motivation was the raw challenge of exploring and conquering the unknown. There were entire libraries full of programs for the bigger, older, more serious computers, but virtually nothing available for the Apple. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] simply enjoyed poking around in the machine's memory and using assembly language programming to come up with new ways to move graphic objects around the screen.
"When I saw what you could do with a personal computer like the Apple, I was thrilled by the prospect of jamming on the computer, the way a jazz musician might jam on a piano. I've always been the kind of person who gets something kind of clunky working quickly, then spends more time fixing it and tuning it- as opposed to the type of person who breaks down the process into logical steps, then gets everything arranged mentally before trying to make it work. There are a lot of advantages to the more analytic mode, but I found that my seat-of-the-pants style was powerful and fast. Mostly, I found that it was the way I like to do things."
Then one day, later in 1979, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] drove across the bridge from Berkeley and down the peninsula to Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters were located. He wrote four different <i>Pong</i>-like games, put them together with an intriguing little graphic leader, copied the program onto a diskette, and took the diskette with him. The people at Apple looked at his software, liked it, and told him they wanted to add it to the demonstration disk they included with every machine they sold. Nowadays, such offers are known as "bundling deals," and they can make programmers rich. Apple offered [[Bill Budge|Bill]] a printer worth about $750 as payment for <i>Penny Arcade</i>, and he was happy to get it.
The main thing about programming microcomputers is that it's fun to do, but it's always nice to get paid as well. That's the way all great programmers start out- intrigued by the idea that they could earn money from such an enjoyable hobby. Six or seven years ago, however, it never really occurred to any of us just how lucrative programming could be. We learned eventually that we not only could make a living at it, but a very decent living at that.
At about the same time that I was beginning to consider having my first game published, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] began to think about making his sideline into a full-time career: "Although it took me a month to write the first programs I sold, I knew that when I got up to speed I could create twenty of them a year. And that meant I could make around $20,000, which was a very decent wage compared to what I could have pulled down in a computer science department at a university or as a programmer for a mainframe computer company. So I started grinding out games."
Despite his "factory approach" to software production, the games that [[Bill Budge|Bill]] started producing weren't bad. In fact, they were visibly superior to almost every other product on the market. They were just as visually intriguing as his first. He kept Apple enthusiasts supplied with new and exciting software, and these early games brought [[Bill Budge|Bill]] up to speed on assembly language and game-programming techniques.
"My parents went to Hawaii that summer, and I had the whole house to myself," [[Bill Budge|Bill]] recalls. "I wrote four programs in three months and took them to Hayden Publishing. They liked the programs, but they couldn't decide on the provisions of the contract quickly enough for me. Three months later I took the programs to a company called Softape. I wanted to sell them outright for $2,000 each. They liked them but they didn't want to buy them. Then I met a fellow who wanted to sell them for me on a royalty basis. He was a sort of frontier ethic, software gold-rush kind of entrepreneur. He had what was then a new idea- he gave demonstration copies of my programs to the managers of computer stores. In Christmas of 1979, a year after I bought my Apple, he brought me my first royalty check- $6,000 for my first month!"
That was more money than [[Bill Budge|Bill]] made in two semesters as a graduate teaching assistant. If it kept coming in at that pace, it would be more than the head of the computer science department earned. It didn't go quite that fast, however. The first year that he devoted himself to turning out programs for a living, 1980, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] made around $10,000 rather than the $20,000 he had hoped for at first. But the year after that, 1981, he made $80,000. And he was now making a name for himself in a field that was just beginning to blossom in the marketplace. Computers were selling faster and faster. And as the rate of computer sales increased, so did the sales of good programs. By 1982-83, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was making in the neighborhood of half a million dollars a year.
For a while, in 1980, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] worked at Apple, along with his old friend Andy Hertzfeld. He became friendly with people like [[Steve Wozniak|Wozniak]] and Jobs, who had been his heroes. The fun factor had jumped an order of magnitude, and the challenges were more intriguing every day. And financially, he was rocketing past what his computer science colleagues were making in academia and the mainframe world. But to [[Bill Budge|Bill]], programming offered more than just money and even more than sheer enjoyment. It also offered what he wanted most of all: glory.
He had seen what Jobs and [[Steve Wozniak|Wozniak]] had done. He had seen what programmers like [[Bob Bishop]] and Paul Lutus had done. Like any other artist, he wanted a broader canvas, a more ambitious scope for his vision. He wanted to create the state-of-the-art program in the world of Apple software. He then stopped writing all of the short, sweet, throwaway games that had been his bread and butter, and he took a risk. And this was before he started making the big money. He spent several months working on one masterpiece, a best-selling program that lives in software legend under the name <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i>.
As usual, [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] idea was to take one of his personal interests and combine it with his programming skills to create something new. In this case, it was his interest in playing pinball. To most people, the old-fashioned electromechanical pinball games are the very antithesis of computer games. Pinball is very mechanical and physical, with steel balls and bumpers and lights and buzzers. Computer games are electronic and more perceptual than physical. Instead of steel balls, computers manipulate dots of light. But [[Bill Budge|Bill]] realized that the ball, the flippers, the effect of gravity, the "bounciness" of the bumpers- all the essential elements of pinball- were, in principle, capable of being simulated by a computer program.
"I wanted to make one great video game," [[Bill Budge|Bill]] told me when I asked if he consciously set out to create a best-seller. "The idea of creating a 'hit' in the commercial sense really wasn't part of the atmosphere back then. I realized that video games were getting kind of boring, from the point of view of the programmer, if not yet the consumer. I could crank them out and make a good living, but they weren't very satisfying. I started working on <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i> when I was at Apple, in late 1980, and I finished it in March '81. When I realized how good it was, in comparison to everything else that was out there, I started thinking about marketing it myself."
[[Bill Budge|Bill]] is actually a pretty modest guy, especially in comparison with some of the unabashed egotists that seem to abound in the software game. When he says that he realized how good it was, he is simply stating a fact. Everyone in the software industry realized that it was a significant programming breakthrough. Besides the idea of designing a computer version of a pinball game, [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] creation included a lot of important innovations that inspired other programmers to try to top <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i>. The game exhibited a graphic complexity that had not been seen before on a microcomputer (although arcade-type video games, with their dedicated graphics hardware had attracted attention and money with dazzling graphics).
By April 1981, the software market was maturing rapidly. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] had had a series of bad experiences with existing software publishers and wasn't happy with the contracts he was offered by various distributors and publishers for his products, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He started a software publishing company- [[BudgeCo]], it was called- to market ,i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i>, and his sister and brother-in-law set up an operation in their house, not too many blocks away from [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] place in Piedmont. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] happened to be correct in his initial estimation of <i>[[Raster Blaster|Raster Blaster's]]</i> impact. It was the third program to (temporarily) dislodge [[VisiCalc]]- at that time, the all-time best-seller in microcomputer software history- from Softalk's list of the top thirty Apple programs. (The other programs to temporarily outsell <i>[[VisiCalc]]</i> on the Apple were [[Tony Suzuki|Tony Suzuki's]] <i>[[Alien Rain (Apple II, 5 1/4" Disk) Broderbund Software - 1981 USA, Canada Release|Alien Rain]]</i>, a [[Broderbund Software|Broderbund]] publication, and [[Nasir Gebelli|Nasir Gebelli's]] <i>[[Space Eggs]]</i>, a [[Sirius]] product.)
By the time <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i> hit, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was more than a legend- he was a significant industry in himself. There were many more people buying programs, the price of the programs was going up, and so was the programmer's share. But running a publishing company turned out to be a drain on his creative time, so [[BudgeCo]] eventually faded away. He started out publishing the Apple version of his next program but soon grew tired of worrying about marketing it and began shopping around for another publisher- one that would take him on his own terms.
That next program was, like <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i>, a masterpiece. It was called <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>, a program generator in the guise of a game, and it turned out to be another watershed in the programming art, as well as another smash hit in the marketplace.
The origins of <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i> are particularly interesting to me, because they involved a challenge that two of our programmers and I set for [[Bill Budge|Bill]] one summer afternoon, and because they involved as well some obscure but important breakthroughs provided by others in various kinds of computer research. The use of program generators was not unique. But  [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] program generator also included graphic symbols known as icons, and graphic editors that enabled users to create new programs by manipulating those icons- a new kind of human-computer interaction that had been pioneered at high-technology thinktanks like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and was included in Apple's new (and then-unreleased) machine, the Macintosh.
The general idea of graphics construction sets first emerged more than two decades ago with Ivan Sutherland's brilliant <i>Sketchpad</i> program. When Sutherland was a graduate student at MIT in the early 1960s, the standard way of seeing computer output was on teletype machines. <i>Sketchpad</i> was a program that enabled programmers to actually control the computer's operations by means of graphic symbols that were displayed on a television-like screen. By using a lightpen, the user/programmer could actually create different shapes on the screen, then manipulate the shapes by means of the computer's processor and store the end product in the computer's memory.
Innovations happen so fast in the software world and become standards so rapidly that the idea of creating graphics on a screen and storing them in a computer seems old hat to even the youngest computer user today. But in 1961, when <i>Sketchpad</i> was written, this idea was truly revolutionary. The idea of designing a graphic world inside a computer- the concept known as simulation- was another such breakthrough that is now commonplace. Several years after <i>Sketchpad</i>, a computer scientist and educational expert at M.I.T. by the name of Seymour Papert was experimenting with graphics and simulations and a new computer language called LOGO.
One of the key concepts in LOGO was that programming a computer doesn't have to be as esoteric and difficult as the first computers and the old-time programmers made it seem. The idea behind the LOGO project was to develop a new computer language- one that even children could quickly learn to use. LOGO starts novices on the path to programming not by having them type in unfamiliar commands but by introducing them to a means of controlling graphic displays known as turtle graphics. The turtle was originally a small turtle-shaped robot that crawled around the floor, drawing patterns on pieces of paper, but eventually it became an abstract turtle- a symbol on a computer screen.
Between the older ideas like Sutherland's <i>Sketchpad</i> and Papert's LOGO and the newer ideas like icons and program generators, the fundamental concepts of software construction sets had already existed for years when [[Bill Budge]] came along with <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>.
But although [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] program generator was one of the best in the microcomputer world, it was not the first to be developed for that market. The previous summer, [[Broderbund Software|Broderbund]] had published a game called <i>The Arcade Machine</i> that enabled the user to create a variety of "shoot-'em-up games," admittedly an easier and less general task than constructing a variety of pinball games. And there was a famous piece of software called <i>The Last One</i> that was heavily advertised in 1981 as a generator so powerful that it would be the last program you would ever need to buy. Even before that, another, very sophisticated game generator was designed in 1978 by a game programmer at [[Atari]] named [[Warren Robinett]]. [[Warren Robinett|Robinett]] decided to do an animated version of the <i>Adventure</i> games that had originated on the mainframe computers at MIT and Stanford and had migrated, via the efforts of people like [[Scott Adams]] and [[Douglas G. Carlston|me]], to the microcomputer world. The original <i>Adventure</i> was strictly a text game with no graphics. In order to produce a version that had animated graphics, [[Warren Robinett|Robinett]] created a simple graphics editor that would allow the player to move through <i>Adventure's</i> various caves while dragging various graphical objects along on the journey.
When [[Warren Robinett|Robinett]] left [[Atari]], he teamed up with a couple of education experts to create a microworld simulation that took his simple graphics editor into the realm of true program generators. The much-acclaimed program <i>[[Rocky's Boots]]</i>, written by [[Warren Robinett|Robinett]] and [[Leslie Grimm]], published after <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>, is a game that allows children to build various "machines" by putting together various graphical "parts." One very interesting aspect of this game is the fact that the machine parts are very advanced in that they are actually Boolean logic symbols, while the machines themselves are Boolean logic circuits. The child who uses the game ends up knowing how to design Boolean logic circuits- a skill that was formerly reserved for college mathematics majors or computer science students in graduate school!
With <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>, an even more advanced program generator entered the marketplace. In fact, when it was first released, it had an enormous impact on those who used it because it seemed to be more than just a great game. It looked and felt like a whole new way of using computers. I can remember the first time [[Bill Budge|Bill]] talked about the idea of programming such a game. The topic came up on the day he, [[Nasir Gebelli]], another set of programmer-entrepreneurs, and I met in Sacramento to talk about the prospect of merging our companies.
It was hardly the kind of giant merger discussion you read about in regard to the old-fashioned computer business, where phalanxes of three-piece-suited attorneys engage in marathon negotiations over hardwood conference tables. As I remember, we spent some time talking in a pizza joint in Sacramento. Nothing came of the merger discussion, but the same people ended up in a conversation at a barbecue I held at my house in San Rafael shortly thereafter. [[Chris Jochumson]], who had created [[Broderbund Software|Brøderbund's]] <i>The Arcade Machine</i>, was there, and so was [[David Snider]]. [[David Snider|David]] had written a best-selling pinball game that [[Broderbund Software|Brøderbund]] sold under the name <i>[[David's Midnight Magic]]</i>. The game was very complex, but it did not give users an option to create their own game from the elements provided.
[[David Snider|David]] was of the opinion that a generalized pinball microcomputer construction set, one that could simulate a wide variety of pinball layouts, couldn't be created. What with the effect of simulated gravity, and the angles the ball would bounce at, and the effect of bumpers and flippers and obstacles, [[David Snider|David]] felt that there were too many factors involved to generalize. But although [[David Snider|David]] thought that a general pinball game would be too hard to write, [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was convinced that it could be done. It took him longer than he thought it would take, but he was certainly right.
Like <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i>, <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i> simulates all the elements of an old-fashioned pinball game. But the new program allows players to make their own modifications on the basic game, and to create their own games. Previously, one had to dig into the program and modify the code to change a computer game. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] made the modification process accessible to the nonprogrammer by providing a set of software "tools" that are displayed as icons- small symbolic graphics- on the screen. At the time [[Bill Budge|Bill]] was developing this program, Andy Hertzfeld and other friends of [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] at Apple were incorporating icons into the Macintosh.
If players want to pick up a bumper or a flipper, they use the joystick to move an icon that looks like a hand and touch it to the bumper or flipper. That icon is actually a tool that can pick up the bumper or flipper icon and places it where the game creator wants it to be. When the hand icon touches the flipper icon and moves it into position, part of the program's code tells the computer's memory that the flipper icon has been moved. By selecting different parts and putting them together in various combinations, the user/player/game builder can make an almost infinite variety of pinball games. [[Bill Budge|Bill]] included another tool that allows users to magnify an area of the screen so that they can work on fine details.
Naturally, the program was another smash hit. It was also a sign of things to come. People who were knowledgeable about the evolution of software design began to point out that this program actually allowed the user to directly manipulate the computer's operations without using a programming language: When the little hand icon drags the little flipper icon over to a representation of a pinball game board, the same thing is accomplished as would normally take a programmer pages of programming code to do.
The idea of modifying a basic template is much more palatable to most people than the prospect of designing a game (or any other complex creation) from scratch. Software construction sets can give novice computer users their first taste of the kind of power exercised by people like [[Bill Budge]]. Instead of seeing computer programming as mysterious and difficult, people are beginning to perceive it as a skill that can be easily mastered and that gives them more control over what they can do with their computer.
Program generators like <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i> have already spawned a whole new category of stand-alone programs and tools that are included within other programs. [[Broderbund Software|Brøderbund]] includes generator tools in several of its programs. <i>Lode Runner</i> and <i>Spare Change</i>, for example, are multi-level games that allow users to modify the program, thus creating their own variations once they have mastered the basic game. Other publishers are marketing programming generators in one guise or another- for learning how to read, write, and compose music, for steering a simulated Space Shuttle, and even for learning biochemistry and immunology.
As for [[Bill Budge|Bill's]] decision regarding a publisher for <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>, certainly I strongly pitched the advantages of signing up with [[Broderbund Software|Brøderbund]]. Any software publisher in his right mind would give a great deal to have a [[Bill Budge]] on board. But at the same time, a group of ex-Apple people, headed by [[Trip Hawkins]] and backed by [[Steve Wozniak]], had decided to form a new kind of software publishing company that would be modeled on record companies, and they strongly urged [[Bill Budge|Bill]] to join them. In effect, they told him that the success of their venture, [[Electronic Arts]], depended on his participation. They also offered him a substantial share of the company's ownership.
So [[Electronic Arts]] published <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i> and started sending [[Bill Budge|Bill]] out on tours to computer stores, printed up [[Bill Budge]] posters, and promoted him as the first software artist to become a pop star. It couldn't happen to a more deserving person, as far as I'm concerned. As far as [[Bill Budge|Bill]] is concerned, his apprenticeship was shoot-'em-up games, he became a journeyman with <i>[[Raster Blaster]]</i>, and he just started his career as a master software craftsman with <i>[[Pinball Construction Set]]</i>. He and a lot of others, including [[Douglas G. Carlston|me]], think that the world has only begun to see the effects of his unique talents.
[[Bill Budge|Bill's]] ambition for the near future is to create more tools that will enable other kinds of artists to do things in their own fields that they weren't able to do before [[Bill Budge]] made it possible. "I want to help create the language for a universal medium of knowledge. I want a filmmaker like George Lucas to use my tool to create films he couldn't have created without the program I plan to make for filmmakers. I want choreographers and playwrights and water polo players to use my tools."
What [[Bill Budge|Bill]] is talking about, and what program generators demonstrate, is that programming is a metaphor for controlling information. The old metaphor involved complex codes, punch cards, and giant machines, and a newer metaphor involved strange new languages and smaller machines. The program generator is a different metaphor altogether, and [[Bill Budge|Bill]] thinks that there are still newer and more powerful metaphors to be found beyond the program generator.
"Right now, I think theater is the best metaphor for programming," [[Bill Budge|Bill]] claims. "That's what I'm trying to make concrete. Alan Kay, who is one of the original visionaries of personal computer software, says that programming is a process of choreographing multiple agents. I want to figure out a way for people to do that choreography by using skills they already possess."
I think [[Bill Budge|Bill]] is trying to say that people understand theater far more easily than they understand mathematics. If programming arcana like procedure calls and data types, loops and stepped variables can be turned into analogies we already understand- like props and characters, scenes and sets- then the population of people who are able to understand how those elements are combined will be vastly expanded.
In the ancient days of computerdom, only the scientifically literate and the technologically obsessed were interested enough in programming to become good at it. [[Bill Budge]] is a significant member of a new generation of artists and craftsmen, thinkers and activists and dreamers- a generation that sees the advent of the computer as the opportunity to create a new level of human culture. I think something similar must have happened back when the new technology of the printing press created a large literate population and made it possible for artists to create sonnets, politicians to draft manifestoes, and scientists to write treatises.
I know a few young programmers, and they give me good reason to suspect that [[Bill Budge]] is just one of many software artists who will make themselves known in the next three, five, or ten years. But today's teenage programmers have at least one advantage over [[Bill Budge|Bill]]: As a pioneer, he didn't have any role models himself, but the up-and-coming hackers of today and tomorrow have [[Bill Budge]] and his products to emulate.
John Draper, fanatic wizard in the programming language Forth, jackpot programmer-entrepreneur, and folk hero of those technological enthusiasts called phone phreaks, is known to most of the microcomputer world as "Cap'n Software." His involvement in the industry began in the myth-shrouded era of the homebrewers, but long before then, he and [[Steve Wozniak|Wozniak]] were fellow technopranksters back when apples were still just small red fruit that grew on trees. He's cherished by many as a stubborn, independent, free spirit in a software market increasingly dominated by large teams of programmers. To others, however, "cherished" might not be the best word to describe their feelings about John Draper. Ask around the industry and you'll collect some strong and often less than favorable opinions when you mention his name.
Indeed, his reputation almost precedes him, for he is a man with a past- a past that involves one of the more notorious and romantic episodes from technological folklore of the 1970s.
This is one of the few profiles in this book that are not based on years of friendship or extensive personal interviews. Frankly, I'm a little wary of approaching John for a direct interview, especially after hearing what he did to a couple of journalists I know. There is apparently a kind of informal Draper initiation ritual that all interviewers must survive before they get anything out of him. One of the journalists who suffered through a Draper interview agreed to describe the legendary ceremony, with the understanding that I wouldn't use his name.
"Fifteen minutes after I met John Draper," my journalist friend told me, "he ordered me to assume an anatomically questionable position."
What this friend meant was that Draper asked him if he wanted to "help out with some stretching exercises." That in turn meant that my friend had to take off his own shirt and shoes and get down on his hands and knees on the floor of John's apartment. Then John got on my friend's back, threw a full nelson, and barked orders into his ears. Such was a typical Draper interview, but it turns out that the Draper treatment is a form of amateur chiropractic. He has a bad back, and he actually does go through various calisthenics and contortions every day.
But nobody had fully explained this to my friend: "By the time it sank in that somebody who I had been warned was rather eccentric was taking it upon himself to debug my spine, I was duckwalking around the room, carrying out odd instructions barked into my ear by this big sweaty guy with an itchy beard. I knew that programmers can be weird, but it had never come to this." My friend survived the initiation, conducted his interview, but canceled his plans for a second conversation.
Draper is intimidating enough without direct physical contact. I've seen him at Computer Faires and trade conventions over the years, and I can vouch for the fact that his appearance alone can unnerve the unprepared: A gray-flecked tangle of dark hair and beard frame his famous gap-toothed grin; ice-blue eyes focus an inch and a half into your forehead when he talks to you. If you remember the face of Blackbeard the pirate or Long John Silver, and if you can imagine one of those fellows wearing slightly skewed eye-glasses, then you'll be able to recognize John Draper.
Then there's the matter of John's personal communication style. Expansive gestures often accompany his words. He has been known to raise his voice, which is pitched at a particularly piercing frequency range. He doesn't lack for strong opinions. And if anybody within 200 yards lights a cigarette, cigar, or pipe, watch out. He's allergic to tobacco smoke and is not too shy to say something about it.
Draper is definitely a graduate of the "take it apart and see how it works" school of computer wizardry, rather than the rarified heights of MIT's or Stanford's computer science department. But programming was really his second career. The escapades that brought him notoriety, if not financial rewards, took place long before the Altair era and involved the global telecommunications network rather than anything as simple as a personal computer.
Before he became reknowned as "Cap'n Software," the programmer of the late 1970s who was involved in one of the major software deals in the history of the microcomputer software industry, Draper was known only as "Cap'n Crunch," techno-anarchist hero of an entire subsect of the technological underground: the phone phreaks. Although he had been a legend in phreak circles since the late 1960s, his saga as Cap'n Crunch wasn't told to a general audience until 1971, when a journalist named Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article for <i>Esquire</i> entitled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Rosenbaum described the antics of an electronic genius in California who performed strange and technically illegal pranks through which, by means of a device known as a "bluebox," he was able to gain access to the telephone system free of charge.
Years later, Draper still claims that his motives for his former activities were unjustly misunderstood. He's not an anarchist or a vandal, he has always maintained. He just likes to learn how complicated systems work and is driven to find out how to control the activities of these systems- whether they are electronic systems, software systems, or telephone systems. Unfortunately, in 1974, Federal judges didn't agree with John's interpretation of his motives, so Draper temporarily moved into Federal correctional facilities.
But long before that time, Cap'n Crunch was just one- albeit the most well known-of thousands of "phone phreaks" who for years conversed over their own clandestine communication system that just happened to make use of Ma Bell's own vast network. Their very existence stemmed from their urge to tinker, which was in turn stimulated by something as accessible, complex, mysterious, and vast as the telephone system. That they could even learn how that system worked came about as a result of their discovery of forbidden knowledge about a technical loophole in the telephone system's security. Nearly thirty years ago, AT&T made the long-term multibillion-dollar decision to base its long-distance switching system on a series of audible tones. These tones, which triggered various internal switching devices, were based on a series of specific frequencies. Unfortunately, an article in a technical journal divulged the frequencies of the control tones.
An unusual group of people, having read the article, began to take advantage of this technological vulnerability, apparently independently of one another- at first. A mutant variety of the kind of adolescent boy who is likely to fiddle with soldering irons and ham radio outfits, the first phone phreaks made clever use of tape recorders and electric organs to facilitate entry to the switching system. By knowing when and how to enter the right tone into their home telephones, these electronic trespassers were able to "phreak around" the network and to learn how it worked. Soon, those phreaks with electronics skills began building tone generators.
The person who is universally acknowledged to be the founding phreak, predating even Cap'n Crunch, was a blind young man with perfect pitch who <i>whistled</i> into the phone and thus gained access to virtually any telephone in the world, free of charge. Joe Engressia was his name. His dream in life was to work for Ma Bell. In fact, he liked to tell her about flaws in her system-a bit of outlaw gallantry that eventually led to his legal downfall. In fact, the first phone phreaks considered themselves to be harmless, and for the most part even helpful. They <i>liked</i> having the system function perfectly, and they liked to help the phone company fix any bugs they found. Many of them, curiously, were blind. The more aggressive phreaks, however, were bringing down the heat.
In the late 1960s, Cap'n Crunch himself got his name from a breakfast cereal that offered a toy whistle as a premium. The sound produced by the whistle was coincidentally close to a pure 2600 cycle tone, and as every phreak who ever thumbed a bluebox knows, 2600 cycles is the most important of the control tones needed to build one's own shadow network within the international switching system. When he was an Air Force electronic engineer stationed overseas, John Draper started using his whistle to talk to his friends back in the States, toll free. But free phone calls to friends weren't his biggest goals. He wanted to learn the ins and outs of the wonderfully complicated global switching system.
When he got out of the Air Force, the Cap'n got full-tilt into phreaking, driving around northern California in a van crammed with electronic equipment and performing late-night experiments from public telephone booths. He set up complex, satellite-linked, global communications circumnavigations in order to talk to himself from adjacent phone booths in remote areas. Or he would call public telephones in faraway places. What's happening at the American Embassy in Moscow? Who's passing by a phone booth in London? What's the weather like in Uruguay? The object was not to make free phone calls. The goal was to play the communications network like a musical instrument, to reprogram it as if it were a giant computer that he could command from any telephone.
After the <i>Esquire</i> article came out in 1971, Draper got a message through the phreak underground that two young fellows from Silicon Valley wanted to meet him. Crunch knew how to put the right electronic components together to make a bluebox. [[Steve Wozniak]] and Steve Jobs were interested in building their own blueboxes and maybe making a few dollars by selling them to students. Ever the advocate of a free exchange of technical information, Crunch told the two would-be entrepreneurs the technical details they were seeking. Shortly thereafter, the two Steves were holding "bluebox parties" in Berkeley dormitories and selling their elegantly home-built blueboxes for $60 apiece.
In 1974, Cap'n Crunch was busted twice. The first time landed him in a Federal penitentiary in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for six months. His second conviction for wire fraud landed him for several years in Lompoc, another Federal pen, located in California. It was in Lompoc that a Mafia-connected inmate tried to bribe John to divulge the secrets of bluebox construction, then, failing that, to extort them from him. Draper refused to divulge what he knew, and the other inmate broke Draper's back- hence his ongoing interest in chiropractic exercises. While serving his second term he became eligible for the prison's work-furlough program, which enabled him to learn programming and try to find programming jobs.
Draper and [[Steve Wozniak|Wozniak]] continued their friendship, although the Cap'n's relationship with Jobs was not as close. When Apple was barely out of the garage stage of its operations, Draper became one of its early employees. One of his jobs was to design a telephone device for the Apple. The telephone board Draper designed had very sophisticated properties- too sophisticated for Jobs's tastes, because Draper had included features that phone phreaks might find very useful. They were no longer having fun and making a few extra bucks selling blueboxes to undergraduates. They were trying to build a legitimate company. Draper was fired. But not before he used the prototype phone board for one last, massive prank.
Draper was looking for WATS extender numbers- codes that allowed people in a particular area to gain access to free long-distance lines for major companies. Phone phreaks like to use these numbers to help them set up some of their pranks. The codes were four-digit numbers, which meant that he would have to dial up to 10,000 numbers if he were to find these codes by brute force. But Draper wired up an early Apple computer to his prototype phone board and programmed it to dial 5,000 calls a night and automatically record which attempts led to legitimate WATS connections. The city of Mountain View, California, where Draper was living at the time, has determined that Draper was responsible for more than 50 percent of the calls originating from that city during the period his experiment was in operation.
Draper had dabbled in programming for years- after all, phreaking is a way of programming the communication network- but it wasn't until he was on a work-furlough leave from his second prison term that he started to seriously teach himself Forth. Forth is a peculiar programming language in that it uses "grammatical" structures different from those of other languages. Because Forth consists of programmer-defined "words" that can be combined into customized programs, it enables programmers to work in a highly individual manner. Because of the fanatic devotion that some programmers tend to develop for Forth, one of the clichés in thesoftware industry is that "Forth isn't a language- it's a religion."
Because of his self-taught, freewheeling style, John's method of programming had several advantages and disadvantages when it came to the world of microcomputer software. While he was at Apple, and afterward, he developed a reputation for writing very concise code, which meant that he could produce an applications program- like a word processor, for example- that could fit into the limited memory of one of the early personal computers. He could also work very fast and accomplish a great deal during prolonged programming binges that sometimes took several days. His style was also vulnerable to criticism on some counts, however. Instead of revising his whole system to fix an error, he might create a "patch"- additional code that doesn't eliminate the problematic feature of the program but rather bypasses certain annoying results.
In the late '70s, John decided to design a word-processing program for microcomputers. Text editing and word processing were already catching on, but such programs then in use in offices were too large and cumbersome to shoehorn into an Apple. So John created <i>EasyWriter</i>. But by this time, he was persona non grata around Apple, and even though he maintained his friendship with [[Steve Wozniak|Wozniak]], his program was rejected by the corporation. Eventually, in 1978, Apple decided to support a word-processing package called <i>Apple Writer</i>, created by that other eccentric character, Paul Lutus.
After Apple turned down <i>EasyWriter</i>, Draper found a partner, Matthew McIntosh, who was able to handle his mercurial mood changes and bizarre work habits. He and McIntosh set up a booth at an early West Coast Computer Faire, and when Adam Osborne came around, they asked him how they might go about selling their new <i>EasyWriter</i> package. Osborne was a well-known author and computer-book publisher at the time- although he had yet to start the innovative and ill-fated Osborne Computer Company- and they were eager to get advice from someone of his caliber. Osborne suggested that they visit another booth where a young fellow was promoting a primitive database manager and whose start-up software publishing company was called Information Unlimited Software. Draper and McIntosh took Osborne's advice and went to the IUS booth, where they found a transplanted midwesterner in his early twenties, an aggressive and confident entrepreneur by the name of Bill Baker.
From the moment Draper first talked to Baker about <i>EasyWriter</i>, the destiny of Cap'n Software became more of an entrepreneur's story than a programmer's tale. That story will be continued in the next chapter. Suffice it to say now that when Baker happened onto one of the juiciest deals in microcomputer history, Draper became one of the first microcomputer programmers to make a lot of money in a very short time.


== Links ==
== Links ==

Revision as of 04:32, June 30, 2025

Software People
Title
Software People: An Insider's Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Inc.
Release Date
1985
Genre
History
ISBN
0-671-50971-3
Format
Hardcover
Country
United States of America
Language
English

Description from the Book Jacket

Entrepreneurs, eccentrics, prodigies, and flim-flam men-the software people emerged from hobby shops and backwoods cabins to create the explosive, lucrative business of personal-computer software publishing. Now, insider Douglas G. Carlston chronicles the birth of the industry and tells the tales of the small group of extraordinary young people who started out pursuing an obscure hobby and ended up spearheading a new campaign in the information revolution.

Back in the glory days of the late '70s and early '80s, bright young entrepreneurs like Doug Carlston shook the change out of their families' and friends' pockets to finance start-up companies, and found themselves millionaires overnight- the Gold Rush era. But just as suddenly, the software publishing business went bust- the Shakeout-leaving a lot of people wondering what happened.

Doug Carlston, whose own company, Broderbund Software, Inc., is thriving, has been in the middle of this volatile industry from the start. In Software People, he takes a personal look at the programmers, adventurers, and home-brew tinkerers who provided the fuel for the personal-computer revolution:

  • Teenagers Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a small software company that topped the $100 million sales mark before Gates turned thirty.
  • Paul Lutus, hermit, self-educated dropout, and former street person, built himself a primitive cabin in Southern Oregon where he wrote the program that earned him over a million dollars in royalties every year of the Gold Rush- nearly $4 million in his best year.
  • Terry Bradley and Jerry Jewell were running a Radio Shack franchise in Sacramento, California, in the spring of 1980, when a confident young programmer named Nasir Gebelli walked in with a couple of microcomputer programs. Less than a year later, Gebelli's royalties were in six figures and Bradley and Jewell were in charge of a multimillion-dollar company that was on its way to dominating the industry. By 1984 that company was bankrupt.

There was Bill Budge, the young programmer whose publisher promoted him as a pop star; Joyce Hakansson, self-proclaimed "denmother" of the educational software developers; Margot Tommervik, who won $15,000 on a television game show and used it to start the computer magazine boom; Ken and Roberta Williams, who created microcomputer fantasy games, hired a crew of teenage programmers, and built an empire in the Sierra foothills; and the Japanese software people, whose software boom is just beginning. Carlston tells about today's survivors, and analyzes the factors that led to their success, discusses what happened to those who didn't survive the Shakeout, and speculates on what might have brought some of them down.

Harvard graduate Doug Carlston abandoned his law career in 1979 because he was making almost as much money- and having a lot more fun- writing his Galactic Saga programs. In 1980, at age 32, Doug enlisted his younger brother Gary to start a software publishing business out of their Eugene, Oregon, home. By 1983, their annual gross sales topped $10 million. Along with their sister Cathy, Doug and Gary continue to run a healthy company in an industry littered with the remains of former software giants. Software People is the real story behind today's digital boom and bust, and the people who made it happen, written by one of the drama's most prominent players.

Copyright

To:
Gary and Cathy Carlston,
without whom Broderbund would never have existed.

Copyright (c) 1985 by Doug Carlston

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Design by Shirley Covington Jacket Design by Lorraine Louie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Production Data
Carlston, Douglas G.

Software People

Includes index.

1. Computer software industry- United States.

I. Title
HD9696.C63U51487 1985 338,4'700536'0973 85-18355 ISBN 0-671-50971-3

Acknowledgments

I want to thank John Brockman, who conceived of this book, and Frank Schwartz, who believed in the project and gave me the confidence to tackle the job. I'd also like to thank Howard Rheingold, who helped me write much of this book and whose knowledge of his craft made the rest as intelligible as it is. Without his gentle prodding, I never would have succeeded in committing anything to paper. I'd like to extend my appreciation to my assistant, Janetta Shanks, whose humor and organizational skills helped bring the book together. Many software industry people contributed their time and let me pick their brains for the book: Paul Lutus, Ken Williams, Ed Auer, Margot Tommervik, Bill Budge, Messrs. Son, Hoshi, Kudo, and Gunji, and Bill Baker. Thank you all. My gratitude extends to all the Broderbunders who kept our company on such a steady course that I could spend weekends working on the book: Gary Carlston and Cathy Carlston, Ed Bernstein, Bill McDonagh, Stu Berman, Debbie Hipple, Jane Risser, Jon Loveless, Brian Eheler, Brian Lee, Al Sonntag, Allan Kausch, and all the others. The three outside groups whom we most credit for our early success are Dave Wagman and Bob Leff of Softsel, Al and Margot Tommervik of Softalk magazine, and Minoru Nakazawa of Star Craft. Finally, I thank my wife, Mary, for her patience and support on this project during our first year of marriage.

Introduction

When my brother and I started Broderbund Software in 1980, we had no idea that it would become one of the largest home computer software companies in the world. In fact, we originally entered the software business by accident. We had no business plan, no scheme to make our fortunes. We were just trying to come up with a way to pay our next month's rent.

In most ways, we were unlikely candidates for the roles we assumed. Neither of us had any business experience to speak of, neither of us knew very much about computers, and neither of us lived anywhere near those centers of innovation where so many high-technology firms were springing up. Before we started our company, I was a lawyer, practicing my trade in rural Maine. My brother Gary had just returned from Sweden, where he had spent five years working as a coach for a women's basketball team. He was now living in Oregon, where, after a stint as field director for the March of Dimes, he became involved in an importing business that proved to be unsuccessful.

What we had was computer fever-a malady we shared with all the other entrepreneurs who were forming similar companies. Of the two of us, I was the one who was more heavily stricken. Programming can be an addiction- those who get drawn into it often forget jobs, family, and friends in their absorption with these fascinating machines. My own addiction began in 1978 when I took the fateful step of entering a Radio Shack store in Waterville, Maine, in order to take a closer look at the computer that was displayed in the window. I ended up walking out with a TRS-80 Model 1 tucked underneath my arm. My life has not been the same since.

I wasn't a complete stranger to computers, however. In the mid-1960s, as a teenager, I had taken a summer course on computers at Northwestern University. In the following years I found a few programming jobs, first at the University of Iowa in Iowa City (where my family lived when I was in high school) and later at the Aiken Computation Lab of Harvard University, where I was an undergraduate. My fellow programming fanatics and I used to jam chewing gum into the locks on the doors of the chemistry building just so we could sneak in after midnight and play with the big IBM 1620. But college was an exciting place for me, and there were lots of other distractions, so my interest in computers waned. By the time I saw that computer in the Radio Shack window ten years later, I had forgotten everything I once knew about computers-except how much fun they were.

When I obtained my TRS-80, I was a lawyer in Newport, Maine, a small town that had fewer than 5000 residents and was close to my parents' summer place. Having grown tired of practicing corporate law in Chicago, I had retreated to Maine in 1977, opened a law practice with a friend, and divided my time between lawyering, building houses, and skiing. All of this had been fun at first, but rural life was starting to bore me, and I began looking for a distraction.

I bought the computer because I thought it would be fun to use. I also had a notion that I could computerize a lot of the routine work around my law office. At that time I knew of a lawyer in Northern Maine who traveled around the area in a Winnebago camper that was fully equipped as an office and that included a microcomputer system; he was able to crank out wills, trusts, and deeds in a fraction of the time normally required for such work and at a fraction of the cost that most lawyers charged. Our law office needed to be able to compete with him, I thought. We needed to computerize.

I know now that those thoughts were purely rationalizations. As I started to play with the computer, all my old fascination with the technology returned. These tiny machines could do almost as much as the huge, expensive models I had first encountered! My interest in the law business declined, and I spent more and more of my spare time learning the tricks of programming. I did eventually write the legal software for my firm, but we never really used it. At the same time I also wrote a game. Although I saw it as a weekend amusement, that game was actually the beginning of the end of my law career.

The game was a simulation-a science fiction fantasy called Galactic Empire. I wrote the program in a couple of weekends for my personal enjoyment. And when I say a couple of weekends, I mean a programming marathon that started Friday afternoon and wrapped around to Monday morning, relieved only by occasional catnaps and snacks. When the game was finished, it turned out to be a lot of fun to play, and so I started adding more and more features to it, until I finally ran out of space in the computer's memory. Even these powerful new microcomputers can hold only so much in their electronic memories before they cry uncle and refuse to run a program.

I then began to look for ways to make my programming code more compact so that I could add just one more feature. Like minuets and mathematical equations, programs should be elegant as well as formally correct, and it takes a very skilled, experienced programmer to tinker with a program without destroying its elegance. My own program structure ended up looking like a tangled ball of spaghetti, but only another programmer would have noticed how ungainly it was. For those who were just playing the game, the programming code was invisible.

Imagine you're playing the game. What you see on the screen is the cockpit of a spaceship. You're at the helm, where you see, in the upper left corner of the screen, a window that looks out into interstellar space. If a planet comes into view, your onboard computer identifies it for you. Below the viewport you see a computer screen (after all, spaceships are bound to have computers on board, so I included a "computer within the computer"), and off to the right is your fleet detail that tells you at a glance how many fighters, transports, and scout ships you have at your disposal. The objective of the game is to conquer a cluster of twenty planets that had unlikely names like "Javiny" and "Ootsi." To accomplish your goal within the 1000 years that you are allotted (people live longer in the future) requires considerable logistic sophistication.

In fact, the game was a fascinating intellectual exercise. It was far more fun to play than I had ever thought it would be. What made it so special was that I had never been able to play anything like it before. Without computers it would have been impossible to create such a simulation. In other words, a whole new area of entertainment had just been created. It's hard to describe how excited I felt. I love games of all sorts. The idea that the world might suddenly be filled with hundreds of brand-new games was unbelievably thrilling.

At that time, however, I owned very little software, and Radio Shack carried almost none. It was then that the store manager told me about a wonderful chess program published by a Boston-based company called Personal Software; eventually, I drove all the way to Boston to get a copy. But one program simply wasn't enough to satisfy my appetite. I then discovered 80-NW, a home-printed four-page computer magazine that was dedicated to users of the TRS-80. I bought a subscription to the magazine and was treated every other month to an ever thicker book filled with programming tips and advertisements for microcomputer-related products. Dozens of programs were available, and I could have bankrupted myself in a week simply by ordering all the software that struck my fancy. So one day I thought up a scheme to get more games.

I sent a copy of Galactic Empire to four companies that had runs ads in 80-NW. Would they be interested in publishing my program?, I asked. And, by the way, would they consider sending me their line of software, gratis, as part of the deal? To me, creating a game and trading it for other games promised to be an intensely satisfying transaction. It would be great fun if I could get away with it.

The scheme succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Scott Adams of Adventure International sent me his whole line of adventure games from Florida. Art Canfil of Cybernautics sent me his program Taipan from San Francisco. The Software Exchange (TSE) in Milford, New Hampshire, sent me a huge pile of games. And in return, everybody wanted to publish my program, a procedure that was a little different in the late 1970s than it is now. Then, programs were stored on cassette tape- a fairly slow and clumsy medium that was eventually replaced by floppy disks. Moreover, in those days no one thought to ask for exclusive publishing rights to a program, so with my permission Adventure International, TSE, and Cybernautics all published my game, with varying degrees of success. I was in seventh heaven, having never imagined that writing software could be profitable!

Compared with the effort of writing software, the activity of selling it was not only profitable but also remarkably fast-paced, right from the beginning. Four days after I sent Galactic Empire to Scott Adams in Florida, I received a call from Scott's wife, Alexis. Yes, they loved the program, she said. In fact, they already had orders for it, and if I would give her oral permission to publish, they would start shipping later that day. The contract would follow later. Scott and Alexis were as good as their word. I received my first royalty check, for a couple of hundred dollars, two weeks later. I was astonished. People were actually paying me to have fun!

I started to take the whole programming business a little more seriously, and in time my obsession with the TRS-80 began to destroy my law practice. I couldn't help myself. Even in the courtroom, I'd suddenly find myself thinking of a more efficient way to write a particular piece of code, or I'd realize that there was a logical defect in a program that wasn't doing what I wanted it to do. My legal briefs ended up with bits and pieces of programming code scribbled in the margins, and I could hardly wait to get back to the office to key my ideas into the machine to see whether they worked.

Finally, in October 1979, I dissolved my law practice. I was having a lot more fun writing computer games than I was drawing up wills. The fact that I was also making a modest but steadily increasing income from my programming efforts had something to do with my decision, but at the time it wasn't at all clear that this was a prudent career move. I had no idea whether the freelance programming business was going to continue to be financially viable, but I abandoned my law career anyway because the microcomputer software world drew me in a way that I found irresistible.

It immediately struck me- when I realized just how possible it was to make a living at my kind of programming- that I had an opportunity to lead an altogether different way of life. It took me a while to accept that I had stumbled upon such a beautiful loophole in the rules of life, but once I did I knew that my job for the immediate future was to create fantasies and translate them into computer programs. If you think that sounds a lot more like play than work, you know how I reacted to the prospect of this new career. The kind of fascinating sci-fi sagas that had occupied my spare hours- flying interstellar craft to a thousand strange planets- was now my profession as well as my avocation.

It didn't take long for my new career to change the way I lived my life. Something very different from everything I had previously planned for myself suddenly became possible, and I was still young enough to be tempted by the prospect of a romantic journey into an uncertain future. So I went along with the opportunity to become an electronic-age vagabond. I didn't need an office or more equipment than I could fit into the trunk of my car. In fact, I could write my fantasy programs from wherever I could plug in my computer, so I started traveling across America. With my dog in the front seat and my computer and a few other possessions in the back seat, I headed in the general direction of Oregon. I stopped along the way to visit friends and relatives, play with the computer, and shed the three years of Harvard Law School and four years of the juridical practice. I was free, for the first time in years.

Three thousand miles later, I arrived in Eugene, Oregon, where my brother Gary lived. He had given up his job with the March of Dimes and was now investing all his time and energy in his ill-fated importing business. One day when he was feeling particularly broke, I suggested that he try to sell some of my programs; after all, everyone else seemed to be making money doing it. By this time, I had followed up my first simulation program with another, Galactic Trader; eventually, I finished four programs in the Galactic Saga series. On the morning of February 20, 1980, Gary called a fellow named Ray Daly, owner of The Program Store in Washington, D.C., and talked him into ordering $300 worth of our products. We then officially formed a company, and, using a name from one of my science fiction simulations, we called ourselves Broderbund. A software company was born.

That evening, Gary and I had a celebration dinner at a local restaurant to fortify us for the arduous task of filling Daly's order. Computer software was still sold in the form of cassette tapes, and so we spent most of the next day with three cassette tape recorders, dozens of cassettes, plastic packing bags, and staplers strewn all over the living room floor as we frantically tried to copy enough programs to fill the order on time. Our efforts were successful. We packed the cassettes into the plastic bags and sent them off. At the top of each bag was our (hastily produced) business card and a punched hole that retailers used to hang the bags on the pegboard racks that passed for point-of-purchase displays in those days.

Things moved very quickly from that point. We had some financial problems in our first year, but by the third year of operation, we had moved from Eugene to San Rafael, California, a community in Marin County, twenty minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. We had hired more than forty people to help us and were occupying a fairly large building. Our company was selling millions of dollars' worth of software annually. Software pioneers who had been only names in magazines or the heroes of hobbyist legends were now my colleagues, competitors, and, in some cases, friends.

Broderbund is now around the tenth largest software publisher in the microcomputer industry, while the software industry itself has become a significant slice of the gross national product. Indeed, the software business, and particularly software people, seems to have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention from the general public.

Most people are not particularly interested in investment bankers or manufacturers of pantyhose. But the readers of magazines as different as Time and Ms., Fortune and Playboy, Forbes and Cosmopolitan have been eagerly following the tales of Adam Osborne and Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Perhaps the sudden fascination with microcomputer Wunderkinder is a result of the youth of these entrepreneurs. Perhaps it is because people sense (or are told) that this mysterious, intangible, and volatile new commodity promises to have an unprecedented impact on America and the world. It also could be due to an interest in Horatio Alger stories like ours and those of people who have made a lot more money than Gary and I have.

Or perhaps it is because people are always intrigued by extraordinary characters who do what they do because they love doing it and, almost unintentionally, end up changing the face of our society in the process. I know that I continue to be fascinated with software people, many of whom happen to be my relatives, my friends, my employees, and my business associates. Some of them think and behave in ways that have to be labeled eccentric. Some of them are no more eccentric than an insurance salesman. Many of them are extremely bright, even geniuses, when it comes to thinking up the intricate codes that cause computers to serve as video games, software tutors, or electronic accountants. Some of them know little about programming but a great deal about marketing products. All of these people share, in varying degrees, an obsession with personal computer software- an obsession that in fact led to the birth and phenomenal growth of an entire industry.

The primary reason for this book is to tell the stories of the remarkable people who created and have been the driving force behind the microcomputer software industry. Although I make no claim to being an official historian of the industry, I hope to convey something of its unique nature by describing the people I know or know about who have played major roles in the evolution of the software business from its infancy to its coming of age.

Time is highly compressed in the software business because computer technology changes so quickly. The period during which the events in this book took place, from the age of the first hobbyist computer, the Altair, to the present era of Apple and IBM, lasted only around ten years. The first, strictly hobbyist phase of the personal computer industry began in 1975, when a few intensely devoted hobbyists began to put together their first Altair kits. By 1978, the hobbyists were putting together companies to sell the first generation of home computers that didn't have to be assembled from kits. By 1980, the newborn video game and personal computer companies had grown at a dizzying speed into a billion-dollar industry.

For a time, it seemed that all who dipped their pans in the software stream came up with a few nuggets, if not an entire lode. The software gold rush began in 1980, the first of several years in which teenage programmers and software entrepreneurs who were still in their early twenties made personal fortunes.

Until the middle of 1983, companies continued to proliferate and prosper, riding the unprecedented annual rates of growth in the computer industry. Then the personal computer market began to level off, and people who had been making fortunes for years suddenly found themselves losing fortunes in months. This period, which extended through 1984, is the era generally referred to as "the shakeout." In examining the shakeout, which was at least as important to the history of the software industry as was the gold rush (albeit less glamorous), I have attempted to point out some of the underlying causes of several of the business disasters that occurred during that period.

In this book are the stories of people who lived the events of these various software eras. Although the individual stories overlap, the overall order of their presentation is roughly chronological, progressing from the hobbyist days through the early years, the gold rush period, and beyond the shakeout to the present.

Each of the people profiled in this book helped to shape the extraordinary character of the software industry. Intense, volatile, creative, lucrative, adventurous, and regularly eccentric- it is an industry that, in terms of its spirit and complexity, is quite unlike most other contemporary American businesses. Moreover, it is dominated not by a single type of individual but by a variety of people. The hobbyist-programmers might have started the whole thing, but the sudden blossoming of the home computer software industry came about as a result of the efforts of many different kinds of people who played very different roles-programmers, entrepreneurs, publishers, developers, and marketers. And the nature of their products varied just as widely across different software genres that addressed very different markets, from games to business productivity tools to educational programs. If anything, the software community is an eclectic collection of different interests, linked only by the personal computer that makes the market possible.

Some of the people I've written about here were included because of their importance to the software industry. Some people are included because they exemplify a certain kind of software legend. Some of them are my friends or acquaintances whose stories are closely related to mine. There are many stories I did not tell, including those of many friends. To them I apologize- my intent was more to give a feeling for the industry than to provide the definitive history.

Many of the principals in the industry, whom I did not know personally when the events described here happened, were interviewed for the purposes of this book. In other cases, where I did not interview the subject in person, I have done my best to sift the most likely true stories from the vast and contradictory lore of software legends, which are already becoming embellished with each retelling as the age of the Altair recedes into history.

Bill Gates and and Paul Allen are foremost among the people who are included here. Their names cannot be omitted from any history of the software Industry-partially because of the continued success of their company, Microsoft, and partially because they were present at the beginning of the microcomputer era, during the pioneering Altair days. Gates was nineteen years old when he left Harvard to join Allen in New Mexico to create software for the first hobbyist microcomputer. Less than ten years later, the company they founded topped $100 million in sales.

Other major figures in the founding of the microcomputer software industry include Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who came up with the first microcomputer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, and Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings, whose company, VisiCorp, marketed Bricklin and Frankston's product, making it the first phenomenal best-seller in the micro market. Their program made the four principals millionaires, established personal computers in the business world, and ensured the early success of Apple because so many business people bought Apples to run VisiCalc.

Without programmers, there would be no software industry. The legendary programmers of the gold-rush years number in the dozens. I chose three for this book. One of them, Bill Budge, is not only an example of the new breed of programmer as fine artisan, but also an old friend of mine. His programs Raster Blaster and Pinball Construction Set were milestones in software history, acclaimed for their artistry as well as the sheer dollar volume of their sales.

Then there's Paul Lutus, the fabled programmer-hermit of the Oregon wilderness. Paul exemplifies the legend of the eccentric character with a knack for programming who made himself a millionaire by writing a best-selling program while living in his backwoods cabin.

The third programmer profiled here is another one of those who can't be excluded from any history of the software industry, although I don't know him personally. John Draper didn't make himself a millionaire like Lutus, or create a masterpiece of programming elegance like Bill Budge, but he was perhaps the first of the maverick techno-wizards because of his past career as a colorful anti-hero known as "Captain Crunch," king of the "phone phreaks" (until he was busted for playing with the phone company's switching network without paying for the privilege). Years later, a program he wrote led to one of the first and biggest entrepreneurial coups of the software gold rush.

Indeed, aggressive entrepreneurship has been one of the major forces behind the phenomenal growth of the software industry. Most of the early software entrepreneurs were programmers who discovered that they could make a lot of money marketing their own programs. Others saw the opportunity to make fortunes by marketing other people's products. Bob Leff and Dave Wagman, for example, founded a software distribution business that went from a shoestring budget to a $150 million annually in a little over four years. They distributed Broderbund's products when we first started publishing, and they even bought us disks when we couldn't afford to fill their orders.

Unlike me, Bob and Dave are the kind of successful entrepreneurs who take advantage of all the high-life perks of their occupation- from the champagne they gave away to their suppliers to the matched Porsches they bought for themselves. Like all the most successful entrepreneurs in the software Wild West show, they also work twelve to eighteen hours a day.

My friend Ken Williams has a different kind of entrepreneurial story altogether. Still living out his own brand of fantasy up in the Sierra foothills, he and his wife/partner, Roberta, and their tribe of well-heeled programmers make up the single largest component of the workforce in Oakhurst, California, and are the dominant cultural element in a territory where the last big action was the gold rush of 1849. Less than four years after Roberta convinced Ken to program the adventure-fantasy game she had designed, their company, "Sierra Online" (now called "Sierra"), reached a level of more than $6 million in annual sales.

Ken and Roberta's company was one of the first and most successful of the software publishers-companies like Microsoft, Broderbund, Sirius, Synapse, and a dozen others profiled here, that concentrated on marketing products created by inhouse or freelance programmers. A small number of these companies, most of them associated with Apple-oriented products, most of them located in California, were, along with Broderbund, part of a loose group of friendly competitors I've called the Brotherhood.

Then there are the developers, who came along a little later than the first publishers. Developers come up with the ideas for new programs and hire programmers to create these products, which will then be sold or licensed to software publishers for marketing. Some of these developers, like Joyce Hakansson, concentrated on a specialized segment of the industry, such as educational software. Others specialized in games or productivity software. Some developers were either started by or backed by venture capitalists- groups of investors who often guided (and occasionally took over) the management of the companies they invested in.

Not all the software entrepreneurs were programmers, distributors, publishers, or developers. There were those like Al and Margot Tommervik, founders of Softalk magazine, whose focus was on the personal computer culture. In the case of the Tommerviks, their market and their community encompassed that segment of the computer subculture who were devoted to the use of Apple computers. The Tommerviks, who started their first magazine with the money Margot won on a television game show, were among the more prominent casualties of the software shakeout.

Because the computer revolution is a worldwide phenomenon, and because my own company in particular has had a long history of dealing with Japanese software companies, I have also written about Japan's software community and industry. Even as the companies mentioned in the foregoing paragraphs struggled to create an industry in the United States, a parallel struggle was taking place in Japan. There, hobbyists followed the development of microcomputers with every bit as much interest and enthusiasm as their American counterparts. And in response to the growing market in Japan for products made with or for microcomputers, a small group of Japanese entrepreneurs emerged to build a fledgling industry in their country.

Computer addiction knows no national boundaries, it seems, and it appears that Japanese hobbyists are no more immune than Americans to the lure of entrepreneurship. Consider Masaaki Hoshi, who founded I/O, now the largest microcomputer magazine in Japan, strictly as a part-time enterprise to help him keep in touch with other hobbyists. As so many of the cottage entrepreneurs did here in the United States, he started small in 1976 and got caught up in a wholly unexpected wave of consumer enthusiasm for what had, until then, been interesting only to a small group of hobbyists.

Or consider Akio Gunji and Kazuhiko "Kay" Nishi, who worked with Hoshi until they saw an opportunity to compete with him. In 1977, they started their own magazine, ASCII, which they then used as a base to turn their operation into an empire that included one of the largest software publishers and distributors in Japan, and several of the most successful magazines in the industry as well.

One of the people who occasionally wrote articles for I/O and ASCII was Yuji Kudo, an amateur photographer and avid collector of model steam locomotives. When he started his own software company, he named it after his favorite locomotive and turned Hudson Soft into Japan's largest microcomputer software publisher. Another successful entrepreneur in Japan's software world was Jung-Eui Son, a software distributor and publisher who started his own magazine when his competitor's magazines wouldn't take his advertising. His distribution company, Soft Bank, which he started when he was a teenager, ended up as the largest microcomputer software distributor in Japan.

More than a few other software people have not yet been introduced, although their stories are told in later chapters: Among these are Mary Carol Smith and Don Fudge of Avant Garde Productions; Nasir Gebelli, the first superstar programmer; Scott Adams of Adventure International, my own first publisher, whose business has been eclipsed by those companies founded by many of his former employees; and Bill Baker, the twenty-one-year-old deal maker who built a company on the basis of one of John Draper's creations, then sold the company for $10 million on the eve of the shakeout.

There are still more whose stories we'll encounter along the way. For now, we'll start at the beginning of the personal computer era, way back in the "ancient" days of the mid-1970s, when the first microcomputer kits were assembled by many of the people who were to become the leaders of today's microcomputer software industry.

The Birth of an Industry

The Age of the Altair

In the beginning was the IBM mainframe. The microworld was formless and devoid of software. On the first day, Intel brought forth the 4004, fashioned from the Silicon of the Valley. MITS said 'Let there be Altair,' and the microcomputer was created. Then Microsoft, created in the image of Gates, begat the microcomputer software industry. The hackers were the first prophets, and the homebrewers were the patriarchs, but the children of Intel remained in bondage until the Woz led them to the promised Apple with one bite missing...

The idea of a Scripture of the Microcult is not entirely a joke. The origins of the microcomputer industry are indeed spoken of in quasi-mythological tones by many people in the personal computer culture, even though the events upon which the myths are based occurred no more than a decade ago. Gates and the Woz are real people who happen to have created multimillion-dollar companies before they were thirty. MITS was a real place that symbolizes to computer freaks what Kitty Hawk means to aviation fanatics. And there is a definite evangelical streak to be found beneath the entrepreneurial surface of the founders of the earliest microcomputer businesses.

Many of my colleagues started out as hobbyists and ended up as industrialists, and although their fortunes have diverged in a dozen unlikely directions over the past ten years, many share a reverent nostalgia for the 1975-76 era. the Age of the Altair. Indeed, for many, that era represents a kind of magical time, but in reality it was directly experienced by only a rare few survivors who still tell the tales of Altair to the multitudes of recent converts.

Altair was the name of the first widely used hobbyist computer based on the new microprocessor technology. It was a do-it-yourself kit that preceded the factory-assembled Apples and Commodores and IBM PCs. Compared with today's personal computers, the Altair was computationally puny and unbelievably difficult to program. But it inspired a group of people who believed it was possible to have computers for their own personal use. They were solitary, garage-based computer tinkerers who called their avocation "home-brewing" and who were all surprised when they discovered how many others were fiddling with Altairs, or patiently waiting for Altair parts to be shipped to them.

But these Altair users were more than the forerunners of the personal computer enthusiasts who were to buy Apples and PCs five or six years later. They were the spearhead of the microcomputer revolution, and although some of them even knew it, none of that first wave could have predicted how much money, power, and attention would come their way over the course of a decade.

Out of that hobbyist network of a few thousand people, a dozen or so ended up creating the personal computer technology we see today in millions of homes and offices. Some of those people are still tinkering- happily or not. A few of them are personally worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Not all of them are on speaking terms with one another any longer, but in the beginning, all were unified by their one common interest: the microcomputer. In fact, the microcomputer industry is the only major one in the world that started out as a club for teenage enthusiasts.

Both the hardware and software branches of the industry were directly influenced by these enthusiasts who, as relatively small groups of hobbyists, gathered in the mid-1970s to share ideas. Of those groups, two are most notable. The first included the now-legendary amateur computer builders in the San Francisco Bay Area who called themselves the Homebrew Computer Club and who ended up being the founding fathers of the microcomputer hardware industry. The second group consisted of a pair of very young but decidedly professional programmer-entrepreneurs from Seattle. It was their creation that was the beginning of what has become today's microcomputer software industry.

Until recently, the better known story behind the microcomputer revolution has been on the hardware side of things, and yet, as a mathematically minded programmer would say, hardware is necessary for making a computer, but it isn't sufficient. You need more than circuitry to make a computer do anything useful. You need software -coded instructions that turn a computer into a word processor or spreadsheet, telecommunication terminal or video game. The lesser-known chapters of this story, then, are about software, and they're chapters where people like me step into the scenario.

Still, it wasn't until the waning days of the homebrew era that software people started to become important. When the Age of Altair gave way to the eras of Atari and Apple, the software epoch had only just begun. Its dawning marks the point in history where the physical components of computers became less important than the human ability to think of new things to do with these machines. Nevertheless, no book about microcomputer software people can exclude the Altair story or a discussion of microcomputer hardware, nor can it leave out an early tribute to Ed Roberts, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and the other legendary homebrewers whose hobby unexpectedly gave birth to a new and unprecedented kind of industry.

Although I know several of these founding fathers, my own roots in the industry do not go as far back as the Altair Era. I was a young attorney working in Chicago when the era began and the first microcomputer kits were marketed by a company located between a laundromat and a massage parlor in a shopping center in Albuquerque. I didn't write my first line of microcomputer code until three years after the now-famous January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics told of a wondrous new toy for electronic enthusiasts. That new toy was an affordable computer, and the company that sold it by mail order was called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems- fondly remembered as "MITS."

A brief discussion about the technology and history of the microprocessor and microcomputer is necessary in order to explain what was so important about the mail-order microcomputers sold in the 1970s by a small company that no longer exists. Computers are not as hard to understand as they have been made out to be. You might need to know esoteric details of electronic circuit design if you intend to build a computer, and a healthy knowledge of how the computer operates is helpful if you want to successfully program one. But you need to know only a few simple, general principles to understand how computers work.

The first principle has more to do with economics than electronics, and it is also the hardest to believe: Computers get smaller, more powerful, and less expensive as time passes. Computers and software change very quickly because the electronic technology on which computers are based also changes quickly. Most of these changes are triggered by the continuing miniaturization of computer components. In fact, the computer revolution has been strongly influenced by the electronic miniaturization revolution, the importance of which lies in the relationship between the size of electronic components and the efficiency of computers built from those components.

To understand the power of software, you need to know only two essential facts about computing machinery. First, a computer is a machine for interpreting instructions, especially instructions that tell it how to imitate other machines. Second, both the machine that interprets the instructions and the instructions themselves are built from very simple elements- electrical switches that can be turned on and off. In essence, a computer is a collection of switches, which can be vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, or any other technology that can create a network of devices that are either on or off.

The real power of a computer lies in how and in what patterns you turn those switches on and off- the software. When you want to create switching patterns that can accomplish complex tasks like calculating the results of physics equations or storing census statistics or creating pictures on a screen, you need lots of switches- very fast ones.

The faster those switches can operate, and the more switches you can put into a computer, the more things you can do with the computer. And smaller switches can operate at higher speeds than large ones. At the heart of the microprocessor revolution is the fact that the switches got smaller and faster. As the speed of the computer's fundamental elements increased, so did the sheer informational volume-the "memory," or the amount of coded on-and-off information that the computer could store. Over the four decades since the first electronic digital computer was invented, computing power increased more than a millionfold.

But the speed and number of switches are not the only aspects of computers that are affected by the size of the basic components. The heat generated by all that switching is another aspect, and it is also a major problem in computer design. Big components tend to get hot, especially when packed together in large numbers in an enclosed space, and that means that electronic computers are limited in their size and power. The first computers were built out of vacuum tubes, which were very hot and very big. No computer with a capacity that surpassed a certain threshold amount of computing power could be devised by using vacuum tubes. Such machines would melt before anything substantially useful could be done with them.

Not long after the first tube computers reached their heat limit, however, a discovery in the field of subatomic physics made considerably more efficient switching elements possible. In the late 1940s the transistor was invented, and that meant that computers could be constructed from elements that were much smaller and much cooler than the old tube technology. As a consequence, "smarter" computers could be built-computers that could follow more complex strings of instructions.

Besides their cool and rapid manner of operating, transistors had another advantage over the old computer elements- they were cheaper than tubes. Indeed, a paradoxical phenomenon has governed the evolution of computer technology: As computer components became smaller, cooler, and more powerful, they also became cheaper. They also happened to come along at the perfect time. The pressure to develop electronics and computer technology to their furthest limits, and substantial financial resources to support large-scale research and development efforts, were provided by two of the most powerful institutions in history- the Defense Department of the United States government and IBM. In the years that followed World War II, this fortuitous combination of fundamental scientific breakthroughs, breakneck engineering, and unprecedented economic benefits eventually made computer technology an integral part of all the levels of society.

Computers are valuable because they multiply the power of the human brain, in the way levers are useful tools for multiplying the power of the human arm. A lever, however, is only for moving a large object, but a computer can do much more than that. It can command machines to move large objects, or it can perform mathematical calculations, or it can put words on a screen. It is an all-purpose tool that empowers anyone who can afford to use it. In fact, the sudden empowerment made possible by available computers has happened so fast that our society has barely begun to feel its impact. As computers have become cheaper, in terms of computations per dollar, the computer-using population has expanded dramatically.

In the 1950s, computers more powerful than those used previously by the Defense Department were being installed by large institutions like banks and corporations. By the 1970s, computers of even greater power were being used by small businesses. Now, in the 1980s, middle-class households can afford computers that only the national government could afford to build thirty years ago, and it is reasonable to expect that people thirty years from now will be able to afford computers that are as powerful as the mightiest supercomputers being used today.

While computers kept getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they were still too expensive to be made accessible to the exclusive use of one person. By 1970, a computer still couldn't be called an affordable device for individuals, but its cost had fallen from millions of dollars to thousands. By the early and mid-1970s, another series of breakthroughs in miniaturization was underway. Researchers for electronic companies had already discovered ways to put thousands of components into ultra-miniature circuits known as "integrated circuits"- or, as they came to be known, "chips." These chips made all kinds of electronic devices possible-satellite communications, cheap color televisions, stereos, and radios, as well as personal computers.

In 1969, engineers at Intel Corporation designed a chip that had all the switching elements needed for a computer's central processing unit-the historic 4004 chip. In 1972, a somewhat more powerful version- the 8008-was developed by the same engineers. While the 4004 could handle information only in 4-bit chunks, the 8008 was a true 8-bit processor, and this boosted the device's potential applications from the realm of calculators to the world of true computers.

The 4004 and the 8008 were the first microprocessors- electronic devices capable of processing information- but they were not quite computers, which are information-processing machines that must possess specific capabilities. The 8008 had the basic information-processing capability and the built-in "language" of instructions that could enable it to become a computer, but other devices had to be connected to the chip in order for people to actually create and use programs. This wasn't a simple matter; you had to have a pretty advanced knowledge of electronics to assemble the different parts of the computer.

Still, a subtle but crucial shift in the course of events was triggered by these devices, although only a few people recognized their significance when they were created. In fact, neither the world at large nor the electronics world in particular heralded the arrival of the Intel 4004. Intel was just looking for a new kind of chip that the company could sell to all the other companies that make consumer devices out of microelectronic chips.

In any case, at this point in the story we are still talking about hardware expertise, but now we are beginning to talk about computer designers, not just electronic component manufacturers, for the microprocessor was the first electronic computer technology cheap enough to make it possible for ordinary people to afford relatively powerful computers (although, as we shall soon see, the first people to use these homebrew computers were far from ordinary).

The microprocessor has often been called "a computer on a chip," which is slightly misleading, since it isn't possible to use one of these chips as a real working computer without connecting it to additional electronic equipment. That is where MITS and the homebrewers came in. Ed Roberts, the owner of MITS, entered the annals of computer legend when he decided to build a kit for putting a microprocessor together with all the other necessary components. Little did he know that there was a vast, previously unknown market for these devices. Hundreds of young computer enthusiasts across the country were fiercely determined to get their hands on real working personal computers. The year was 1974.

Roberts hadn't started out to be a computer entrepreneur. He had originally wanted to be a doctor, and last I heard, about a year ago, he actually was in medical school in Florida. But he received electronics training in the Air Force, and in the late 1960s he started his own company and sold radio equipment to model airplane hobbyists- hence the name "Microelectronic Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems."

Before the Altair kit came along, MITS faced some rocky times, especially when Roberts decided to get into the calculator business at precisely the wrong time to compete with the Texas Instruments juggernaut. But he moved on to microprocessors and shopped around for a better chip than the 8008. The problem with the 8008 was the way its instruction set hampered the efforts of programmers. He finally purchased a quantity of Intel's successor to that chip, the 8080, for $75 apiece. The price was right, and the 8080 instruction set was far more amenable to computer software design.

A man named Les Solomon, who was the technical editor of Popular Electronics magazine, heard about Roberts's devices and convinced MITS to provide the original working model for a cover article on the first affordable computer kit. In January 1975, the article appeared. The mail-order kits sold for $397, and Roberts was hoping for a few dozen orders so that he could keep the business going. The first day he checked his mail after the article appeared, he found more orders than he had hoped for in a year.

Nobody could have predicted how many people were eager to spend $400 on a computer kit. Roberts was swamped. Within a few weeks, MITS' bank balance went from nearly half a million dollars in the red to a quarter of a million in the black. But his small company couldn't ship the kits fast enough to satisfy some of Roberts's most fanatical early customers. Some of them actually went to Albuquerque, prepared to camp out on his doorstep until their Altair was ready!

The origin of the name Altair is also a microcomputer legend. According to Roberts and Solomon, they were speculating on the phone about possible names for the kit before the article appeared. Solomon asked his daughter, who was watching "Star Trek" at the time, what Roberts ought to call the device. She replied that in that evening's episode the starship Enterprise was heading for a star called Altair. So Roberts put the world Altair on the cover of the machine, in those hard-to-read "computer letters" that were considered "futuristic" in the 1970s.

Still, programming an Altair was an almost inconceivable tedious business at first. Nowadays, people program by using their keyboards and video screens to write the symbols for a program in what is known as a "high-level language" (for example, BASIC). After they write their program, they enter it into the computer, and then another program known as a compiler or interpreter translates the high-level program to the kind of language-the patterns of on-and-off impulses- that the machine understands. Back in 1975, an Altair owner had to create even the simplest program by laboriously turning switches on and off by hand.

The lack of a high-level language was a big handicap, but there were other problems with the Altair besides that. You can't run complicated software unless the hardware has a certain information-handling capacity. The memory of the earliest model was infinitesmal. The first Altair held 256 bytes of information- approximately 2000 on or off impulses. By contrast, most home computers today have 256 kilobytes of information- a memory that is a thousand times as large as the Altair's. There was no way to feed information to the processor other than by setting the switches, one a time, by hand-and if you made a mistake you had to start from the beginning.

A volunteer army of garage tinkerers set out to solve these problems by creating software, memory expansion devices, and input-output devices. From all accounts, and from the many innovations that came forth from the homebrew reign, it was an open, enthusiastic, brilliant, intense, esoteric, fun, and exuberant effort- the finest days of the hacker tradition.

Although all the homebrewers of the mid-1970s started out as orthodox members of the Altair cult, they quickly developed their own patriarchs, their own legends, their own shrines. The homebrew mythology started shortly after the birth of the Altair and centered on northern California, rather than New Mexico. The Apple empire, the ill-fated but revolutionary Osborne Computer Corporation, and almost all of the earliest microcomputer-related companies trace their origins back to an anarchistic, ragtag group of computer zealots, the Homebrew Computer Club, who started meeting in the auditorium of Stanford University's Linear Accelerator building in the spring of 1975.

Lee Felsenstein, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement, a former reporter for The Berkeley Barb, a lifelong electronics freak, and the "anarche" who presided over the early Homebrew Computer Club meetings, later became famous, if not rich, by designing the Osborne I- the first "portable" personal computer. Steve Wozniak, barely out of high school, was another homebrewer whose attempts to outdo the Altair led to a company that grew from a garage to a billion-dollar operation in a few swift years. Dozens of other members of the Homebrew Computer Club started their own companies in the post-Altair, pre-Apple era-with varying degrees of success.

Important as they might have been to the personal computer revolution, the entrepreneurial success and engineering brilliance of the homebrewers is not as directly relevant to our story as is the history of two other Altair enthusiasts who launched the microcomputer software industry. These two homebrewers-turned-industrialists were teenagers at the time, as were many of the early Altair fans. They were far from inexperienced in either the computer world or the business arena, however, and their creations marked the transition of microcomputer programming from a freewheeling amateur affair to a full-fledged business enterprise.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates were their names, and when the Altair came along they were already professional programmers. In the 1960s, when they first met at Seattle's exclusive Lakeside School and began their long, profitable partnership, Paul Allen was fifteen and Bill Gates was thirteen. They rode bicycles to work years before they owned a company car. Despite their youth, their ability to find the flaws in adult-sized minicomputer programs got them their first job.

A company in Seattle had just received a new minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation (known as DEC). The Seattle firm, a company called the Computer Center Corporation (known to the young hackers as "C cubed"), made a deal with DEC: As long as C cubed could uncover bugs in the new computer's system software, it wouldn't have to start paying for its use of the computer. This was a mutually profitable arrangement, since both the inventor and the user of the computer had a practical need to track down and eliminate all the programming errors that could cause the system to "crash" and stop working. Gates and Allen were therefore employed by C cubed, which offered them an equivalent deal: These exceptionally bright kids would be allowed to play with the computer, free of charge, for as long as they could come up with new bugs. They did their job so well that they were soon earning real pay.

After several months, DEC, fearing that these hot young bug hunters might find flaws in the system indefinitely, backed down on its original arrangement with C cubed and demanded payment for use of the computer. Meanwhile, Gates had grown so adept at the black art of computer crashing that he had learned to defeat the security procedures of several well-known computer systems. Crashing systems was something of an accomplishment back then, since it proved that one could out-think the people who had designed the system security. The practice had not yet earned the notoriety it found fifteen years later, when the movie WarGames brought the stereotype of the mischievous hacker to public awareness.

By 1971, when Bill Gates had finished his sophomore year of high school and Paul Allen had graduated, their reputation as bug hunters had spread. They were soon hired by a major company, TRW, which was in need of troubleshooters who knew how to find software flaws in exactly the same kind of DEC system that Allen and Gates knew so well. TRW had been contracted to develop the complex and critically important computer system that would control the electrical power generated by the Bonneville dam on the Columbia River. The reliability standards for such a system were, understandably, extremely high. The young troubleshooters ended up making a significant contribution to the project.

Eager to capitalize on their expertise, Gates and Allen developed a computer program for analyzing the traffic-flow data collected by those rubber tubes that transportation departments stretch across highways. Under the company name Traf-O-Data, the young entrepreneurs tried to sell their service to various municipalities; these efforts failed to make them rich. By this time, Bill was in his last year of high school while Paul was studying at Washington State. They got together again during their summer vacation, when they secured summer jobs at another computer giant- Honeywell.

Meanwhile, the miniaturization revolution was proceeding at such a rapid pace that Allen and Gates both knew that affordable computers were going to arrive sooner or later. When they did, these two young entrepreneurs wanted to get in on the ground floor of what they suspected would be a major revolution within the computer industry. In fact, Allen tried to convince Gates that they should write a BASIC interpreter for Intel's 8008 microprocessor, but Gates felt that the chip's built-in language was too clumsy.

Their entrepreneurial speculations were based on their knowledge of the way microprocessor chips were set up to receive instructions from programmers. When a microprocessor chip is built, certain circuits are put into it to perform elementary information-processing operations. One such circuit would take two inputs and add them together, for example. Another such circuit could perform an elementary logical operation such as opening a circuit when either one of the two inputs was on. These wired-in elementary commands are known as the instruction set of that chip, and they constitute the "words" of any higher languages that communicate instructions to that kind of chip. Each chip has its own instruction set, but all instruction sets are written in the same code, known as machine language, which is based on an "alphabet" of on-and-off switches.

A BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8008, then, would be a program written in the language of the chip's hardwired instruction set. The purpose of such a program is to make life easier for programmers. In the machine's native language of ones and zeroes (the numerical equivalent of the on-or-off states of the switching elements) it would take literally dozens of machine instructions to perform a simple arithmetic operation like multiplying two times three. First, the numbers each have to be assigned specific positions in the processor's memory. Then the built-in multiplication procedure has to be directed to first multiply the contents of one memory location by the contents of another memory location and then to put the product of the operation in yet another specific memory location.

Programming anything of significant complexity with such a nit-picking and endlessly specific code is like writing a novel with alphabet blocks. The interpreter program would enable the BASIC programmer to write a command like "PRINT 2*3," then enter it into the computer along with the BASIC interpreter program, which would translate the command into the proper 8008 instructions, apply it to the data, and return the correct answer on the screen or printout.

After Allen and Gates decided to pass up the 8008, Allen quit Washington State to continue working with Honeywell and moved east to Honeywell's Boston office. In the fall of 1974, Gates was at Harvard, just across the Charles River. The next time they contemplated the state of microprocessor-based software was the afternoon Allen saw the historic Altair issue of Popular Electronics at a Harvard Square newsstand. This new computer kit was based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor, an improved version of the 8008 chip they had originally rejected as the target for a commercial software effort. This was it- their opportunity to expand their entrepreneurial venture, begun with Traf-O-Data, into the software business.

Although they didn't even have an Altair, they called Ed Roberts and asked if he was interested in a BASIC interpreter. Roberts told them that several other programmers had already made the same proposal, and as far as he was concerned he would buy the first BASIC that would actually run on an Altair. Gates and Allen promised him delivery of their interpreter in three weeks. They then programmed a larger computer to simulate an Altair, and by using the simulation rather than the actual hardware, they created the BASIC interpreter they promised. It took twice as long as they had expected- not an unusual turn of events in the software business.

Six weeks after their conversation with Roberts, Allen finally delivered a paper tape that contained, in a code consisting of a pattern of holes punched into the paper, his and Gates's version of BASIC for the Altair. This was before disk drives were cheap enough for small computers, so punched paper tape (as ancient as that technology sounds) had to be used to feed the program to the computer. After a tape reader converted the pattern of holes into on and off impulses that automatically set the Altair's memory-location switches, the Altair was ready to receive BASIC commands. The remarkable thing about that tape is that it worked the first time-a virtually unheard-of event in the bug-prone world of software. It was an especially noteworthy feat, considering the fact that they didn't have an Altair to test it on!

Within a month, Roberts had hired Paul Allen away from Honeywell. Bill Gates stayed at Harvard while Paul Allen went to New Mexico to become MITS' software director. In the meantime, they had renamed Traf-O-Data Micro-Soft, later to be shortened to Microsoft. Then Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard (in fact he never returned) and moved to Albuquerque. He and Allen hired a programmer by the name of Monte Davidoff to help them enhance their BASIC interpreter. MITS was in ferment. The Altair freaks were already drifting in to check on their orders and become involved in the operation. Gates and Allen, perfectionists since their days as consultants for TRW, didn't exactly mesh with Roberts, who was strictly a seat-of-the-pants guy. But they were on to something hot.

Gates wrote the disk operating system program for the first Altair disk drives in a famous marathon session in February 1976. According to one of the legends that have since become a prerequisite for homebrew software immortality, he apparently sequestered himself in a motel room with a computer, pencils, and notebooks until the task was complete. The same story is told of Wozniak and the creation of Apple's first disk operating system. In any case, 1976 was also the year that Roberts's competitors began to appear, in the form of companies like IMSAI, Processor Technology, and Cromemco- all founded by members of the Homebrew Computer Club. Given the increasing competition, Allen and Gates's BASIC interpreter became a major selling point for the Altair.

But in the meantime, it had also become a source of conflict between MITS, Microsoft, and the homebrewers. A lot of people objected to the idea of selling software- especially for $500, which was the price of Microsoft BASIC. Some people refused to pay for it. Others made copies of the punched paper tape and distributed them for free. A $500 BASIC interpreter was simply a philosophical affront to the inner circles of the personal computer cult. The hacker tradition went back to the early 1960s, when similarly obsessed computer enthusiasts at MIT created the software for the kind of interactive computers that led to personal computers. And hacker tradition dictated that software was supposed to be free.

Gates didn't agree. In February 1976, at the same time he was creating the Altair disk operating system, he also wrote a now-infamous manifesto titled "Open Letter to Hobbyists," which was published in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. He pointed out that "as the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?" A lot of the homebrewers didn't react kindly to this bluntly worded accusation by a nineteen-year-old programmer who was clearly interested in becoming a successful entrepreneur.

In retrospect, that rift between two factions of an obscure group of highly technical young amateurs appears to have been the birth pang of an infant industry. But very few people, other than maybe Paul Allen and Bill Gates, were thinking of industries or fantasizing about software empires back in 1976 and 1977. Most were content at the time to keep their hobby- and whatever differences of opinion they might have about that hobby-to themselves. Their arguments were still in the family, for they were all part of a single community. But in a very short time, these amateurs would find that they were no longer obscure.

From VisiCalc to Activision: The Beginning of the Software Industry

The year 1977 marked the beginning of an entirely new era in the computer revolution. In the spring of 1977, both the Apple II and the Commodore PET were born in the same place- the first West Coast Computer Faire. The Faire was an unexpectedly popular, totally enthusiastic convergence and celebration by thousands of disciples of the new doctrine of the personal computer. The man responsible for convening the Faire was one of the most mischievous and skillful social organizers of the personal computer culture, a somewhat older, definitely more radical associate of the homebrewers- Jim Warren.

Warren already had a reputation as a flamboyant social organizer by the time he got hooked on computing and decided that everybody else ought to get in on the thrill. Before that he had been chairman of the mathematics department at a Catholic women's college on the fringe of Silicon Valley. After five years, he was fired in the midst of a scandal. It seems that the college administration was not amused by the reports from Time, the BBC, and Playboy that had documented the wild parties that he was having at his home. In Warren's words, these parties "... were rather sedate by any common standards, except people didn't have to have clothes on."

Following his dismissal from the college, he looked around for new employment and happened upon a job at Stanford University that required programming skills. He was not particularly qualified for the position. But he learned quickly while on the job, and like many others, he found that he had a talent and an enthusiasm for the art and science of programming. He was soon involved in a crusade to "bring computing to the people." He edited an enthusiasts' magazine, one with a social conscience and sense of humor as well as pages of technical jargon. Its title, Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, was a programmers' joke based on the magazine's subtitle, Running Light without Overbyte, which referred to the limited memory capacity of early microcomputers.

By 1976, computer hobbyists were beginning to attend national shows in New Jersey, Denver, and Detroit. Warren, who had attended several of these shows, thought that the organizers had not done justice to the spirit of the movement and that the shows lacked what he felt was an essential element: a party-like atmosphere. One thing they know about out in California is how to throw a party, and with Warren's own slightly scandalous credentials as a socializer, he became determined to throw his own bash for computer enthusiasts. He saw his show as a potentially joyous event, a celebration of the liberating advent of personal computing. He envisioned organizing something like the Renaissance Faires that at the time were immensely popular in the San Francisco Bay Area. He then formed a company, signed up exhibitors at $300 apiece, and, renting the San Francisco Civic Auditorium for the event, convened the first West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977.

The event was a milestone, remembered with reverence and glee by those who participated- a Woodstock for the personal computer generation. People who would be running multimillion-dollar operations a few years later were manning their booths and talking about their products. The Apple II made its debut. Companies were born. Introductions were made. Visionaries traded crazy predictions about how there would soon be millions instead of thousands of people in this personal computer community.

In the aftermath of the Faire, and by one of those twists of fate that are called "history" long after they happen, Microsoft grew overwhelmingly in its importance while MITS disappeared. Roberts's company, whose Altair had been worth $13 million in gross sales in 1976, was sold in May 1977 to a company called Pertec for what Roberts said was "essentially 6 million dollars." Gates and Allen decided that their BASIC interpreter would not be part of the acquisition- thus signaling the end of their relationship with Ed Roberts. Pertec management brought in some three-piece-suit types who immediately alienated the fanatically devoted MITS employees. The Altair was facing stiff competition in the market at just the time MITS' original crew was departing.

By late 1977, the first wave of home computers like the Altair, the Sol, and the IMSAI were sharing the marketplace with Commodore's PET and a model put together by a couple of homebrewers, both named Steve, who decided to give their elegantly garage-engineered product the unlikely name of Apple. The hardware hobbyists were building an industry right in the backyard of the mainframe giants. And the software entrepreneurs were coming up with programs for those new, small, affordable computers-programs that would quickly change the way offices operated, businesses were run, and teenagers entertained themselves.

Microsoft in particular continued to turn out different versions of BASIC as the different brands of personal computer grew in number, diversity, and power. Allen and Gates eventually moved to Bellevue, an affluent, woodsy suburb of Seattle, to expand a company that would in time become a major force in the software business.

From 1975 through 1977, personal computers were mostly for hobbyists who were willing to learn how to program in BASIC or even get down to circuit boards and soldering irons to put their equipment together. Homebrew computers were exciting only to that tiny minority who loved to work with their hands as well as their heads. The far vaster audience of people, however, didn't care how computers were put together. They became owners primarily because they were drawn to what computers could do for them. And by the late 1970s, personal computers could do more than ever before, thanks mainly to the development of video displays and the development of better software. It was, in other words, the creation of spreadsheets, word processors, and adventure games -programs- in conjunction with improved hardware technology that turned computers into consumer items.

In the late 1970s, prior to my own entry into the software industry, three different programs virtually created the mass market for personal computers. First, there was VisiCalc, which convinced businesspeople and everyone who worked with numbers that the potential pragmatic gains of being able to experiment with financial projections and to prepare business presentations made buying an Apple a worthwhile investment. Then WordStar showed typists, writers, and anyone who worked with words that a small computer could enable them to accomplish tasks that were either tedious or impossible to do with an old-fashioned typewriter. Finally, Adventure Land and other "fantasy simulation" games showed people of all ages that the small computer could be used as a fantastic toy and a means of amplifying the power of imagination. These games also advanced the notion that computers could be used in the home.

In many ways, VisiCalc created the Apple empire and gave it both a toehold in the small-business market for computers and a fanatic following in the hobbyist world. This program, the first electronic spreadsheet for microcomputers, was written in 1978 and 1979 by Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who years before had been roommates at MIT. It originated when Bricklin, as a graduate student at Harvard Business School, was given a particularly onerous homework assignment- to prepare spreadsheet analyses of various hypothetical companies. The professor gave the students a mass of financial data and lists of assumptions, and the students had to make intricately cross-referenced calculations in order to project those companies' fortunes at specified times in the future.

Bricklin, a former professional programmer, suspected that the tedium involved in preparing these projections would be enormously relieved if their required calculations and cross-indexing were programmed for a microcomputer to do. He then took his idea to Frankston, an even more accomplished programmer. They worked on the program together, and the result, in October 1978, was the first prototype of [[VisiCalc]]. Their enormously successful software development company, Software Arts, was born.

As it turns out, one of Bricklin's classmates at the Business School had his own small software publishing firm. His name was Dan Fylstra, and he had recently started Personal Software as a means of selling the Micro Chess program written by his partner, Peter Jennings. When Fylstra saw Bricklin and Frankston's creation, he invited them to a business meeting at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. There the cofounders of Software Arts agreed to produce an Apple-compatible version of VisiCalc that would be marketed by Fylstra and Jennings's firm.

Several years later, the two companies found themselves in a bitter conflict, the substance of which will be discussed later. But in the meantime, the early 1980s were exceptionally lucrative years for all parties involved. Apple, although initially skeptical about the usefulness of VisiCalc, ended up selling millions of computers to businesspeople who wanted to perform spreadsheet analysis and were interested in a tool that could help with their hardest ask-predicting the future. Frankston and Bricklin made close to $10 million as a result of that agreement in a Chinese restaurant. And microcomputer software as a whole was becoming a far bigger business every week, largely as a result of their program.

At about the same time that the spreadsheet entrepreneurs were programming in Massachusetts, another enormously influential and lucrative program was created in California. Seymour Rubinstein, one of the earliest hardware entrepreneurs, had recently left the ill-fated IMSAI corporation (which folded in 1979, a victim of its marketing strategy, its erratic hardware, and competition from more advanced machines) to start his own company, MicroPro. Sometime after he published a filing program and a primitive word-processing program, he received several letters from people asking for a more powerful text editing program, like Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, which was the first commercial microcomputer word processing program.

Rubinstein, like any smart entrepreneur, responded to the needs of the market. He commissioned a top-notch programmer by the name of Rob Barnaby to create a word-processing program called WordStar. The program was released in mid-1979. It became an instant hit and was near the top of every best-seller chart until early 1985.

By 1983, MicroPro's revenues had exceeded $50 million, making it, by some people's estimates, the largest microcomputer software company in the world. But the question of whose estimates one wants to believe is a notorious trigger for heated debate among software people. Trying to arrange companies in rank order is a tricky exercise, especially in such a volatile industry. When this book was written MicroPro and Microsoft were running neck-and-neck for the number one spot, but MicroPro was facing internal problems and Microsoft was still coming on strong. By the time this book is published, the top slot on the charts may well have changed.

But regardless of this ongoing conflict over estimates, there is one point on which there has never been any dispute between the market gurus and prognosticators: In everybody's opinion, WordStar was an all-time runaway money-maker. The success of this program demonstrated that a single piece of intellectual property, created by a single individual, could bring in revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few years.

Word processing was a revolution unto itself. Indeed, because of word-processing software, a major change in society took place in a very short period of time. In 1979, only the largest business offices had computers- and those were always enclosed in special rooms, somewhere off in the data processing department, and were tended and administered to by computer experts. But some years later, there were in many offices more computers than typewriters, and you would be hard-pressed to find many businesses of reasonable size that didn't have at least one word processor. In the years following WordStar's introduction, that venerable institution, the typing pool, began to disappear; and in general, the way people in offices and universities deal with text was irrevocably altered.

By the early 1980s, the business world was adopting word processing on a large scale. By the mid-1980s, with the advent of low-cost word-processing software like Broderbund's Bank Street Writer, word processing has begun to saturate the home market. And by the late 1980s, the typewriter may be on its way to the museum along with other obsolete curiosities like slide rules.

The third category of microcomputer software that took off in the late 1970s was geared for entertainment and was not business-oriented at all. The arrival of the first simulation games provided unexpected and, to many, far more exciting reasons for using a computer. A simulation, in terms of a computer, refers to a program that presents a realistic model of a process, an object, a series of events, a real world, or a hypothetical universe. Mathematical representations underlie all simulations, which is why computers are necessary to keep track of even a simple simulated universe. The model itself is presented on a screen or paper printout in the form of words and numbers or even in graphically displayed patterns.

Computer simulation techniques were originally developed for serious purposes like designing airplanes. That they could also be used as the basis for a particularly addicting variety of recreation- the fantasy simulation- was a fact initially recognized by a gleeful and talented bunch of young men who ran amok on MIT's computers more than twenty years ago. In fact, most software people agree that the term hacker originated with those early programmers, who seem to have discovered everything from the "serious" computerized gaming of chess programs to the purely recreational field of computer graphics games.

But these programmers, many of them MIT dropouts, had nevertheless been hired by MIT's computer development laboratories because of their prodigious programming ability. Not only was the software for the first interactive computer systems their creation, but artificial intelligence research, the construction of time-sharing software systems, and other landmarks in software development and computer science all came out of the hackers' headquarters in Cambridge's Technology Square. They were renowned for their accomplishments in advancing computer research and notorious for their irreverent attitudes and often unorthodox lifestyles.

And of course, while doing their more purposive work, they also delighted in finding ways to use computers to play games of various kinds. In 1961, for example, they got their hands on the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, which had a large, round video display screen, and they started playing around with different programs that would demonstrate the machine's graphic capabilities. One hacker, Stephen Russell, who was known to his cohorts as "Slug," came up with the idea of simulating spaceships on the screen. He had been reading science fiction novels about space battles, so he included a means of controlling the spaceship's flight patterns and a means of shooting down other ships. Meanwhile, another hacker by the name of Peter Samson created a realistic depiction of a star field as a background to the spaceships. The game Spacewar was born. Years later, Spacewar, as well as some other games that were originally designed by hackers at MIT and elsewhere, would form the basis of billion-dollar industries.

Although MIT was clearly the mother-temple of hacking, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (known as SAIL) became a West Coast shrine of the art. By the 1970s, a kind of party line for computers called the ARPAnet (developed by researchers for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency) linked SAIL computers to those at MIT and hundreds of other institutions. This multi-computer long-distance network made it possible for programmers at various institutions to send messages and even programs to one another.

Games, of course, were one of the largest categories of community-shared programs on the ARPAnet. One day, a SAIL hacker and Stanford student by the name of Don Woods found a particularly intriguing game on the network- a non-graphic simulation of an adventure through a cavern-world that was replete with treasure, trolls, dragons, maidens, and flying horses. Woods contacted the game's creator, Will Crowther, because he wanted to add some refinements to the program. Crowther, a computer scientist in Palo Alto, had concocted the game as a means of amusing his children, and having once been a spelunker, he decided to create a fantasy in the form of an exploration of linked caves. He was working for a company that was connected to the ARPAnet, so he had simply posted the game on the network for other hackers to enjoy. Woods, however, came to the game with a sophisticated perspective, since he had been involved in role-playing board games like "Dungeons and Dragons." When Woods's refinements were added to Crowther's original version, the infamous game called Adventure was born.

I say that Adventure was infamous because research leaders and computer system managers very quickly discovered that many programmers were spending hours and days- even weeks and months!- on the game. It must be pointed out that as there were no graphics on the original Adventure, the game offered a different kind of thrill from the sensory addiction of the video games that would surface a few years later. Besides the fantasy aspect, it, and games like it, provided an intellectual challenge that caused otherwise rational programmers to spend days working their way through it.

The game is a puzzle in the form of a trip through a series of caves. Each cave poses a problem that must be solved before the player can progress to the next cave. As the player solves each puzzle and moves through the various caves, a narrative unfolds, describing the fantasy adventure. The player makes moves by typing in commands like "KILL TROLL" or "TAKE TREASURE," and sometimes the player must backtrack through several previous caves to pick up an object-such as a sword, a bag of food, or a jug of water- that is required to solve a problem in a later cave.

Adventure spread rapidly through the ARPAnet community and was played on the big mainframes and minicomputers that were available to the computer research labs where the hard-core hackers congregated. Such relatively sophisticated games, however, were inaccessible to the Altair hobbyists and homebrewers who were dealing with computer memory sizes far too small to contain the programming code for a fantasy simulation. Even when the larger-capacity machines like the TRS-80 and Apple appeared, it was widely believed that Adventure ate up too much memory to be programmed in one of the microcomputer languages used by those computers.

But software history is largely the story of people who accomplished tasks that had previously been considered impossible. In 1978, a young man named Scott Adams decided to take up the challenge of writing a simulation game for the TRS-80 microcomputer. He succeeded in solving this "insoluble" problem in the remarkable time of two weeks. His first game was Adventure Land, which was based on Crowther and Woods' Adventure and was totally nongraphic and text-oriented, like the original. It was an immediate success, and TRS-80 owners started buying it like crazy. Scott and his wife, Alexis, started a company, Adventure International, which grew into its own strange kind of game empire, and which seeded the software industry with Scott Adams protégés (Doug Carlston among them). In time, even Microsoft brought out a version of the original ARPAnet Adventure.

Just as VisiCalc introduced businesspeople to the benefits of computers, and WordStar showed wordslingers how computer programs could dramatically increase their productivity, Adventure-type games demonstrated to tens of thousands of non-businesspeople how much fun computers could be. And the idea, new at that time, that ordinary men, women, and children would find things to do with computers in their homes was buttressed by the success of Adventure Land.

But the home computer market had not yet blossomed, for there was a definite limit to the number of people who liked to solve puzzles by typing in primitive sentences like "PICK UP SWORD." The color television generation is very sophisticated when it comes to the matter of visual media, and the monotonous look of green alphabetic characters on a screen was far less attractive than the kind of fast-moving, high-resolution, brightly colored displays that most people were accustomed to watching.

Affordable personal computers cannot be built without microprocessors, but microprocessor-based computers would never have caught on if, in addition to having good software, they weren't also connected to television-like display screens. If computer output were still restricted to numbers and alphabetic characters printed on sheets of paper, as had been the case for decades, computers would still be confined to laboratories and data processing centers. Moreover, if it weren't for computer graphics technology, the home computer market would never have opened up as widely as it did and would instead have remained largely a community of hobbyists.

The reason for the importance of the video display is very simple: The visual sense is the way human beings assimilate information most efficiently. People can simply understand information far better if it is presented in a visual form. And games in particular are far more exciting if they have a visual component, especially if color and motion also are involved.

A computer processes information and presents it to humans in an understandable form. Census statistics, financial data, numbers, or text is entered via keyboards, punched cards, magnetic tape, or other input devices. The central processor of the computer compiles the statistics, sorts the data, performs calculations, and processes the text. All of this is a marvelous improvement over adding machines, ledger books, and typewriters, but it wouldn't have any meaning unless the processed information could be presented to people in an easily perceived form.

The idea that computer output could be presented in the form of images on a video screen seems natural today, but it was considered a radical innovation when it first came about in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Computer scientists might still be reading and interpreting esoteric printouts if the United States Air Force had not developed a computer that graphically displayed information about the state of the country's air-defense readiness. And the use of computer graphics might still be confined to the military if it weren't for those irrepressible hackers at MIT who created the first computer-based video games, like Spacewar, in the early 1960s. But Spacewar itself would not have been possible without the revolutionary breakthrough provided by a program called Sketchpad, written in 1961 by yet another brilliant MIT student, Ivan Sutherland. Sketchpad allowed computer users to produce and manipulate graphic patterns on video screens and to store the results in computers.

By 1976, the homebrewers began to experiment with various graphics devices for the Altair. They were able to produce kaleidoscopic effects and to devise very simple games, but the computers themselves were nowhere near powerful enough to recreate a minicomputer program like Spacewar. Ironically, then, the next step in the evolution of the personal computer industry did not come from the general-purpose computer technology of the Altair or its immediate successors, but from far less versatile machines.

In order for an electronic information-processing device to be called a computer, it has to be programmable. But by the mid 1970s, it was possible to build machines that, using "dedicated," nonprogrammable microchips, could create sophisticated graphic effects. These machines were called "video games," and although they didn't have much to do with microcomputers, they hastened the day when the personal computer cult would break through to infect the general population.

Video games resulted from the entrepreneurial combination of two different ideas that had been around for a long time. Since 1961 and Spacewar, it was obvious to those few people who knew about interactive computing and display technology that sophisticated games could be created by using video graphics and microelectronic controllers. Meanwhile, arcade games in the form of pinball machines had been a steady business for decades. It took another Silicon Valley entrepreneur by the name of Nolan Bushnell, along with several other partners, to decide to put these two factors together.

Forming a company that he initially named Syzygy, Bushnell tried to market the game machine Computer Space, a modified version of Spacewar, to bars and pizza parlors as an electronic substitute for pinball. The idea didn't catch on- only 2,000 machines were sold. He then tried something simpler. In 1974, he unveiled Pong and marketed it to the same places. It was an absurdly simple game by Spacewar standards; using joysticks, the players moved light-paddles to bounce a ball of light back and forth across the screen.

Pong was a hit, to put it mildly. After his first test machines were installed, Bushnell received complaints from the proprietors of these establishments that his machines had broken down. When he followed up on the complaints, he discovered that the machines were malfunctioning only because their coin boxes had been jammed full before anybody had come back to empty them! In fact, when Bushnell approached a number of pinball-machine manufacturers in Chicago with the proposal that they might have a financial interest in his game, most turned him down. Bally Corporation, a giant pinball-machine manufacturer, was interested at first but then backed away from an agreement with him, largely because the corporation couldn't believe the financial statistics he was presenting on the basis of his experience with his test markets.

Indeed, it was Nolan Bushnell and his crude video games, launched a year before the Altair hobbyists and homebrewers began experimenting with personal computers, that triggered the huge influx of capital which would ultimately transform the hobbyist community into the sizeable home computer industry. In time, the success of the arcade games spawned home versions. The idea that small, inexpensive versions of arcade games could be connected to home television sets ultimately turned out to be just the beginning of the evolution of increasingly sophisticated microprocessor-based devices for home entertainment.

People started pouring quarters into Bushnell's arcade machines- to the tune of millions of dollars yearly. Bushnell followed up his first hit with another successful but slightly more advanced game, Tank Command, in which simulated tanks stalked through a video maze and hurled blobs of light at one another. Syzygy was then renamed Atari, after a move in the ancient Japanese game Go, and Bushnell hired creative young programmers and electronics wizards to think up new games. A young man by the name of Steve Jobs was one of Atari's early employees.

This new company combined electronic expertise that had previously been associated with defense contractors and consumer electronics manufacturers with the playfulness and love of games that characterized the hacker era. Two years after the company was born, it was doing $39 million worth of business. In 1976, Bushnell sold his increasingly profitable enterprise to Warner Communications for $26 million. For about six years, Warner's buyout of Bushnell was one of the smartest investments in history: By 1982, Atari's annual sales had swollen to more than $2 billion.

Atari in its Warner incarnation was to play an important role in the rise and fall of many other home computer companies. But in the 1970s, before the first home computer companies got off the ground, it was the sophisticated arcade games of Japanese manufacturers that turned the video game industry from a multimillion-dollar infant into a multibillion-dollar giant, unleashing an unexpected social phenomenon in the process. The key to the video game craze was in the "dedicated" hardware that enabled manufacturers to develop visual displays that were far better than those possible on the first programmable microcomputer systems.

Those games made possible an entirely new kind of sensory experience. In a real sense, they were even selling an experience- a means of ventilating primitive fight-or-flight reflexes through the various "zap the aliens" scenarios, through a visual and auditory encounter of hypnotic intensity, and through cognitive and perceptual gymnastics that offered immediate and quantitative rewards. The flashy high-resolution graphics ("high res," as it is known in the industry), the direct interaction via joysticks or buttons or trackballs, the electronic sound effects, and the way the games were designed to keep proficiency, difficulty, and level of reward in a delicate balance all seemed to precipitate an unnatural hunger in a large portion of every nation in the world- the youth.

The staid old pinball manufacturers who had turned away from Bushnell's video game simply had not foreseen the arrival and the nature of this vast, new, very different market. Nor could they have dared to predict how willing the game's customers would be to pay for their experiences. The rate of return on pinball machines had been holding steady for decades. Depending on the popularity of the machine, the weekly return per unit was measured, at best, in hundreds of dollars. The very first video games, way back in the Pong and Tank days, took in thousands weekly. But whereas the pinball manufacturers in Chicago might have not noticed the existence of this torrentially lucrative new market, the game manufacturers in Tokyo certainly did.

Japanese companies had been manufacturing coin-operated games since the late 1960s, and in the late 1970s they began distributing sophisticated video game machines to the Japanese market. The games were such a huge success that there was for a time a critical shortage of circulating coins in Japan. The devices were virtually sucking the money out of circulation. As a result of this almost shocking success, Japanese manufacturers of coin-operated games began to consider distributing their products to international markets. The breakthrough of Japanese arcade games into the international market came in 1978, with Space Invaders, a fast-moving, colorful video game in which the player fires brightly colored "lasers" at swiftly descending "alien invaders" and tries to accumulate as many points as possible before the invaders destroy the laser bases. As the player gets a higher score, the invaders move more quickly and the electronic background music becomes more urgent. This kind of game, known as "shoot-'em-ups," quickly gained revenues of billions of dollars per year-all of it in coins. The video arcade games had become an enormous industry.

But in the meantime, in 1977, the Warner version of Atari was putting itself in a position to mine an even larger video game bonanza by building cheap game machines that could be plugged into home television sets; these devices, also "dedicated" rather than programmable, enabled people to play the enormously popular arcade games like Pong and Tank, and eventually Space Invaders, in their homes. The first versions of these devices sold extraordinarily well, but they were soon abandoned by their owners because they were limited in their capabilities and offered only one or two games.

Then, in the same year, Atari introduced the VCS 2600, which offered replaceable cartridges called ROMs. By plugging in a new ROM cartridge, it became possible to play the latest game on the old machine, instead of discarding the entire machine for the latest model. This is known in the industry as "giving away the razors and selling the blades," except in Atari's case it was selling both the razors and the blades. Although they were pieces of hardware, the ROMs were actually a form of software; inside each cartridge was the program that enabled the machine to play a new game. Their eventual success with consumers marked the beginning of a broadly based home video game industry and the point when software became a significant consumer commodity.

The home video game industry soon rivaled even the intensely profitable arcade game industry; Atari's revenues rose to more than a billion dollars per year. It was the most phenomenal rate of growth of any new industry in history, and an experience far beyond any CEO's wildest dreams. And Atari's CEO at the time was Raymond Kassar, who had recently been hired by the notoriously charismatic Warner chairman, Steve Ross. Sophisticated, sybaritic, highly cultured, Kassar had spent his entire career at Burlington Mills, a textile company, before coming to Atari. He wasn't a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and didn't care much for engineers or programmers, but for a while he happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

After the Japanese introduced Space Invaders, they brought out Galaxians, which had even more variations on the "shoot the invaders" theme, and then Pac-Man, which created the "munch-'em-up" genre. Incredibly, people spent more than a billion dollars' worth of quarters a year simply to play this one arcade game. Then Atari licensed from the Japanese the rights to create the VCS (home) version of Pac-Man, and a programmer was hired to do a quick-and-dirty version for a reported $1 million. Ironically, the game programmer who created the original Japanese version of Pac-Man didn't make a penny in royalties.

By 1982, Atari had more than 80 percent of the huge and still growing home game hardware and software market. The VCS might not have been a computer, but those cartridges certainly were software, and a programmer was needed to create the code that was embodied in the cartridges. That meant that there were juicy royalties to be made. More than that, some programmers began to feel that they ought to get some personal recognition for their accomplishments.

While Kassar was buying apartments in the most expensive co-ops in the world and flying around in a luxury jet, a few of the programmers who were creating Atari's wealth decided that it was time for them to get their names printed on the cartridge's package. Kassar tried to ignore them, but they were persistent. In May 1979, four of Atari's best game designers, dressed in jeans, finally met with the elegantly tailored Kassar in his office. In an interview in an issue of Info-World (Vol. 5, No. 48), one of the programmers, Larry Kaplan, summed up the CEO's reaction: "He called us towel designers. He said, 'I've dealt with your kind before. You're a dime a dozen. You're not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge."

The following October, three of the four game designers- Dave Crane, Al Miller, and Bob Whitehead- left Atari to form Activision. Kaplan joined them a short time later. According to Kaplan, "Activision was started to prove that Kassar was wrong." But as an awesome collection of talent and a burning desire to succeed are still not sufficient to build world-class company, the programmers soon got together with a Jim Levy, a CEO whose previous experience had included involvement with a music and software company as well with Time, Inc., and Hershey Foods. Eventually Silicon a venture as capital partner- Sutter Hill, one of the hottest in Valley- joined Activision's effort.

As the first company in the video game business to concentrate exclusively on software, Activision was breaching the wall between the still financially puny but ever more sophisticated home computer software market and the relatively one-dimensional but monstrously profitable video game software market.

According to Levy, Activision's original business plan was based on three fundamental ideas. The first could be called the "appliance hypothesis"- a prediction that during the 1980s the computer would become as important in American homes as the television, radio, stereo, and automobile. "The second fundamental idea," Levy said in a June 1984 interview in Atari's Antic magazine, "was that software was going to drive the market." And the third idea was based on the premise that a software company requires an approach and focus different from that which a hardware company requires. This corporation, after all, was going to prove that programmers weren't towel designers.

Activision was an instant hit, and when the company went public, it made the founders Silicon Valley millionaires. By 1982, after only two years in the business, they topped $150 million in sales. Activision's best-selling product, a game called Pitfall, sold more than three and a half million units worldwide. In subsequent years, the company marketed four more games that sold more than a million units each. The Activision founders far surpassed their original goal of proving something to Atari: In effect, they created the concept of the software star. The company not only put the programmers' names on the game packages, it also put their pictures and bios in promotional materials and sent the programmers themselves on speaking tours.

Activision wasn't Kassar's- and Atari's-only problem. In 1981, when another group of game designers left Atari to form Imagic, Kassar called them "high-strung prima donnas," and afterwards many of the programmers who remained at Atari soon sported T-shirts with the words: "I'm another high-strung prima donna from Atari." But with annual sales figures approaching the billion-dollar mark, Atari was in no mood to listen to doomsayers who decried the erosion of their programming talent.

Atari's VCS was soon followed by other systems, including Odyssey, Intellivision, and Colecovision. Other game companies proliferated, and some of the country's largest companies became involved- notably Quaker Oats, CBS, and Mattel. By the time the video game business reached its peak, in the early 1980s, another up-and-coming industry was making inroads- the home computer market. Both the hardware and software components of personal computers had grown more powerful and less expensive since the days of the Altair. When microcomputers first became powerful enough to accommodate sophisticated game programs, complete with graphics, Broderbund and I entered the story.

The Early Years

The View from Broderbund

I learned to program at the age of seventeen, which is a lot older than many of the current crop of programming stars were when they started. In fact, when I got my start in 1964, many of today's software luminaries were still in diapers. And now, a lot of the people in the software industry who are my age or older are taking orders from CEOs who are much younger than they are. Two prominent examples- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, the largest microcomputer software company- were both under thirty years old in 1984, when I began writing this book.

But it isn't necessarily the extraordinary youth of these people that enabled them to rise to their celebrated positions in the industry. They rose because of pure talent. More specifically, most of the people who created this industry gained entrance because of their programming skills. And programming is something that can't be faked- the program either works or it doesn't. Computers are immune to all human prejudices. They are utterly literal and totally fair. They open their secrets to anyone, but only if that person can speak their language.

Indeed, until very recently, one of the major factors that kept the mysteries of programming closed to most people was access. Very few people ever had a chance even to try learning how to communicate with computers. The old-style machines were huge, extraordinarily expensive, and cloistered in air-conditioned, dust-free chambers; access to these inner sanctums was permitted only to a small priesthood of intermediaries.

I was one of the very few lucky ones who succeeded in gaining access to these machines in the early 1960s. My mother, father, two brothers, two sisters, and I moved from Dubuque to Iowa City, Iowa, in 1964, when my father, a Presbyterian minister, became professor of New Testament at the University of Iowa. My brother Gary, my sister Cathy, my mother, her sister, a cousin, and I became Brøderbund's founding shareholders, and Cathy and my mother both worked with Gary and me at Brøderbund at one time or another. But that was sixteen years in the future.

In 1964, I was a high school student. That summer I went to Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, to attend a summer conference on engineering for bright high school kids. The conference included classes in calculus, physics, and engineering and, most importantly, a class entitled "Introduction to Digital Computers." It was then that I learned how to write programs in the programming language known as FORTRAN. The machine was an antique of laughably limited power, judging by today's standards: an IBM monster that filled an entire room.

Today's desk-top computers are far more powerful than that IBM machine and cost a fraction of the IBM's original price. But I had no idea then of what was to happen to computer technology in the near future. In those days, I was, like many others, simply seduced by the logical, gamelike, mathematical, and tactical challenges of writing, debugging, and running my own computer programs. It was like a cross between solving jigsaw puzzles, building models, and playing chess- the kind of fascinating activity that involved me for hours on end before I noticed the passage of time. I started cutting all my other summer classes in order to spend more time in the computer center.

The reason I had to hang out near the computer, and the very notion of "computer center" itself, were artifacts of the way computers worked in 1964. Computers in those days took in data and programs and then returned answers in the form of printouts; the system as a whole was known as "batch processing." First, all the programs and data had to be coded in terms of those square-shaped holes on small pieces of cardboard universally known as "IBM cards." If there was a missing instruction in the program, or if one of the cards had a hole punched in the wrong place, then the programmer would get back a printout full of mistakes (called "bugs") instead of solutions. That meant that the programmer would have to study the printout in order to discover the bug.

In practice, the programmer would bring a deck of cards down to the computer center, then wait five hours for the batch processing. But if any bugs turned up before the five hours elapsed, the programmer would simply copy the cards and submit them again. Because of the waiting time, several different programs would be run one after another, so that there would be a steady stream of output. This meant that I, as a programmer, was running down to the computer center every forty-five minutes to see if another batch of output was waiting for me. Before I realized what had happened, I had spent the entire summer immersed in printouts and decks of cards.

The following summer, I got a job at the University of Iowa computing center as a batch clerk who took in the decks of cards and gave them to the operators who ran them through the machine. As this procedure reflects, there was a definite hierarchy of access to the computer, and it is not wholly poetic license to refer to the top of the hierarchy as a priesthood guarding the holiest of holies. But I didn't mind my lowly position or the minimum-wage pay, partly because Iowa summers are hot and the computing center was one of the few air-conditioned buildings in the vicinity. I was also motivated by the prospect of getting a free account number to submit my own programs, and there were plenty of computer aficionados around-they weren't widely known as hackers yet- to teach me even more about the programming art. There weren't too many college programming courses, and none at the high school level, back in 1965. As far as I knew, the only way to really learn the ins and outs of the art was to hang around a university computer center and pick up tips from the experts.

This strategy soon paid off, and about halfway through the summer, the university started to use me as a programmer. One of the more interesting jobs I had was writing the program that computed the salaries of all the employees at the university. I got a sense of the real power that programmers held when I realized that my father was one of the employees whose salaries I was computing. At that time he was still teaching at the university, and out of curiosity I found out how much money he earned. This might not seem like a big deal today, but I remember being impressed with the fact that computer programmers were privy to a lot of information that would otherwise have remained under lock and key. They never would have been allowed access to it had they not performed the valuable and mysterious service of creating computer programs.

I went to Harvard the following fall. (In fact my brothers, Don and Gary, also attended Harvard, and at one point all three of us were there at the same time.) I worked as a programmer for two years as an undergraduate, but at that time computer science was hardly my burning ambition in life. Adventure, excitement, and novelty- qualities that others in my age group over at MIT found in the new time-sharing computers- were what primarily interested me. So I went off to Africa and ended up teaching math and geography in Botswana for a year.

When I returned to college, I became a more serious student and abandoned programming, which had been a personal hobby rather than a vocation anyway. I buckled down to study social psychology and was graduated with high honors in 1970. I went to graduate school on a fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, and concentrated in African affairs and international economics. However, after I had attended school for a year, the school's funding was cut back unexpectedly, and it had to cancel most of its fellowships, including mine. Since I had no money, I took a job instead of returning to finish my masters degree.

American Express hired me as an editor for its language publications division, which was located in Washington, D.C. This division published basic texts, books to accompany teaching tapes, and readers that were used at its language centers. I edited French, German, Italian, and Spanish textbooks (I was pretty decent in French and German but had to rely on outside help for Italian and Spanish) and arranged the taping and manufacture of the language tapes.

With two languages out of four, I was apparently the best they could find- at least I was the best they could find for $7800 a year. I stayed at the job for only about seven months, however, before city life started to get to me. When a few more book contracts came my way, I talked my boss into letting me write the books instead of farming them out. Since authors didn't have to work at the office, I moved to Maine.

A few years previously, I had helped build a little ski chalet in Fryeburg, Maine, for my parents, and after making the arrangement with American Express, I fantasized that I could live in the chalet alone, deep in the woods, writing every other day and skiing the rest of the time. I had no worries about my ability to turn out the textbooks, which by nature had a prescribed format. And they weren't my first books, either- in college I had written a beginning Swahili textbook for a small publisher.

At first, the fantasy turned out to be a perfectly workable arrangement. I finished the books and skied a lot. But in time I got bored with this routine, too. Although I like being alone and am a serious bibliophile and daydreamer, I was developing a bad case of cabin fever. Because I had always enjoyed being a student, I decided to return to school, this time to try for a law degree. The only two places I knew were Iowa and Harvard, so I applied to the law schools at both universities.

Law school is one of the few graduate programs that one can get into without prerequisites (the only other one is business school, and I had no interest in business). Apparently my eclectic background was just what Harvard Law School was looking for, so I returned to Cambridge in 1972 and spent the next three school years at Harvard Law School attending classes and playing a lot of basketball; I spent the summers in Maine building houses, which I then sold to pay for law school. It was my first entrepreneurial endeavor, and although at first I learned a great number of ways to lose money, I eventually achieved my goal of making enough to help finance the completion of my studies.

After my graduation from law school I worked at a large law firm in Chicago. After three years, I quit the firm and moved back to Maine, where I set up my own office as a means of obtaining the general kind of experience a private practice could offer. I also planned to build houses in some entrepreneurial way while running my law practice. I ended up with a partner in the law practice and another partner who built houses with me.

In 1978 I obtained the TRS-80 to help with my law practice and (mostly) to have fun. It was then that I was drawn more and more back into programming. I continued to practice law, but eventually the housing recession depressed my construction business. Having a computer and some time on my hands, I began to develop my first game program, Galactic Empire, and before I knew it I was once again seduced by the sheer enjoyment of working with a computer. By the time I sent off that first program to Adventure International, The Software Exchange, and Cybernautics in hopes that they would publish it, I realized that I was looking for a way out of the law business and into the freelance microcomputer programming business.

As I recounted in the first pages of this book, my trip to Eugene, Oregon, in early 1980 eventually turned into the beginnings of Brøderbund. Gary was twenty-eight and I was thirty-two when we started the company. We still remember fondly those early frantic days of cassette recorders strewn about the living room of our house in Eugene. We recall not only the laughably casual way we did business then, but also the raw excitement we felt starting out on this crazy futuristic adventure. We did everything on the basis of instant decisions and ten-minute negotiations. Although many of the friendships and alliances we formed in those days are still part of our business, our business has changed considerably and has become more professional over the years. But back then, we did everything in a seat-of-the-pants manner.

Once, we found a printer in Eugene and said to him: "We don't have any money, but if you print up this documentation we think we'll be able to sell the program and pay you later." We must have looked honest, because the printer took us up on our offer, and the arrangement worked out, miraculously, just the way we said it would. The printer's name is Don Fast, and although we are no longer in Eugene we still do some business with him when we can.

Although by 1980 three companies in particular- Personal Software, Microsoft, and MicroPro- were on their way to establishing themselves as multimillion-dollar enterprises, it was still a time when most of the microcomputer software "industry" consisted of kitchen table operations like ours. And those were the days when most of the companies got together once a year in San Francisco for a strange kind of convention that was more of a cult-gathering and social get-together than a serious trade show like the huge ones we see nowadays.

Shortly after we got that first $300 order from the Program Store in Washington, D.C., Gary and I decided to attend the San Francisco convocation that we had heard so much about from other microcomputer folks. The event was the West Coast Computer Faire, and a week before it was scheduled to start, we called Jim Warren, the organizer, to see if we could get in on the action. For $200 we obtained a tiny space known as a "microbooth." In an excess of optimism we recorded almost a thousand copies of each of my TRS-80 programs, of which there were now three. We loaded the trunk of my car with sleeping bags, computers, and cassette tapes and headed for San Francisco in April 1980.

I remember that we arrived in the Bay Area on one of those clear, beautiful, days that seduce people into moving to northern California. Mount Tamalpais was a soft green, the bay was deep blue, San Francisco itself was a sparkling white, and the air was clear enough to see the treeline of the Marin hills from the Bay Bridge.

We crossed the bridge in high spirits, feeling very much in the tradition of the forty-niners and all the other half-crazy adventurers who had come to California in search of their fortunes. We headed for the auditorium where the Faire was held and found our booth, the size of which justified its name- six feet by six feet. In that rather restricted space we set up our TRS-80 and our newly purchased Apple on the fold-up table we had been provided. That was our entire hardware base and most of our capital investment at that time.

We had bought the Apple a week before the show in order to demonstrate my brother Don's game Tank Command. Don was married and employed as an associate professor at the University of Iowa, so he wasn't interested in moving west or switching careers in order to join Gary and me in our new enterprise. But he, like a great many others, was fascinated with the capabilities of the Apple II. He had originally created Tank Command for the Plato educational system and had later converted it for the Apple. His game and my three TRS-80 programs were Brøderbund's entire software line, and at the Faire, Gary and I had high hopes of selling many copies of all four programs in no time.

But unforeseeable events at the Faire ended up having more of a profound impact on Brøderbund's future than the events we had expected. Initially, we were just thinking about selling a ton of software and learning what all the big companies were up to. After the first couple of hours and no sales, however, we were hoping for enough cash to cover the cost of the microbooth. We had as yet no sense of community with any of the other companies at the Faire. As it turned out, our introduction to the community was literally right next door to us.

Our long-standing relationship with Japanese software companies started because the fellow in the booth next to ours didn't have an Apple. That booth was owned by an accountant named Jack Hatfield, who lived in Placerville, California, in the Sierra foothills, and who imported memory chips from Japan, offering packages that allowed people to upgrade the memory capacity of their computers. In the booth with Jack was a memory-chip supplier, a fellow named Mioshi, who was the president of a Japanese trading company. In addition to the memory chips, Mioshi had also brought to the Faire a couple of Apple arcade-type games that he had picked up in Tokyo from a company called Star Craft.

Since there was no Apple in their booth to demonstrate the games, Jack asked if we wanted to show the games in our booth. The only problem was that our machine had only 16K memory, and we needed 32K to demonstrate the programs. That was easy to solve- we just opened our Apple and put Mioshi's memory chips in. Mioshi agreed that after the show was over we could keep the memory chips as payment for letting them use the Apple. Those chips turned out to be a significant part of our profit from that show, along with about $200 we received from sales of our own games.

The way the games played and the way we felt when we played them, however, was far more interesting to us at that time than the profit-and-loss statements we'd face when we returned to Eugene. These were the first fast-action arcade games I'd ever seen on a personal computer. They were light years beyond anything I'd ever seen on the U.S. market so far. We played them ourselves because they were so tantalizing. Even though they weren't even our products, the Japanese games turned us on so much that we began pulling people out of the crowd to try them. But this became frustrating when everybody wanted to buy the games that weren't ours to sell in the first place. And Mioshi himself had brought only one copy of each game!

After the show, business began to look a little less fun. The TRS-80 games that had launched my programming and publishing careers gradually declined in sales. We were going broke fast. We then began writing versions of all our games for the Apple, having learned at the Faire that the Apple was an instant marketplace for new software in ways that we felt the TRS-80 was not. By June 1980, we had finished our first few Apple conversions.

Then we got an unexpected call from Mioshi, who was in Placerville. He wanted to fly to Eugene to discuss publishing arrangements. When he arrived, he brought ten copies of each of the games we had found so attractive in April. We then worked out an arrangement whereby we would buy one hundred copies at a time and store them in Placerville. From there Jack would ship them to us as we paid for them. Mioshi's price, was we were to discover, was very high. But we were so anxious to get those games for Broderbund's inventory that we were willing to lose money on the first ones we sold. One product cost us $10.50 each; when we started selling it to dealers we sold copies at 50 percent off the retail price of $19.95.

Our decision to start selling a product at a loss, in hopes of making the money back later in terms of a larger market base, was a fairly bold, if not ill-considered, strategem. By that time we had gone through all of the money I had saved from my law practices in Chicago and Maine (around $12,000), had borrowed $8,000 from my relatives, and were approaching the limits on both my MasterCharge and VISA cards. The pressure was on, to say the least. Here were two promising Harvard graduates who were losing their money at an astonishing rate.

But at that point, another random event changed our fortune once again. In previous years, Gary had coached a women's basketball team in Sweden, taking it to the national championships twice. Three of his former athletes were now visiting the United States on vacation and were headed for San Francisco when they called Gary and asked him to join them there. Of course he had no money to finance such a trip, but then a friend of his from San Francisco bought him a plane ticket to the Bay Area. He took a lot of software with him, and as his friends drove him to the city from the airport, he convinced them to stop at a few computer stores along the way so that he could try to sell some programs.

Computer stores were fairly new enterprises in the summer of 1980- certainly not the international chains that they are today. They were hungry for any software to sell along with the Apple II. (The TRS-80 was sold only through Radio Shack, not computer stores, and the IBM PC didn't exist yet.) The first day of Gary's venture into traveling software salesmanship, he racked up several hundred dollars' worth of sales. The next day he did even better. And since we sold on a cash-on-the-barrelhead basis, we were getting ahead of the game for the first time since we started the whole unlikely enterprise. Our sales had been less than $1,000 a month since February and had sunk to zero in May. By the end of his stay in California, Gary had sold several thousand dollars' worth of software.

We used some of the money Gary brought back from San Francisco to buy a few hundred more cassettes from the Japanese, and to finance a sales trip I took across the country in August. I sold our software out of the car and stopped at Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City- in fact, at every place I could find a computer store across the northern tier. I sold fifteen or sixteen thousand dollars' worth of programs on that trip, which really got things humming back in Eugene. No doubt about it, we were not only in the black, but it looked like we might actually be a viable company.

At about this time we realized that the higher-capacity and faster-running technology of disk-based software, which had been in existence for a while, would eventually become inexpensive and reliable enough to supersede the slower cassette-based programs in the marketplace. In fact, the disk format was becoming the standard medium for software by the end of the summer of 1980. With that in mind we began converting all of our own games from cassette to disk format and managed to convince our Japanese suppliers to do the same.

After I returned from my sales trip, a gentleman named Minoru Nakazawa showed up at our door in Eugene. He was the president of Star Craft, which created the software that Mioshi had been selling us. Nakazawa explained that Mioshi had kept a sizeable part of the money that we had paid for the product, a situation that was beneficial to Mioshi but not to either Star Craft or Broderbund. Nakazawa asked us to make a direct arrangement with him, and as he didn't intend to sell any more software to Mioshi, we naturally went along with the suggestion. We worked out an arrangement that turned out to be much more profitable for us. We no longer had to store the programs in Placerville until we could pay for them; after our first check, he trusted us to pay him as we sold them.

In the last month of 1980, Brøderbund took off. With support from a distributing company called Robwin and later renamed Softsel, our sales never went below December's level of $55,000 again. The following January, Computerland started carrying our products. We were selling fewer and fewer strategy and simulation games and more and more of our video game-like programs. In the meantime, I was still trying to do the programming while Gary handled the sales. I was also doing the books, and we had a phone with call-waiting installed. We were still located in the same house in Eugene, but at least we had moved beyond the living room. My bedroom was the product development department, manufacturing still went on in the living room, and the kitchen became our shipping department.

But soon we moved into a house with a large garage and hired three people to help with manufacturing and shipping. My bedroom was still the product development headquarters, but the Ping-Pong table in the garage became the center for assembling and shipping the products. In the spring of 1981 we expanded our product line to include Snoggle (a Pac-Man imitation) and Payroll, our first nonentertainment package. At about that time, our sister Cathy, who was then living and working in New York, quit her job and moved to Eugene to join us. She started out as office manager and bookkeeper, then took over advertising as well. I wrote my last program that summer, having given up all hope of doing serious programming while running the business.

By the summer of 1981 we were also getting a lot of pressure from our Japanese colleague to move to a more convenient location. In Japan, a successful company wouldn't be located in a small town. For prestige value as well as operational convenience, a successful company in a small town would move to a major city. And if a Japanese company were serious about continuing its success, it would move to Tokyo. Of the major cities open to us, we were willing to consider only Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area, both of which had better facilities for our Japanese friend. We chose the Bay Area because Gary and I hadn't forgotten the euphoria of our arrival there for the 1980 Computer Faire. So we packed up the entire enterprise and moved it south to San Rafael in August 1981.

There were five of us at the time we left Eugene- Gary,Cathy, Brian Ehler (who was a production worker and who is now director of Sales Administration), Chris Jochumson (an independent programmer and friend), and I. We set up operation in a house. We didn't know any better- we had always operated out of a house- and at first, our business consisted of a few phone calls, daily trips to the post office, and use of one Apple II computer (having long since abandoned the TRS-80). In the meantime, we were fairly oblivious to things like zoning laws and never suspected that our neighbors would report us, which they did the first week we moved in, when the UPS trucks started driving into our cul-de-sac to pick up our shipments.

The Planning Commission came by and we had a chat and decided to move the operation once again. We found an old liquor warehouse, also in San Rafael. We expanded throughout the building one chunk at a time, and after several months, we eventually filled the building and even the building next door. By 1983 it was time to move again, because we now had forty-five employees and no parking facilities. We were still violating most of the zoning ordinances, but as there were no neighbors we got away with it. Still, our accommodations were cramped and crowded, and the roof leaked like a sieve. In mid-1983 we moved into the building that we still occupy today. It still isn't spacious enough, but it is much nicer to work in. And it's in an industrial park in San Rafael, so we're legal now.

In the spring of 1982, we were approached by venture capitalists, as were several other formerly-small software publishers who had grown into multimillion-dollar businesses. Venture capitalists-sometimes known as "vulture capitalists"- like to find million-dollar businesses, infuse them with money and guidance and even stick a few of their own people on the board of directors, and then take the companies "public" a few years later.

With the success of Microsoft, Micropro, Personal Software, and Digital Research, the big-money people were beginning to look a lot more seriously at the upside potential of this peculiar industry that had mutated from a bunch of hobbyists. We had one bad experience ourselves, with a venture firm that will remain nameless but that made us a very attractive offer of working capital in exchange for a healthy piece of the action. We almost agreed to do business with the firm until our lawyer pointed out that one term in their proposed contract gave the firm the power to fire us all and take over Brøderbund if we failed to show a profit two quarters in a row. We had no intention of ever failing to show a profit for even one month, but the idea of even taking the risk of losing our company was totally unacceptable. We eventually made a deal with a venture firm called Burr, Egan, and Deleage, and we've been happy with them.

By the time we moved to our present quarters, Brøderbund had already developed its own group of programmers- either in-house programmers or independent programmers who had a very close association with us. This development began after I had given up programming, when we realized that we had to find other product sources. Our most successful products, during the explosive stages of our growth, were the original programs that were submitted to us, like the Star Craft games. Then we began to work with original submissions that needed further development but nonetheless looked promising. Gradually, after a few years, we worked our way to a system that we found comfortable as well as profitable. We still use that system today, whereby we treat programs in development in a manner very similar to the way book publishers treat manuscripts in development. Later on in the book, when we take a look at the way different software publishers and developers create new products, we'll focus on the process of product development. For the time being, however, I think we've spent enough time discussing Brøderbund, which is hardly the one and only scene of action in the software world. It's time to enlarge the frame of reference to include other developments and other people in the burgeoning microcomputer software industry. Now that you know who I am and where I came from, its time to meet some other software people.

Legendary Programmers

Without programmers there would be no microcomputer software industry today, and personal computers would have remained confined to the small fraternity of hobbyists knowledgeable enough to create their own programs. Without programmers like the ones discussed in this chapter, a software- using community never would have existed to make folk heroes out of these unlikely cultural explorers.

Some of them live like hermits, and others are as gregarious as rock stars. All of them love to tinker with abstractions. Some are intellectuals, many are artisans, and a few are true geniuses. I know dozens of these characters, but I've picked three to discuss here: Paul Lutus was chosen because of his outright eccentricity and the size of the fortune he made for himself; Bill Budge is included because of the artistry of his work and because he is a prime example of the software creator as pop star; John Draper's story shows up here because he was probably the first legendary software person, given his earlier notoriety as a different kind of technological folk hero.

Paul Lutus is either the most entrepreneurial of the software eccentrics or the most eccentric of the software entrepreneurs. Certainly he has one of the most unusual backgrounds of anyone in the software industry. In the late 1960s, he was a vagabond who spent several years actually living under the bushes in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and later, on various Lower East Side rooftops in New York City. He experimented with psychedelic drugs, was a street musician, and became a minor celebrity because of his skill at blowing soap bubbles. By the mid-1970s he was back in California, pursuing a relatively mainstream lifestyle and working for NASA. Then he moved to Oregon and lived alone in a tiny cabin on Eight Dollar Mountain. It was there that he taught himself how to program. In the early 1980s, he was still a hermit, albeit in a much more sumptuous retreat, and he had grown accustomed to receiving royalties of two or three million dollars a year from the sales of his programs.

Paul is an independent fellow, but he goes far beyond the normal bounds of independence one comes to expect from programmers, both in what he demands and what he succeeds in getting. He does his own carpentry, his own programming, and his own contract negotiations. He loves music and plays a number of musical instruments. He loves to fly and even pilots his own plane. He even grows his own food, and his brain still seems to generate ideas far faster than he is able to articulate them. To this day he wears clothes that would best be described as "comfortable." His once-tangled head of hair is thinning, but his beard is full and bright red, and he still talks as fast and as passionately as humanly possible when he really gets wound up.

I've seen Paul only a few times, but of course I knew all the Lutus legends long before I first met him. Hearing about Paul Lutus was one of the mandatory initiation rituals in the software industry. Not long ago, I finally saw him on his own turf and asked him, face to face, which of the Lutus stories are true and which are fictional. In the summer of 1984, he invited me up to his latest mountaintop retreat, in southern Oregon. When I got there, he told me the highlights of his strange story.

To get to Paul's place I flew into the small airport in Medford, Oregon. Had he not picked me up in a four-wheel-drive Subaru station wagon, I never would have found his house myself. We got off a main highway and headed for the nearest forested hills, where we crossed a covered bridge, followed a steadily deteriorating roadway that runs alongside a stream, turned off through an inconspicuous and unmarked gate onto a gravel road, and drove straight across a rough landing strip. Then we drove past a "No Trespassing" sign and a "Warning: Protected by Guard Dogs" sign, and after the "Radiation Hazard" and "Mine Field: Contact Commanding Officer for Map of Area" signs, we finally arrived at a large house built into a mountain- Lutus Central.

Paul claims that his independence and his reclusiveness began during his unpleasant childhood in San Jose, California. "My family is very peculiar," he told me. "Even when we were living in the same house, we didn't talk with each other." Paul's father, a machinist, worked for IBM, and when Paul was young his father sometimes brought home obsolete computer parts. Paul remembers retreating into his workshop and his imagination, putting the components together in different combinations and pretending that they made a real computer. In the fifth grade, when his teacher wanted to put him in a class for slow learners because he always seemed to be dreaming or doodling in some world of his own, a test revealed that he had a genius IQ.

In high school, he was the classic example of a brilliant but emotionally tortured nerd. Only a few years before, he had been considered "slow," and now he found himself regarded by his peers as a "brain," which made him more of an outsider than ever before. Although he did have a few friends, he was pretty much of a loner who entertained himself. He built his own ham radio and an oscilloscope that he traded to a friend for a used bicycle. He remembers riding his clunky bike to and from school whereas his classmates drove their cars to football games and dates. "I was the most socially unacceptable person who ever went to that high school" is the way he remembers it now.

At sixteen he dropped out of school and got a job as a television repairman. Then, some years later, attracted by the countercultural ethic, he decided that making money wasn't a decent goal in life and quit the television repair business to live on the streets and make it as a folksinger during the height of the Haight-Ashbury and East Village scenes of the 1960s. Several years later, facing a winter on the streets of New York, he finally decided that having a job and a regular address wouldn't be so indecent after all. Establishing a modus operandi that was to serve him well for years to come, he walked into the instrumentation laboratory at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital and, with typical verbal persuasiveness, talked his way into a job building electronic equipment for medical research.

In the spring of 1974, after about a year at Mount Sinai, Lutus decided to ride his bicycle from New York to California. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no attachments and no particular plans for the rest of the year, to say nothing of the rest of his life. In Boulder, Colorado, he took some time out to learn hang-gliding, then bought a motorcycle and continued westward. The motorcycle and his money gave out somewhere around Sacramento. He hitchhiked to San Francisco, picked up a newspaper, and saw an ad for a job he knew he could do. He cleaned himself up as much as possible and performed a bit of his patented verbal razzle-dazzle on the personnel officers of an aerospace contractor.

He told a tale about a technical education he never had, but, showing that he knew what he was doing when it came to electrical and electronic design, he talked his way into a contract to design part of the complicated lighting system for the first Space Shuttle. His brilliant solution to this technical problem won him a bonus and a certificate of recognition from NASA. The aerospace contractor offered him other projects, but Lutus declined and in fact quit the job right then and there.

The subcontractor was reluctant to see him go, since he had turned out to be the star performer whenever NASA officials showed up to see how the lighting project was progressing. He had a knack for filling blackboards with equations and deftly fielding all technical questions with extemporaneous dissertations on the details of his design. But Paul was determined to get himself some breathing and thinking space. He had lived on the streets and in the parks, he had been a hobo and an aerospace engineer, he had traveled and dealt with too many people, and now it was time to find a place to be alone with his thoughts. And so he took his NASA money, told his former employers that he would be back to work for them as soon as he needed more money, and left San Francisco for the deep back country of Oregon.

In the spring of 1976, Lutus backpacked construction materials to the top of Eight Dollar Mountain, a wooded ridge 400 feet above a wilderness valley in Oregon, and hand-built a 12- by 24-foot cabin. After the cabin was finished, the provisions and modest furnishings were packed in, and the wood was chopped for the winter, the one thing he had in abundance was spare time, so he taught himself programming. At the time, he undoubtedly fit the classical definition of a poverty-stricken "hermit," but eventually his self-taught programming skill would eliminate his poverty and make him a rich hermit instead.

To most people, hackers are just the latest and perhaps the scariest variety of mad scientist. Weird computer guys, in the minds of the nonprogramming majority, are exactly like other weird technocultists. But people like Paul Lutus turned a much more favorable light on the public image of the programmer when they showed how much their arcane skill was worth on the open market. Some of the early entrepreneurial hackers of the microcomputer age came up with something that no previous variety of obsessed scientist had procured- vast amounts of money. As for Lutus himself, it is ironic that after he painstakingly worked himself into a position of bucolic solitude and lived a lifestyle that took a lot of manual labor to maintain but paid him very little in terms of money, one of the first things he did to amuse himself ended up making him rich.

That first winter, when he found himself alone with his thoughts in his wood-heated, waterless cabin, Paul started toying with one of the few items he had brought with him- a sophisticated battery-powered Hewlett-Packard electronic calculator. He told me that he had brought the calculator up to the cabin in the first place to help him with basic arithmetic. Higher mathematics had always interested him, but he had never bothered to memorize even the multiplication tables.

"The law said I had to attend school, so I was physically present in the classroom after the seventh grade" is the way he puts it, "but I wasn't there in any intellectual sense. I was in the back of the room with my own books. At home I built radios. I didn't know my multiplication tables, but I sure as hell knew how to think."

And as it happened, by setting up equations in proper sequences, he figured out how to create a limited variety of programs on the calculator. As an exercise, he made a pocket-calculator model of the solar system and wrote an article about it for publication in an electronics hobbyist magazine. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote Lutus to tell him they were using his calculator model to help perform their own calculations for the Viking Mars-lander mission.

"I realized that my calculations were more than exercises," Lutus told me. "I saw a way to capitalize on my unique way of thinking about things. Programming started out as fun, but I certainly didn't object to making money from it." (This is a familiar refrain. Many other software entrepreneurs, me included, were disbelieving when we first learned that people were actually willing to pay us to mess around with programming. I remember how I felt when I saw my first royalty check for Galactic Empire.)

Paul then became more and more interested in programming for microcomputers. Although eventually he would write a little science fiction software himself, he was mostly interested in building tools for computer owners- word processing programs and graphics programs that people could use to make their own discoveries. Tools of this nature help people win their independence and offer a very attractive kind of profession to someone like Paul, for whom making his own discoveries has been one of the most dominant themes of his life and work.

And so, after the HP calculator, Paul bought himself one of the early Apples, which he connected to his generator. Having low serial numbers is quite a status symbol among Apple fans, and Paul always points out that his Apple II was number sixteen. One of the things he thought about in his mountaintop retreat was how to create programs that were compact enough to fit into the very limited memory space of these early machines. It was the perfect kind of intellectual puzzle for him: After a life of drifting between art, technology, and vagabondage, he had finally found a pursuit so absorbing that he could pass entire nights solving a programming problem without noticing that sunset had turned to dawn. He sent more than thirty cassette-based programs to Apple, which bought most of them-for anything from $100 to $500 each.

But few of the programs Apple purchased were ever distributed. Of the few that were published, one of them, strangely enough, had initially been rejected by Apple. It was a simple music program- a tone generator. It was finally printed and attributed to Paul, whose name was nevertheless misspelled in Apple's famous "Red Book"- their first, terribly written, technical reference manual. (Software publishing was a lot looser back then; nowadays, a mistake like that would lead to a lawsuit.) Lutus then sold some programs to other companies, but he never made more than a few hundred dollars per program until the spring of 1978, when he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to work on another Space Shuttle job. He brought with him a cassette that would enable the Apple to understand a few spoken commands. He asked Apple for a thousand dollars up front. Apple offered him one of their new disk drives in return for the program.

When he got back to Oregon, late in the spring of '78, Paul turned out a variety of small programs for different manufacturers, and he thought he would attempt a more ambitious program- a word processor. He had been trying to write an article about Albert Einstein and resented all the time he lost retyping drafts. What he needed was a computerized writing tool- a program that would enable his Apple to do what fancier word processors on bigger computers could do. By the end of the summer, he had a crude working version of Apple Writer. He didn't know it at the time, but this was the first version of the program that would make him a millionaire.

Lutus took this version of Apple Writer down to Apple and demanded a flat fee of $7,500- far and away the most money a programmer had ever asked for thus far. Having sold only about 5,000 of the new Apple IIs by the fall of 1978, Apple was still a small enough company to consider $7,500 to be an issue for serious deliberation. The Apple people finally agreed, but they kept asking him to make changes, additions, and fixes on the program. After a while, he decided that he had no obligation to continue fixing the program until he ended up upgrading it to a new version (something every programmer has a right to charge for) for free. He then began to conceive of new features for a completely revamped word processor, and he started writing the program that eventually became Apple Writer II.

By 1979, Lutus programs were selling for between $5,000 and $10,000 apiece. He was now earning more money in a single month than he had made in all of his vagabond years combined. Over a year had passed since he had sold the first version of Apple Writer. At about this time he had completed another word processing program that he claimed was a radically new product. Because Apple still paid flat fees instead of the royalty arrangement Lutus now wanted, he began to look around for a publisher. Having once met Peter Jennings of Personal Software, publishers of VisiCalc, Paul wrote him a letter and proposed that Personal Software publish the new Lutus word-processing program under the name LexiCalc. Dan Fylstra, whom Lutus had not known previously, immediately took over and asked Paul to "refrain from serious negotiations with anyone else" during Personal Software's forty-five-day evaluation period.

Lutus was to receive $1,500 for the waiting period, during which, according to Lutus, Fylstra asked for various modifications in the program. He began to sense that he was creating a whole new version before he even had a contract. Although he swears that he never initiated negotiations during the option period, Paul was contacted by Apple, which told him they had heard about his program via a friend inside Personal Software. The software people at Apple, who were not willing at first to meet Paul's demand for a royalty arrangement rather than a flat fee, were nonetheless eager to see his program. Somehow, word of this traveled back to Fylstra, who immediately launched into an acrimonious dispute with Lutus over the phone and via letter.

Lutus eventually sold his program to Apple, but this time he received an advance against royalties instead of a fee. Since Apple was selling considerably more than a few thousand machines by this time, Lutus started receiving royalties that soon amounted to more than $5,000 a day. Whereas Apple Writer had been only a modest success, Apple Writer II remained the best-selling word processor for the Apple for five years; his 25 percent royalty on this one program made Paul a millionaire.

The first wave of successful Apple programmers made more money in a few years than almost any mainframe or minicomputer programmer normally makes in a lifetime. For example, Paul Lutus earned more than a million dollars a year during the 1980-83 boomtime, and the word-processing program he created with his generator-powered Apple earned him nearly 3 million dollars in royalties in a single year.

Before long he had enough money to indulge his long-time dream of flying his own plane. He even moved out of his old cabin at Eight Dollar Mountain and donated it, along with his first airplane and thousands of dollars, to The Nature Conservancy, a wilderness preservation group. He became the sole source of financial support for Planned Parenthood in southern Oregon. (Because, he claims, his own childhood was so miserable.) After building a series of progressively larger cabins he finally moved to a real house- one that he didn't even pack in and assemble himself. He has an airstrip now, as well as two airplanes. He writes articles, continues to support charitable ventures, flies around making speeches to school children, publishes slim volumes of poetry, and is still one of the best programmers in the business.

Paul's current house- the one he invited me to recently- is a rambling, white stucco and terra cotta tile affair in the Spanish style, with a central courtyard and a thick, ornately carved front door. If you can envision a slightly scaled-down version of President Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, and put it in rolling hills surrounded by Douglas firs instead of on a cliff that overlooks the Pacific, surrounded by palm trees, you get the picture. The house, which was originally built by a survivalist, even had a moat around it when Paul first moved in, but he filled it in and planted a garden.

If the original cabin on Eight Dollar Mountain was the epitome of spartan, his latest place could easily be described as luxurious. There are massive rock fireplaces and high ceilings; he has electricity now, and a state-of-the-art stereo with speakers in every room. Not exactly the kind of hermit he once was, he now entertains an occasional friend. He even has girlfriends but retains a passionate distaste for the institution of marriage. He still makes his own music- I saw a recorder, a lute, a guitar, and a piano at his house- and one night during my stay he and a girlfriend treated me to a flute duet for several hours. When he needs more intensive solitude, he takes off in one of his planes.

I spent a morning flying around southern Oregon in his Super Cub with him. While he practiced "touch and gos" on isolated mesa tops and tiny airstrips, we talked about his future in the software industry. Or at least, I tried to talk to him about it. Lutus, like many programmers, avoids thinking about long-term or large-scale strategies for securing his position in the industry. Job security was never his goal in the first place. The computer is a device with which he and many programmers have an intensely personal relationship- a relationship that exists independent of their relationship with the software marketplace. They program because programming is in itself pure entertainment for them, and because real life seldom produces the kind of immediate feedback and instant rewards that programming can provide.

Paul needs that kind of relationship, but only as long as it continues to be a liberating rather than a confining force. For that reason, he absolutely rejects any attempt to stereotype or pigeonhole him. That's why he devotes so much of his time proving both to himself and to others that he is much more than a rich programmer. He is an aviator, a musician, a political activist, an outdoorsman, a poet. He is utterly himself- irascible, brilliant, iconoclastic- and will not be trapped by the expectations or preconceptions that others may have about him.

One way people liberate themselves from others' expectations is by acting in as idiosyncratic a manner as possible. Once people define that behavior, however, even idiosyncracy becomes a cage. The existence of rich programmers like Paul proved that unorthodox people who relate to machines better than they get along with people still can be valued by our society. But Paul understands that the myth of the programmer can estrange him from the actual role of programmer. As he says, he is fortunate. His savings permit him to do whatever he likes. He doesn't have to program for the marketplace, and that feels good because he's not at all sure that he wants to create for the market, at least not the market that exists now.

Paul has his own inner vision of what the future holds for the software industry, and he'd just as soon program for that market. If the world catches up to him, that's fine with Paul. But if it doesn't, that's okay too. He never specified what the software market of the future looked like in his vision, and in our conversations he didn't talk about one specific kind of software he planned to produce. We'll all just have to wait to see what he comes up with next, I guess.

"The rich are different from other people," Scott Fitzgerald reputedly said. "Yes," Ernest Hemingway allegedly replied, "they have more money." By the same token, programmers are different from other people because they know how to write computer programs. For many people, the programming skill is as difficult to grasp and as distant from their daily experience as is fluency in Swahili or the ability to assemble a pocket watch.

But this difference between programmers and nonprogrammers will probably become very blurred in the near future because programming will no longer require facility with the arcane amalgamation of abstruse mathematical calculations and painstaking logical puzzle solving. One key that will help to open the door to this coming populist revolution in software design is an exciting new kind of program, known in the trade as a program generator, that is already on the market. A lot of people in the software industry see these innovative products as the first step toward the creation of a programming-literate population that will number in the millions instead of in the thousands.

Program generators are partially tool-like, partially game-like, and partially lesson-like. A program generator brings the nonprogramming computer user to an intermediate stage between using a computer program that was written by someone else and generating a computer program of one's own. This stage is reached not through any formal education in programming principles but by means of a kind of transitional metaphor between the thinking involved in playing a video game and the kind of thinking needed to create a program.

One of the best and most successful program generators was written by a friend of mine named Bill Budge, who has been a legend among Apple programmers since the earliest days of commercial microcomputer software. He is also probably the quintessential representative of the new breed of programmers who see themselves as teachers and artists as well as technicians and craftsmen. He is, in fact, a programmer raised to the level of a pop star. Bill's current publisher, Electronic Arts, is even promoting him in much the same way that record companies promote their artists- with personal appearances, posters, even full-page magazine ads that display photo portraits of the programmer as culture hero. In one of the first magazine ads on Bill, the copy next to his photograph claimed: "In a bedroom in a frame house in Berkeley, California, a guy who looks like he might have stepped out of a TV series family is playing with some ideas that could change your life."

Bill does indeed look like he stepped out of "Leave It to Beaver." He could be one of Wally's friends, the kind of gangly but good-looking guy who is usually depicted with a basketball under one arm. He could even pass for one of the non-blond minority in a surf movie. Although there is a certain truth to the "nerd mythology" that microcomputer technology was first invented by a bunch of MIT types with thick glasses, bad complexions, and unsuccessful social lives, Bill Budge is evidence of the fact that an obsessive love of computer programming can strike even the tall, dark, and handsome boy next door. (Softalk, the magazine for Apple owners, once published a fan letter that described Bill as a "hunk." The letter was later revealed to be a hoax- composed by Corey Kosack, a sixteen-year-old programmer who happened to be doing some work for Brøderbund at the time.) As for the frame house mentioned in the Electronic Arts ad, it too exists, although it is considerably more than the humble student dwelling implied by the ad, and it is actually located in Piedmont, an affluent neighborhood a few miles away from Berkeley.

It is also true that Bill is playing with ideas that are likely to change your life. His tools will put the power of computer programming into the hands of ordinary people. And he has yet to come up against the limits of his abilities. He's the kind of synthesizer and innovator who takes ideas from dozens of places and weaves them into brilliant and startlingly unexpected patterns. His past programming achievements, and the way he always seems to have his antennae out for sources of new ideas of every kind- from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to theories of dance notation- lead me to expect something even more spectacular from him in the near future. Certainly, Bill will be among those people who are going to make the next decade of the microcomputer software industry even more interesting than the past decade.

Bill was a famous programmer (in programming circles) before I ever owned an Apple- in fact, before I had even seen an Apple computer. I first learned of his name when on my journey west to visit my brother Gary- the trip that turned into a career- I stopped in Chicago to visit my aunt, who had an Apple II. Several diskettes containing demonstration programs came with the machine. One of the diskettes contained a game called Penny Arcade, which had a beautiful graphic opening sequence that struck me as a particularly provocative example of what one could do with an Apple. Penny Arcade had been written by Bill Budge.

The first time I met Bill was at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1981. Since then we've spent a lot of time together, talking about the art and science and business of developing software, and on several occasions we have even talked about becoming business partners. I can remember one particular occasion when a conversation between Bill, me, and some other programmers actually led to Bill's program generator and masterwork- The Pinball Construction Set, about which more will be said later on.

Like most great programmers, Bill got into software at a young age. He was in exactly the right place at the right time to join the first generation of programmer-entrepreneurs. But unlike today's youngest programmers, who have learned to program with the more advanced computer languages that have come along in the past few years, Bill started out the hard way. At sixteen, as a precocious student at Piedmont High, Bill was introduced to computers by his math teacher, who put a few exceptional students together with an old IBM 1401. The 1401 didn't have an easy-to-learn high-level language like BASIC, or even an older, harder-to-learn language like FORTRAN. Bill had to create his first programs in a language called 1401 Autocoder, a very primitive assembly language.

An assembly language consists of three-letter commands (like JMP or LDA) that tell the computer to perform very simple one-step-at-a-time operations. For example, where a command in a high-level language like BASIC might be able to say PRINT X + Y - Z, an assembly language program might require a dozen instructions to perform the same task. Assembly language instructions, however, can be converted into machine language-the code of zeroes and ones that instruct the computer to produce the on-and-off electronic impulses that constitute a computer program in operation- by means of a special translation program or assembler.

Assembly language is a very tedious and complex language to create programs with, since the computer must be instructed in exhaustive and unambiguous detail about where to find the data to operate on, how to operate upon them, and what to do with them once they are processed. And if any single symbol is out of place, the whole program will fail. Because the assembly language instructions correspond so closely to the electronic activities of the computer hardware, assembly language is called a low-level language, or one that, as some say, is "close to the machine."

Most programmers prefer to write their programs in a high-level language because it is more like English and is easier to use than the complex assembly language. When one learns enough BASIC to write programs on a computer, the BASIC interpreter built into the BASIC language program works as the program runs to convert each line of the program's instructions into machine language commands. However, BASIC programs are never as compact or as fast-running as code written by a programmer directly in assembly language.

The speed of execution of a program is particularly important in computer games, because people don't want to wait for three minutes to see if their shot hit or missed the alien invader. Graphics and animated figures are possible only when a program runs quickly. For these reasons, then, an assembly language expert like Bill Budge had an edge over other programmers when computer games came along.

But long before that time, when Bill was still learning assembly language programming in high school, he had the first "religious experience" of his programming career. His math teacher gave him a program for multiplying two numbers by repeatedly adding one of the numbers to itself and then stopping when the number of repetitions equaled the second number. This kind of instruction that starts the computer performing the same set of subinstructions over and over until a certain goal is accomplished is a basic programming technique known as "looping."

"I got real excited," Bill told me when he recalled that first insight, "because the whole idea of programming became clear to me when I saw what a loop could do. It was an incredibly exciting moment. I wrote down the lines of the program, then checked them to make sure they were right. All of a sudden, I saw what a loop really was for, why there could be such a thing as a loop, and how you could do a lot of things with the right kind of repeated sequences of simple instructions. By the end of high school I thought I was the world's greatest programmer."

But although he had far surpassed his teacher's ability to show him anything new, he was still a novice, and there was no hacker subculture of other high school-age software prodigies, such as there is today, to initiate him into the deeper mysteries of programming. He was virtually on his own, and when he was graduated from high school, he realized that spending so much time with his programs had locked him away from his peers. He went to the University of California at Santa Cruz as an English major, determined to expand his horizons beyond his obsession with programming virtuosity.

"I was fooling myself into believing that I didn't want to program computers as much as I did," he remembers. "I didn't want to be a nerd. I wanted a social life. I wanted to date. So I started acting cool. I wanted to be a writer. But I didn't want to write. Then it became clear that although writing was a struggle for me, programming was still a pleasure. So I transferred to the computer science program in Berkeley and concentrated on learning as much about computers and programming as I could."

The year that Bill went to Berkeley was 1975- a signal year in the history of microcomputers, since that was when the introduction of the MITS Altair brought programming out of the world of expensive mainframe computers and within the reach of hobbyists. Of course, Bill didn't have to build a microcomputer from a kit to program. He could program on the finest equipment available at Berkeley. He wasn't interested in kid stuff like microcomputers, and video games were still in their infancy then.

Instead, Bill wanted to create systems software and write compilers. It was the deep stuff of computerdom, and by now Bill was more interested in his career goals in the mainframe world than he was in the kind of intense emotional involvement that had gripped him at sixteen, when he first discovered the loop. Then, in 1977, as a graduate student in computer science at Berkeley, he had his second "religious experience" when his friend and fellow graduate student Andy Hertzfeld showed him one of the earliest Apple computers. Bill still gets a wide-eyed look when he talks about it: "What I saw was the graphical bandwidth that was possible with the Apple. Like the loop, it opened a door onto a huge universe of possibilities."

"Bandwidth" is simply jargon for a measure of the amount of information than can be transferred between the computer and the display screen, and between the display screen and the eye of the person looking at it. Think of bandwidth as the width of a pipeline of information. Morse code can transmit only one bit of information at a time, so it has a narrow bandwidth. A television image can convey millions of bits of information in less than a second, so it has a very high bandwidth.

When it comes to computers, bandwidth is a very important measure of how interactive the device is and thus is a direct indicator of how interesting the programmer or user will find the device. We humans are very information-hungry creatures, particularly when it comes to visual information. It takes a lot of bandwidth to attract and hold our interest. Think about the first, simplest Pong games, with the ball bouncing back and forth, with some primitive sound effects. Then think about something like Pac-Man, with animated characters in color and high resolution, moving fairly quickly in a rich visual environment. Finally, think about a television show and a wide-screen movie image. It's pretty obvious that one's interest increases as bandwidth increases.

Bill got hooked on the Apple's bandwidth because it offered him something the mainframe computers he was using at Berkeley could not. Even though mainframes had vastly greater processing power than the first Apples, the way they communicated with the programmers was through a very low bandwidth device known as a terminal. Terminals allowed many people to share the services of a central computer- an arrangement known as time-sharing that was a revolutionary breakthrough in the early 1960s but that was old hat in computer terms by the late 1970s.

By entering commands on keyboards and receiving print-outs through a typewriter-like device, programmers on time-sharing systems could run their programs and see the results. But they couldn't interact with the computer at the same communication rate that they used when they interacted with people. It's very much like trying to carry on a conversation by means of a teletype machine. And so, since most programmers want to have a conversation with a computer, their hunger for high bandwidth is understandable.

The nice thing about the Apple that Bill saw that day in 1977 was not that it had huge computing power, but that the power it did have was immediately available to the person using the computer, and the information that mediated the human-computer interaction was visible through the graphic display on the screen. That's what a personal computer is- a computer that is interactive enough, visible enough, and fast enough for one person to use. Bill was therefore so captivated by the Apple's interactive capability that he immediately sat down and wrote a Pong-like game for the Apple- his first microcomputer program.

To the faculty and the other students at Berkeley's computer science department, the Apple was an amusing toy, but certainly nothing for a sophisticated programmer to get serious about. Bill's friend Andy Hertzfeld tried to declare personal computers as his academic subinterest, and everybody gave him a hard time about it. At the time, computer scientists, programmers, and the computer industry all saw them as smaller and far less powerful computers with bad or nonexistent software. To some extent, those were valid criticisms- but computer people, of all the different technological specialists, ought to have known how quickly crude prototypes can evolve into sophisticated devices.

Not too long after he left graduate school, Hertzfeld joined the Apple Corporation at a very early stage in that institution's history and later became one of the most influential software people on the Macintosh team. Bill himself also worked for Apple at one time, but before that, while still a graduate student, he spent months just trying to buy an Apple at a discount. Computer science graduate students aren't wealthy people, unless they moonlight as professional programmers. By Christmas of 1978, in his second year of graduate school, he finally went as deeply into debt as he had ever been in his life and bought his own Apple at full price.

"I remember putting the whole machine back in the boxes every night after I used it, just to keep it as new as possible," he told me recently. It was an ironic reminiscence, considering the tens of thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment and audio gear that surrounds him in his workplace-playroom now. All of the models of Apple computer are scattered around the room, although the one that appears to be used the most is the 1978 Apple II, now battered-looking and only partially operational. And there's what appears to be a coin-operated video game machine in the corner. It turns out to be a customized programming device sent him by Williams Electronics, the coin-op giant, who evidently hoped that Bill could be persuaded to write some coin-op games for them. (He couldn't.)

BASIC was the only high-level language that was available when Bill got his first Apple, but he quickly realized that he couldn't write anything interesting in BASIC. So he started writing in assembly language. With the speed and precision afforded by assembly language, Bill was able to approach a new level of high-resolution graphics- indeed, his programs became known for their "high-res" effects.

"In early 1979," Bill remembers, "everyone was discovering the tricks of microcomputer programming through trial and error. I'd turn on my machine and start fooling around with different locations in the memory, trying to figure out how to put dots on the screen and move them around fast."

Then, referring to Bob Bishop, the first person to sell a lot of Apple software and actually make a little money for his efforts, Bill said: "Nobody but Bob Bishop had ever written any high-res stuff. He was everyone's hero." "Everyone" consisted of the hard-core fanatic Apple programmers of that era. "When I first got my Apple, the first thing I did was to get a disk that had some Bob Bishop games.

"One of the games on the disk was called Bomber, a really famous game because it was in hi-res and had so much detailed animation. These tanks would go across the screen and you'd fly a bomber. When you released a bomb, it would make a parabolic curve as it fell, and if you made a hit the tank would blow up and pieces would fly up in the air then settle to the ground. It was a whole new level of realism from bouncing square Pong balls around a screen.

"I wanted to make cartoons and games. That's what I thought was really neat about these new little computers that you could plug into your television. I thought that computers by themselves were a lot less interesting than computers combined with other things- like entertainment or education or art. Despite my specialization in microcomputer programming, I've always been interested in a lot of different subjects. The Apple looked like a great vehicle for turning my programming abilities to a much wider range of applications than just science or business programming."

And after a while, it also looked like a fun new way to pick up a few bucks on the side. At that time, Bill was making about $4,000 a year as a teaching assistant- a stipend that paid for his tuition, but not much else. In the tradition of grad students everywhere, he was just getting by. Still, the prospect of making some money from his microcomputer dabbling wasn't his major motivation. At first, the primary motivation was the raw challenge of exploring and conquering the unknown. There were entire libraries full of programs for the bigger, older, more serious computers, but virtually nothing available for the Apple. Bill simply enjoyed poking around in the machine's memory and using assembly language programming to come up with new ways to move graphic objects around the screen.

"When I saw what you could do with a personal computer like the Apple, I was thrilled by the prospect of jamming on the computer, the way a jazz musician might jam on a piano. I've always been the kind of person who gets something kind of clunky working quickly, then spends more time fixing it and tuning it- as opposed to the type of person who breaks down the process into logical steps, then gets everything arranged mentally before trying to make it work. There are a lot of advantages to the more analytic mode, but I found that my seat-of-the-pants style was powerful and fast. Mostly, I found that it was the way I like to do things."

Then one day, later in 1979, Bill drove across the bridge from Berkeley and down the peninsula to Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters were located. He wrote four different Pong-like games, put them together with an intriguing little graphic leader, copied the program onto a diskette, and took the diskette with him. The people at Apple looked at his software, liked it, and told him they wanted to add it to the demonstration disk they included with every machine they sold. Nowadays, such offers are known as "bundling deals," and they can make programmers rich. Apple offered Bill a printer worth about $750 as payment for Penny Arcade, and he was happy to get it.

The main thing about programming microcomputers is that it's fun to do, but it's always nice to get paid as well. That's the way all great programmers start out- intrigued by the idea that they could earn money from such an enjoyable hobby. Six or seven years ago, however, it never really occurred to any of us just how lucrative programming could be. We learned eventually that we not only could make a living at it, but a very decent living at that.

At about the same time that I was beginning to consider having my first game published, Bill began to think about making his sideline into a full-time career: "Although it took me a month to write the first programs I sold, I knew that when I got up to speed I could create twenty of them a year. And that meant I could make around $20,000, which was a very decent wage compared to what I could have pulled down in a computer science department at a university or as a programmer for a mainframe computer company. So I started grinding out games."

Despite his "factory approach" to software production, the games that Bill started producing weren't bad. In fact, they were visibly superior to almost every other product on the market. They were just as visually intriguing as his first. He kept Apple enthusiasts supplied with new and exciting software, and these early games brought Bill up to speed on assembly language and game-programming techniques.

"My parents went to Hawaii that summer, and I had the whole house to myself," Bill recalls. "I wrote four programs in three months and took them to Hayden Publishing. They liked the programs, but they couldn't decide on the provisions of the contract quickly enough for me. Three months later I took the programs to a company called Softape. I wanted to sell them outright for $2,000 each. They liked them but they didn't want to buy them. Then I met a fellow who wanted to sell them for me on a royalty basis. He was a sort of frontier ethic, software gold-rush kind of entrepreneur. He had what was then a new idea- he gave demonstration copies of my programs to the managers of computer stores. In Christmas of 1979, a year after I bought my Apple, he brought me my first royalty check- $6,000 for my first month!"

That was more money than Bill made in two semesters as a graduate teaching assistant. If it kept coming in at that pace, it would be more than the head of the computer science department earned. It didn't go quite that fast, however. The first year that he devoted himself to turning out programs for a living, 1980, Bill made around $10,000 rather than the $20,000 he had hoped for at first. But the year after that, 1981, he made $80,000. And he was now making a name for himself in a field that was just beginning to blossom in the marketplace. Computers were selling faster and faster. And as the rate of computer sales increased, so did the sales of good programs. By 1982-83, Bill was making in the neighborhood of half a million dollars a year.

For a while, in 1980, Bill worked at Apple, along with his old friend Andy Hertzfeld. He became friendly with people like Wozniak and Jobs, who had been his heroes. The fun factor had jumped an order of magnitude, and the challenges were more intriguing every day. And financially, he was rocketing past what his computer science colleagues were making in academia and the mainframe world. But to Bill, programming offered more than just money and even more than sheer enjoyment. It also offered what he wanted most of all: glory.

He had seen what Jobs and Wozniak had done. He had seen what programmers like Bob Bishop and Paul Lutus had done. Like any other artist, he wanted a broader canvas, a more ambitious scope for his vision. He wanted to create the state-of-the-art program in the world of Apple software. He then stopped writing all of the short, sweet, throwaway games that had been his bread and butter, and he took a risk. And this was before he started making the big money. He spent several months working on one masterpiece, a best-selling program that lives in software legend under the name Raster Blaster.

As usual, Bill's idea was to take one of his personal interests and combine it with his programming skills to create something new. In this case, it was his interest in playing pinball. To most people, the old-fashioned electromechanical pinball games are the very antithesis of computer games. Pinball is very mechanical and physical, with steel balls and bumpers and lights and buzzers. Computer games are electronic and more perceptual than physical. Instead of steel balls, computers manipulate dots of light. But Bill realized that the ball, the flippers, the effect of gravity, the "bounciness" of the bumpers- all the essential elements of pinball- were, in principle, capable of being simulated by a computer program.

"I wanted to make one great video game," Bill told me when I asked if he consciously set out to create a best-seller. "The idea of creating a 'hit' in the commercial sense really wasn't part of the atmosphere back then. I realized that video games were getting kind of boring, from the point of view of the programmer, if not yet the consumer. I could crank them out and make a good living, but they weren't very satisfying. I started working on Raster Blaster when I was at Apple, in late 1980, and I finished it in March '81. When I realized how good it was, in comparison to everything else that was out there, I started thinking about marketing it myself."

Bill is actually a pretty modest guy, especially in comparison with some of the unabashed egotists that seem to abound in the software game. When he says that he realized how good it was, he is simply stating a fact. Everyone in the software industry realized that it was a significant programming breakthrough. Besides the idea of designing a computer version of a pinball game, Bill's creation included a lot of important innovations that inspired other programmers to try to top Raster Blaster. The game exhibited a graphic complexity that had not been seen before on a microcomputer (although arcade-type video games, with their dedicated graphics hardware had attracted attention and money with dazzling graphics).

By April 1981, the software market was maturing rapidly. Bill had had a series of bad experiences with existing software publishers and wasn't happy with the contracts he was offered by various distributors and publishers for his products, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He started a software publishing company- BudgeCo, it was called- to market ,i>Raster Blaster, and his sister and brother-in-law set up an operation in their house, not too many blocks away from Bill's place in Piedmont. Bill happened to be correct in his initial estimation of Raster Blaster's impact. It was the third program to (temporarily) dislodge VisiCalc- at that time, the all-time best-seller in microcomputer software history- from Softalk's list of the top thirty Apple programs. (The other programs to temporarily outsell VisiCalc on the Apple were Tony Suzuki's Alien Rain, a Broderbund publication, and Nasir Gebelli's Space Eggs, a Sirius product.)

By the time Raster Blaster hit, Bill was more than a legend- he was a significant industry in himself. There were many more people buying programs, the price of the programs was going up, and so was the programmer's share. But running a publishing company turned out to be a drain on his creative time, so BudgeCo eventually faded away. He started out publishing the Apple version of his next program but soon grew tired of worrying about marketing it and began shopping around for another publisher- one that would take him on his own terms.

That next program was, like Raster Blaster, a masterpiece. It was called Pinball Construction Set, a program generator in the guise of a game, and it turned out to be another watershed in the programming art, as well as another smash hit in the marketplace.

The origins of Pinball Construction Set are particularly interesting to me, because they involved a challenge that two of our programmers and I set for Bill one summer afternoon, and because they involved as well some obscure but important breakthroughs provided by others in various kinds of computer research. The use of program generators was not unique. But Bill's program generator also included graphic symbols known as icons, and graphic editors that enabled users to create new programs by manipulating those icons- a new kind of human-computer interaction that had been pioneered at high-technology thinktanks like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and was included in Apple's new (and then-unreleased) machine, the Macintosh.

The general idea of graphics construction sets first emerged more than two decades ago with Ivan Sutherland's brilliant Sketchpad program. When Sutherland was a graduate student at MIT in the early 1960s, the standard way of seeing computer output was on teletype machines. Sketchpad was a program that enabled programmers to actually control the computer's operations by means of graphic symbols that were displayed on a television-like screen. By using a lightpen, the user/programmer could actually create different shapes on the screen, then manipulate the shapes by means of the computer's processor and store the end product in the computer's memory.

Innovations happen so fast in the software world and become standards so rapidly that the idea of creating graphics on a screen and storing them in a computer seems old hat to even the youngest computer user today. But in 1961, when Sketchpad was written, this idea was truly revolutionary. The idea of designing a graphic world inside a computer- the concept known as simulation- was another such breakthrough that is now commonplace. Several years after Sketchpad, a computer scientist and educational expert at M.I.T. by the name of Seymour Papert was experimenting with graphics and simulations and a new computer language called LOGO.

One of the key concepts in LOGO was that programming a computer doesn't have to be as esoteric and difficult as the first computers and the old-time programmers made it seem. The idea behind the LOGO project was to develop a new computer language- one that even children could quickly learn to use. LOGO starts novices on the path to programming not by having them type in unfamiliar commands but by introducing them to a means of controlling graphic displays known as turtle graphics. The turtle was originally a small turtle-shaped robot that crawled around the floor, drawing patterns on pieces of paper, but eventually it became an abstract turtle- a symbol on a computer screen.

Between the older ideas like Sutherland's Sketchpad and Papert's LOGO and the newer ideas like icons and program generators, the fundamental concepts of software construction sets had already existed for years when Bill Budge came along with Pinball Construction Set.

But although Bill's program generator was one of the best in the microcomputer world, it was not the first to be developed for that market. The previous summer, Broderbund had published a game called The Arcade Machine that enabled the user to create a variety of "shoot-'em-up games," admittedly an easier and less general task than constructing a variety of pinball games. And there was a famous piece of software called The Last One that was heavily advertised in 1981 as a generator so powerful that it would be the last program you would ever need to buy. Even before that, another, very sophisticated game generator was designed in 1978 by a game programmer at Atari named Warren Robinett. Robinett decided to do an animated version of the Adventure games that had originated on the mainframe computers at MIT and Stanford and had migrated, via the efforts of people like Scott Adams and me, to the microcomputer world. The original Adventure was strictly a text game with no graphics. In order to produce a version that had animated graphics, Robinett created a simple graphics editor that would allow the player to move through Adventure's various caves while dragging various graphical objects along on the journey.

When Robinett left Atari, he teamed up with a couple of education experts to create a microworld simulation that took his simple graphics editor into the realm of true program generators. The much-acclaimed program Rocky's Boots, written by Robinett and Leslie Grimm, published after Pinball Construction Set, is a game that allows children to build various "machines" by putting together various graphical "parts." One very interesting aspect of this game is the fact that the machine parts are very advanced in that they are actually Boolean logic symbols, while the machines themselves are Boolean logic circuits. The child who uses the game ends up knowing how to design Boolean logic circuits- a skill that was formerly reserved for college mathematics majors or computer science students in graduate school!

With Pinball Construction Set, an even more advanced program generator entered the marketplace. In fact, when it was first released, it had an enormous impact on those who used it because it seemed to be more than just a great game. It looked and felt like a whole new way of using computers. I can remember the first time Bill talked about the idea of programming such a game. The topic came up on the day he, Nasir Gebelli, another set of programmer-entrepreneurs, and I met in Sacramento to talk about the prospect of merging our companies.

It was hardly the kind of giant merger discussion you read about in regard to the old-fashioned computer business, where phalanxes of three-piece-suited attorneys engage in marathon negotiations over hardwood conference tables. As I remember, we spent some time talking in a pizza joint in Sacramento. Nothing came of the merger discussion, but the same people ended up in a conversation at a barbecue I held at my house in San Rafael shortly thereafter. Chris Jochumson, who had created Brøderbund's The Arcade Machine, was there, and so was David Snider. David had written a best-selling pinball game that Brøderbund sold under the name David's Midnight Magic. The game was very complex, but it did not give users an option to create their own game from the elements provided.

David was of the opinion that a generalized pinball microcomputer construction set, one that could simulate a wide variety of pinball layouts, couldn't be created. What with the effect of simulated gravity, and the angles the ball would bounce at, and the effect of bumpers and flippers and obstacles, David felt that there were too many factors involved to generalize. But although David thought that a general pinball game would be too hard to write, Bill was convinced that it could be done. It took him longer than he thought it would take, but he was certainly right.

Like Raster Blaster, Pinball Construction Set simulates all the elements of an old-fashioned pinball game. But the new program allows players to make their own modifications on the basic game, and to create their own games. Previously, one had to dig into the program and modify the code to change a computer game. Bill made the modification process accessible to the nonprogrammer by providing a set of software "tools" that are displayed as icons- small symbolic graphics- on the screen. At the time Bill was developing this program, Andy Hertzfeld and other friends of Bill's at Apple were incorporating icons into the Macintosh.

If players want to pick up a bumper or a flipper, they use the joystick to move an icon that looks like a hand and touch it to the bumper or flipper. That icon is actually a tool that can pick up the bumper or flipper icon and places it where the game creator wants it to be. When the hand icon touches the flipper icon and moves it into position, part of the program's code tells the computer's memory that the flipper icon has been moved. By selecting different parts and putting them together in various combinations, the user/player/game builder can make an almost infinite variety of pinball games. Bill included another tool that allows users to magnify an area of the screen so that they can work on fine details.

Naturally, the program was another smash hit. It was also a sign of things to come. People who were knowledgeable about the evolution of software design began to point out that this program actually allowed the user to directly manipulate the computer's operations without using a programming language: When the little hand icon drags the little flipper icon over to a representation of a pinball game board, the same thing is accomplished as would normally take a programmer pages of programming code to do.

The idea of modifying a basic template is much more palatable to most people than the prospect of designing a game (or any other complex creation) from scratch. Software construction sets can give novice computer users their first taste of the kind of power exercised by people like Bill Budge. Instead of seeing computer programming as mysterious and difficult, people are beginning to perceive it as a skill that can be easily mastered and that gives them more control over what they can do with their computer.

Program generators like Pinball Construction Set have already spawned a whole new category of stand-alone programs and tools that are included within other programs. Brøderbund includes generator tools in several of its programs. Lode Runner and Spare Change, for example, are multi-level games that allow users to modify the program, thus creating their own variations once they have mastered the basic game. Other publishers are marketing programming generators in one guise or another- for learning how to read, write, and compose music, for steering a simulated Space Shuttle, and even for learning biochemistry and immunology.

As for Bill's decision regarding a publisher for Pinball Construction Set, certainly I strongly pitched the advantages of signing up with Brøderbund. Any software publisher in his right mind would give a great deal to have a Bill Budge on board. But at the same time, a group of ex-Apple people, headed by Trip Hawkins and backed by Steve Wozniak, had decided to form a new kind of software publishing company that would be modeled on record companies, and they strongly urged Bill to join them. In effect, they told him that the success of their venture, Electronic Arts, depended on his participation. They also offered him a substantial share of the company's ownership.

So Electronic Arts published Pinball Construction Set and started sending Bill out on tours to computer stores, printed up Bill Budge posters, and promoted him as the first software artist to become a pop star. It couldn't happen to a more deserving person, as far as I'm concerned. As far as Bill is concerned, his apprenticeship was shoot-'em-up games, he became a journeyman with Raster Blaster, and he just started his career as a master software craftsman with Pinball Construction Set. He and a lot of others, including me, think that the world has only begun to see the effects of his unique talents.

Bill's ambition for the near future is to create more tools that will enable other kinds of artists to do things in their own fields that they weren't able to do before Bill Budge made it possible. "I want to help create the language for a universal medium of knowledge. I want a filmmaker like George Lucas to use my tool to create films he couldn't have created without the program I plan to make for filmmakers. I want choreographers and playwrights and water polo players to use my tools."

What Bill is talking about, and what program generators demonstrate, is that programming is a metaphor for controlling information. The old metaphor involved complex codes, punch cards, and giant machines, and a newer metaphor involved strange new languages and smaller machines. The program generator is a different metaphor altogether, and Bill thinks that there are still newer and more powerful metaphors to be found beyond the program generator.

"Right now, I think theater is the best metaphor for programming," Bill claims. "That's what I'm trying to make concrete. Alan Kay, who is one of the original visionaries of personal computer software, says that programming is a process of choreographing multiple agents. I want to figure out a way for people to do that choreography by using skills they already possess."

I think Bill is trying to say that people understand theater far more easily than they understand mathematics. If programming arcana like procedure calls and data types, loops and stepped variables can be turned into analogies we already understand- like props and characters, scenes and sets- then the population of people who are able to understand how those elements are combined will be vastly expanded.

In the ancient days of computerdom, only the scientifically literate and the technologically obsessed were interested enough in programming to become good at it. Bill Budge is a significant member of a new generation of artists and craftsmen, thinkers and activists and dreamers- a generation that sees the advent of the computer as the opportunity to create a new level of human culture. I think something similar must have happened back when the new technology of the printing press created a large literate population and made it possible for artists to create sonnets, politicians to draft manifestoes, and scientists to write treatises.

I know a few young programmers, and they give me good reason to suspect that Bill Budge is just one of many software artists who will make themselves known in the next three, five, or ten years. But today's teenage programmers have at least one advantage over Bill: As a pioneer, he didn't have any role models himself, but the up-and-coming hackers of today and tomorrow have Bill Budge and his products to emulate.

John Draper, fanatic wizard in the programming language Forth, jackpot programmer-entrepreneur, and folk hero of those technological enthusiasts called phone phreaks, is known to most of the microcomputer world as "Cap'n Software." His involvement in the industry began in the myth-shrouded era of the homebrewers, but long before then, he and Wozniak were fellow technopranksters back when apples were still just small red fruit that grew on trees. He's cherished by many as a stubborn, independent, free spirit in a software market increasingly dominated by large teams of programmers. To others, however, "cherished" might not be the best word to describe their feelings about John Draper. Ask around the industry and you'll collect some strong and often less than favorable opinions when you mention his name.

Indeed, his reputation almost precedes him, for he is a man with a past- a past that involves one of the more notorious and romantic episodes from technological folklore of the 1970s.

This is one of the few profiles in this book that are not based on years of friendship or extensive personal interviews. Frankly, I'm a little wary of approaching John for a direct interview, especially after hearing what he did to a couple of journalists I know. There is apparently a kind of informal Draper initiation ritual that all interviewers must survive before they get anything out of him. One of the journalists who suffered through a Draper interview agreed to describe the legendary ceremony, with the understanding that I wouldn't use his name.

"Fifteen minutes after I met John Draper," my journalist friend told me, "he ordered me to assume an anatomically questionable position."

What this friend meant was that Draper asked him if he wanted to "help out with some stretching exercises." That in turn meant that my friend had to take off his own shirt and shoes and get down on his hands and knees on the floor of John's apartment. Then John got on my friend's back, threw a full nelson, and barked orders into his ears. Such was a typical Draper interview, but it turns out that the Draper treatment is a form of amateur chiropractic. He has a bad back, and he actually does go through various calisthenics and contortions every day.

But nobody had fully explained this to my friend: "By the time it sank in that somebody who I had been warned was rather eccentric was taking it upon himself to debug my spine, I was duckwalking around the room, carrying out odd instructions barked into my ear by this big sweaty guy with an itchy beard. I knew that programmers can be weird, but it had never come to this." My friend survived the initiation, conducted his interview, but canceled his plans for a second conversation.

Draper is intimidating enough without direct physical contact. I've seen him at Computer Faires and trade conventions over the years, and I can vouch for the fact that his appearance alone can unnerve the unprepared: A gray-flecked tangle of dark hair and beard frame his famous gap-toothed grin; ice-blue eyes focus an inch and a half into your forehead when he talks to you. If you remember the face of Blackbeard the pirate or Long John Silver, and if you can imagine one of those fellows wearing slightly skewed eye-glasses, then you'll be able to recognize John Draper.

Then there's the matter of John's personal communication style. Expansive gestures often accompany his words. He has been known to raise his voice, which is pitched at a particularly piercing frequency range. He doesn't lack for strong opinions. And if anybody within 200 yards lights a cigarette, cigar, or pipe, watch out. He's allergic to tobacco smoke and is not too shy to say something about it.

Draper is definitely a graduate of the "take it apart and see how it works" school of computer wizardry, rather than the rarified heights of MIT's or Stanford's computer science department. But programming was really his second career. The escapades that brought him notoriety, if not financial rewards, took place long before the Altair era and involved the global telecommunications network rather than anything as simple as a personal computer.

Before he became reknowned as "Cap'n Software," the programmer of the late 1970s who was involved in one of the major software deals in the history of the microcomputer software industry, Draper was known only as "Cap'n Crunch," techno-anarchist hero of an entire subsect of the technological underground: the phone phreaks. Although he had been a legend in phreak circles since the late 1960s, his saga as Cap'n Crunch wasn't told to a general audience until 1971, when a journalist named Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article for Esquire entitled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Rosenbaum described the antics of an electronic genius in California who performed strange and technically illegal pranks through which, by means of a device known as a "bluebox," he was able to gain access to the telephone system free of charge.

Years later, Draper still claims that his motives for his former activities were unjustly misunderstood. He's not an anarchist or a vandal, he has always maintained. He just likes to learn how complicated systems work and is driven to find out how to control the activities of these systems- whether they are electronic systems, software systems, or telephone systems. Unfortunately, in 1974, Federal judges didn't agree with John's interpretation of his motives, so Draper temporarily moved into Federal correctional facilities.

But long before that time, Cap'n Crunch was just one- albeit the most well known-of thousands of "phone phreaks" who for years conversed over their own clandestine communication system that just happened to make use of Ma Bell's own vast network. Their very existence stemmed from their urge to tinker, which was in turn stimulated by something as accessible, complex, mysterious, and vast as the telephone system. That they could even learn how that system worked came about as a result of their discovery of forbidden knowledge about a technical loophole in the telephone system's security. Nearly thirty years ago, AT&T made the long-term multibillion-dollar decision to base its long-distance switching system on a series of audible tones. These tones, which triggered various internal switching devices, were based on a series of specific frequencies. Unfortunately, an article in a technical journal divulged the frequencies of the control tones.

An unusual group of people, having read the article, began to take advantage of this technological vulnerability, apparently independently of one another- at first. A mutant variety of the kind of adolescent boy who is likely to fiddle with soldering irons and ham radio outfits, the first phone phreaks made clever use of tape recorders and electric organs to facilitate entry to the switching system. By knowing when and how to enter the right tone into their home telephones, these electronic trespassers were able to "phreak around" the network and to learn how it worked. Soon, those phreaks with electronics skills began building tone generators.

The person who is universally acknowledged to be the founding phreak, predating even Cap'n Crunch, was a blind young man with perfect pitch who whistled into the phone and thus gained access to virtually any telephone in the world, free of charge. Joe Engressia was his name. His dream in life was to work for Ma Bell. In fact, he liked to tell her about flaws in her system-a bit of outlaw gallantry that eventually led to his legal downfall. In fact, the first phone phreaks considered themselves to be harmless, and for the most part even helpful. They liked having the system function perfectly, and they liked to help the phone company fix any bugs they found. Many of them, curiously, were blind. The more aggressive phreaks, however, were bringing down the heat.

In the late 1960s, Cap'n Crunch himself got his name from a breakfast cereal that offered a toy whistle as a premium. The sound produced by the whistle was coincidentally close to a pure 2600 cycle tone, and as every phreak who ever thumbed a bluebox knows, 2600 cycles is the most important of the control tones needed to build one's own shadow network within the international switching system. When he was an Air Force electronic engineer stationed overseas, John Draper started using his whistle to talk to his friends back in the States, toll free. But free phone calls to friends weren't his biggest goals. He wanted to learn the ins and outs of the wonderfully complicated global switching system.

When he got out of the Air Force, the Cap'n got full-tilt into phreaking, driving around northern California in a van crammed with electronic equipment and performing late-night experiments from public telephone booths. He set up complex, satellite-linked, global communications circumnavigations in order to talk to himself from adjacent phone booths in remote areas. Or he would call public telephones in faraway places. What's happening at the American Embassy in Moscow? Who's passing by a phone booth in London? What's the weather like in Uruguay? The object was not to make free phone calls. The goal was to play the communications network like a musical instrument, to reprogram it as if it were a giant computer that he could command from any telephone.

After the Esquire article came out in 1971, Draper got a message through the phreak underground that two young fellows from Silicon Valley wanted to meet him. Crunch knew how to put the right electronic components together to make a bluebox. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were interested in building their own blueboxes and maybe making a few dollars by selling them to students. Ever the advocate of a free exchange of technical information, Crunch told the two would-be entrepreneurs the technical details they were seeking. Shortly thereafter, the two Steves were holding "bluebox parties" in Berkeley dormitories and selling their elegantly home-built blueboxes for $60 apiece.

In 1974, Cap'n Crunch was busted twice. The first time landed him in a Federal penitentiary in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for six months. His second conviction for wire fraud landed him for several years in Lompoc, another Federal pen, located in California. It was in Lompoc that a Mafia-connected inmate tried to bribe John to divulge the secrets of bluebox construction, then, failing that, to extort them from him. Draper refused to divulge what he knew, and the other inmate broke Draper's back- hence his ongoing interest in chiropractic exercises. While serving his second term he became eligible for the prison's work-furlough program, which enabled him to learn programming and try to find programming jobs.

Draper and Wozniak continued their friendship, although the Cap'n's relationship with Jobs was not as close. When Apple was barely out of the garage stage of its operations, Draper became one of its early employees. One of his jobs was to design a telephone device for the Apple. The telephone board Draper designed had very sophisticated properties- too sophisticated for Jobs's tastes, because Draper had included features that phone phreaks might find very useful. They were no longer having fun and making a few extra bucks selling blueboxes to undergraduates. They were trying to build a legitimate company. Draper was fired. But not before he used the prototype phone board for one last, massive prank.

Draper was looking for WATS extender numbers- codes that allowed people in a particular area to gain access to free long-distance lines for major companies. Phone phreaks like to use these numbers to help them set up some of their pranks. The codes were four-digit numbers, which meant that he would have to dial up to 10,000 numbers if he were to find these codes by brute force. But Draper wired up an early Apple computer to his prototype phone board and programmed it to dial 5,000 calls a night and automatically record which attempts led to legitimate WATS connections. The city of Mountain View, California, where Draper was living at the time, has determined that Draper was responsible for more than 50 percent of the calls originating from that city during the period his experiment was in operation.

Draper had dabbled in programming for years- after all, phreaking is a way of programming the communication network- but it wasn't until he was on a work-furlough leave from his second prison term that he started to seriously teach himself Forth. Forth is a peculiar programming language in that it uses "grammatical" structures different from those of other languages. Because Forth consists of programmer-defined "words" that can be combined into customized programs, it enables programmers to work in a highly individual manner. Because of the fanatic devotion that some programmers tend to develop for Forth, one of the clichés in thesoftware industry is that "Forth isn't a language- it's a religion."

Because of his self-taught, freewheeling style, John's method of programming had several advantages and disadvantages when it came to the world of microcomputer software. While he was at Apple, and afterward, he developed a reputation for writing very concise code, which meant that he could produce an applications program- like a word processor, for example- that could fit into the limited memory of one of the early personal computers. He could also work very fast and accomplish a great deal during prolonged programming binges that sometimes took several days. His style was also vulnerable to criticism on some counts, however. Instead of revising his whole system to fix an error, he might create a "patch"- additional code that doesn't eliminate the problematic feature of the program but rather bypasses certain annoying results.

In the late '70s, John decided to design a word-processing program for microcomputers. Text editing and word processing were already catching on, but such programs then in use in offices were too large and cumbersome to shoehorn into an Apple. So John created EasyWriter. But by this time, he was persona non grata around Apple, and even though he maintained his friendship with Wozniak, his program was rejected by the corporation. Eventually, in 1978, Apple decided to support a word-processing package called Apple Writer, created by that other eccentric character, Paul Lutus.

After Apple turned down EasyWriter, Draper found a partner, Matthew McIntosh, who was able to handle his mercurial mood changes and bizarre work habits. He and McIntosh set up a booth at an early West Coast Computer Faire, and when Adam Osborne came around, they asked him how they might go about selling their new EasyWriter package. Osborne was a well-known author and computer-book publisher at the time- although he had yet to start the innovative and ill-fated Osborne Computer Company- and they were eager to get advice from someone of his caliber. Osborne suggested that they visit another booth where a young fellow was promoting a primitive database manager and whose start-up software publishing company was called Information Unlimited Software. Draper and McIntosh took Osborne's advice and went to the IUS booth, where they found a transplanted midwesterner in his early twenties, an aggressive and confident entrepreneur by the name of Bill Baker.

From the moment Draper first talked to Baker about EasyWriter, the destiny of Cap'n Software became more of an entrepreneur's story than a programmer's tale. That story will be continued in the next chapter. Suffice it to say now that when Baker happened onto one of the juiciest deals in microcomputer history, Draper became one of the first microcomputer programmers to make a lot of money in a very short time.

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