Software People

Software People
Title	Software People: An Insider's Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry
Author	[[Douglas G. Carlston]]
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.

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.

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