My Adventures in Home Computing
~~John Warner

Keep in-mind that I wrote this essay in the early 90s. Some of the opinions are a bit dated but, I think, the events of the last 5 or 6 years serve to confirm my premise.

My daughter was in dire need of a filing system to keep-track of her customers. She needed to print labels for mailings and log clients' visits to her store. She went into Circuit City and walked-out with a laptop computer she was sure would automate this tedious chore. She didn't have the time to do it herself so she dropped the thing in my lap. (No pun intended) I looked-up at her with a classic "Who, me?" stare.

Where do I start? How do you turn this thing on? Where's the instruction manual? "Boy, Do I Feel STUPID"! And so, I was introduced to the "computer age."

Not really "Introduced", for you see, we had met before! By the time I was finished this task, after many hours spent staring at a blinking cursor, I would recall all my earlier brushes with technology. I would come to realize that I wasn't as stupid as I first thought. You see, I had given-up in frustration in all those prior encounters because I thought I was "thickheaded" or worse! Unbeknownst to me, NOBODY knew anything about PC's!

It was the "late 70's" and I had just bought the neatest piece of electronic gadgetry I had ever seen, "The Commodore 64"! In order to make this "baby" do anything; you had to learn how to give it commands. The "language" that the thing understood was something called BASIC. The person who invented BASIC wasn't a member of some team of Ph.D. Electrical Engineers from a "think tank" at MIT, but a 17 year old named Bill Gates, whose only other accomplishment, up to this time, was scoring high enough on the SAT's to get accepted at Harvard. He was one of those "nerdy types" that no one wanted to socialize with because he approached every parlor game as if the fate-of-the-world depended on whether HE WON or not! One of those "Dungeons and Dragons" weirdoes on college campuses, that you used-to hear so much about, back then.

After going back and re-reading this description, it sounds a bit harsh. I would explain by saying that I was quite annoyed that such a travesty of justice could take place and I felt sorry for the true inventors of the point-and-click operating system.

Gates started-out selling Basic to Ed Roberts, of MITS, who is credited with inventing the first PC, The Altair 8800. Gates was 19 years old and he, and a high school friend named Paul Allen, wrote the "code" that was used to run Altair. The year was 1975, and Allen and Gates needed a name for their two-man company, so they could open a bank account to cash the checks from MITS. They called their newborn enterprise, Microsoft.

I learned BASIC well enough to write a simple program, maybe that wasn't fun; can you say SYNTAX ERROR? I got frustrated with the lack of memory on these early computers, and the "snails-pace" retrieval rate of the old "portable tape decks" that they used for storage. These early computers had no "hard drive" (storage) at all. When you shutdown the computer, RAM goes POOF! Into thin air.

Some years later, the Freshman Class at Drexel University was the beneficiary of a "promotion" being run by Apple Computers. Each student would have their own "personal" computer. It was a stroke of marketing genius on the part of the computer manufacture's young management team. There were three schools chosen for the experiment: Drexel, Stanford, and another that slips my mind. They were selling, at cost, their newest creation, "Macintosh." A revolutionary, new Personal Computer that had an "operating system" that even a child could use. This system incorporated a device that you "ran around" on your desktop called a "mouse." The "mouse" was electrically connected to an arrow on the monitor screen. You simply directed the arrow to point at an "icon" on the screen and "clicked" the mouse, and the computer would do something! No need to type-in any "commands." The concept was not lost. It put-into-practice, for the first time, the prospect of each person having their own computer, instead of sitting around a library waiting for a turn. Their bold business plan worked like a charm...but not for them!
It was 1984, and I "fiddled" with the thing a few times but never really had the time to get-into it.

The people behind the "Macintosh" (Apple Computers, Inc., Macintosh Apples, does this all sound silly?) weren't those MIT Ph.D.s that I spoke of earlier, or even the name that is synonymous with the word "computer", IBM, but rather, two college students named STEVE!

Not the "Dungeons&Dragons" types, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak spent their leisure time engaged in another pursuit, with a "touch of larceny" to add excitement. Jobs had discovered, in a hidden-away corner of the Library at Stanford, a small tech manual issued by ATT. The manual described a "new" dialing system that they were experimenting with that would replace the old "clicking" system used by "rotary" phones. The new system, a series of "tones", would be much faster, as everyone now knows.

Sounds like "old news", however, also in the manual was the formula for deciphering the entire system, worldwide! Jobs asked Wozniak, the electronics wizard, and Steven King look-a-like, to design a device that would match the frequencies of tones listed in the manual, and emit those tones. This was a relatively simple task for Wozniak; knowing which tones to "play" was gleaned from the manual, and soon they began using what they had named, " the blue box." (because it was in a blue box).

They didn't use the device for profit; it was mostly a "prank". College kids calling home for free or asking an Apothecary in Sussex, "If they had Prince Albert in a can?" Once, Wozniak said, he called the Pope, using the name Henry Kissinger. He didn't get to speak to the Pope, but he was told that someone was going to wake him up!

The lesson here, not wasted on Steve Jobs, was that they could manipulate a billion dollar infrastructure like ATT. So, when he asked Steve Wozniak if he could miniaturize a computer, that Wozniak had been "toying with" at hobbyist meetings, to a point where it could be packaged and sold on-the-market, Apple, Inc. was born!
Apple I was nothing more than a circuit board, no case or keyboard. They manufactured them in a garage. Fifty units were sold to hobbyists for $600 each. Jobs could see the possibilities. He went to Venture Capitalist, Arthur Rock, and got backing for a new creation, Apple II. They debuted the Apple II at the "1st Annual West Coast Computer Faire." The II was an instant success, it was the first "real" PC, and they turned-out 1000 units a month. He was 19 years old.

For all its success, the Apple II was still just a toy! It needed an application that would make it DO SOMETHING USEFUL. The PC was the product of the "flower-children" of the West Coast. The "hippies" thought it was "groovy", but the application that would launch it into the billion-dollar business, that it was to become, was on the blackboards of the Harvard Business School. An MBA student named Dan Bricklin, who had some programming experience, was working on a program to automate the laborious calculations needed to "run the numbers", using the accepted Harvard Business School tables, to workout profits and expenses in business. All the values in the tables are related to each other, and so, changes in one year will "ripple" through the table and affect the prices and profits in subsequent years. Since all the values in the table are related, one mistake could mean disaster!
He enlisted the aid of a friend, Bob Frankston, to write the code. They called the program The Visible Calculator, or VISICALC, and began to give VISICALC to anyone who wanted a copy. The first copies went on sale at Marv Goldschmitt's Computer Store in Bedford, Mass. in October, 1979.

They were idealists, they said they were trying to improve the lives of the "bean-counters" of the world, and were not in it for the money. Bricklin tells a story about a demonstration he was giving to some accountants, when one fellow came up to him and, with tears in his eyes, explained how he would labor for a week, missing dinner with his wife and kids, to "run the numbers" that VISICALC just ran in 5 minutes! They NEVER COPYRIGHTED their invention, the FIRST SPREADSHEET! (This would be the first in a series of unbelievable circumstances that would create "openings" for the opportunist Bill Gates that would catapult him into notoriety as the richest and luckiest man in the world!) He would later use the application as the template for Excel.

It was the beginning of the Reagan Years and money was everything. Greed was Good, and the Whiz Kids of Wall St., fresh out of college, were making millions. The spreadsheet was the big businessman's "Crystal Ball." It answered all those, " What If ", questions. How will future profits be affected by different business scenarios? A 24 year old MBA running Visicalc on an Apple II computer could use two pieces of dubious data to convince his corporate managers to loot the company's Pension Fund and do a leveraged buy-out! Apple, Inc. went Public in 1980, and on his 23rd birthday Steve Jobs was a Millionaire.

On his 24th he had $10 Million, and by his 25 birthday he was worth 100 Million Dollars! And Apple was yet to introduce the most revolutionary computer of all time, Macintosh!

All this excitement was drawing the attention of the "sleeping giant." The company known as "Big Blue" had, heretofore, dismissed the PC as a "gadget" and ignored the possible market. But IBM, the name that "means" computer, was beginning to rethink its position. In the boardrooms of IBM the unthinkable was being asked. "Had one of the leaders in the corporate world made a mistake?"

Perhaps, but they were about to make, what is described by some as, the BIGGEST mistake in the history of the business world! There are many lessons to be made of this story, not the least of which is expressed in this axiom: " In business, as in comedy, TIMING is of the utmost importance."

IBM decided that they would get into the PC marketplace, but there was one problem. The staid and conservative leader of the computer industry knew full well that the length of time it needed for research and development, tooling, design and manufacture of it's PC would be so great that the "market" for PCs would be "saturated" by the time their version was released.

With that, IBM decided to buy, from electronics manufacturer's stockpiles, all the components needed to assemble their version of the Personal Computer thus saving the time of designing their own. All they needed to do now was "buy" an Operating System. A good idea, except for one hitch: Since they were not inventing it, but merely assembling it, they could not patent such a device!

When the IBM Execs showed-up on Bill Gates' doorstep he almost "wet himself." They wanted to know if he had an Operating System that they could buy and install in their new PC. Perhaps they figured that he was an electronics nerd who got high off the smoke of his soldering iron and wouldn't be "tied-in" with any existing computer companies, and they would be able to dictate terms to him. Well, he "took the lump" and sent them off to see someone that he thought was better equipped to help them.

A fact that came to light years after I wrote this essay was that Gates' mother sat on the board of United Way, where she, a lawyer, was friendly with the CEO of IBM. Does that sound like a coincidence of enormous proportions? "Boy I guess!"

Luckily, the people he sent them to see were making too many demands for IBM and, as hard as it may be to believe, they came back to see him again. This was all the break he needed and I guess he felt like a man who had been raised from the dead! He knew he didn't have the system they needed, but he told them he did! "Flying by the seat of his pants", he signed a contract with them making Microsoft the exclusive provider of the Operating System for the PC in exchange for his guarantee that he would not sell the system to anyone else. He put his head together with a colleague, who had been working on several different operating systems, and they "threw together" QDOS, an acronym for "Quick and Dirty Operating System." Their inside joke was the forerunner of MS-DOS. The only "unique" component of IBM's PC was the "brain" of the machine. That part which connects the "hardware" to the "software", the Operating System to the Central Processing Unit or CPU, known as the "ROM BIOS."

Someone bought an IBM PC, took it home and took it apart, and found that as long as they bought the components from the companies that held the individual patents on each component, anyone could assemble and market IBM PCs under their own name. That "someone" was COMPAQ COMPUTERS. The only obstacle was: IBM's ROM BIOS.

Here's how they got around that obstacle: A patent attorney assembled a team of Electrical Engineers. He videotaped each interview in which he asks each one if he or she has ever worked for IBM or Microsoft. He then has them swear that they had never seen the insides of IBM's PC nor did they ever see the operating system known as QDOS. 20 people are hired and put to work "reinventing" IBM's ROM BIOS. They are given complete documentation describing the hardware and what it does when instructed by the operating system. The team of E.E.s is able to "reinvent" IBM's ROM-BIOS in 4 months time.

Now there are two companies that own patents on a ROM-BIOS that "runs" IBM's PC. Compaq wants to start selling their PC so they order Operating Systems from Microsoft. Bill Gates' lawyers (probably his mom or dad) tell him that if it was legal for Compaq to "clone" the PC, then it is also legal for Microsoft to sell DOS to the cloners. Perhaps, in a "last ditch" effort to have some control over the PC Market, IBM begins selling THEIR Rom Bios, thereby licensing anyone who wants to "clone" their PC and the "blunder" is complete! The company that proved they could "respond quickly" to grab a share of the personal computer market by "slapping together" a machine that would outsell the Apple Home Computer succeeded in making money for everyone but themselves!

Gates knew he needed a simpler Operating System than DOS. It still required you to have the knowledge of BASIC and the ability to write code. PCs would not sell when the world got a look at the Macintosh OS. It is said, (mostly in Gates' autobiography) that he knew of the Mac OS and advised Jobs to patent it. When Jobs procrastinated Gates stole it! He modified it into an APPLICATION that ran within DOS, and began including it WITH the operating system he installed into every PC. For anyone (me included) who ever saw Macintosh BEFORE they saw WINDOWS, the similarity was astonishing! To a person, they asked themselves, "How could he have gotten away with this?"

Bill Gates and Microsoft "set the world on its ear" when they release the revolutionary operating system WINDOWS. They took all those "inventions" from the Macintosh Operating System: the Windows themselves, the Mouse, the Icons, and the Menus., and just like Chubby Checker stole "The Twist" from Hank Ballard, and Liz Taylor stole Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, Microsoft "blows Apple, Inc. out of the water." Not because they had a "new message" but just because they "said it louder." Gates capitalized on the name IBM, who had no more to do with the development of the PC than Gates did, but who gave it their famous name, IBM Compatible! If you were going to, "plop-down" your hard-earned dollars for a computer, and the man in the store had one named IBM and one named APPLE, which one would you buy? So did everyone else!

In the end, the hippies' contempt for convention, would prove to be their un-doing! Every couple of days I read an article about the trials and tribulations of Apple, Inc. They are STILL at it, concentrating on the "high-dollar" personal computer market, and their machine is STILL better than the competition's! When I made the analogy of a saturated market I never knew that the computer manufacturers would "pace themselves" in releasing faster and faster machines. Avid users buy a new computer about every TWO years! It's an absolute stroke of business genius combined with uncanny luck and all the ruthlessness necessary to have stolen all the major components for success!

John Warner is a frustrated, opinionated, blue-collar, quinquagenarian, wannabe-wordsmith who has managed, during some of his few-and-far-between stretches of lucidity, to string together a few hundred intelligible words suitable for publication in the Events Business News Magazine (and for a fee, no less).

NOTE FROM LINDA:  These words come from John ... not me ;-)