These comics were published a month after the Apple ][ was released and six months after the Commodore PET debuted. Enjoy.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

from the July 1985 issue of MicroTimes magazine

A New Dimension In Teleconferencing: THE WELL

By Laurie and Steve Foster

In ancient times, the well symbolized a place to quench one’s thirst for knowledge as well as being a meeting place for the community. Today, The WELL is a tool to access and share information as well as being a meeting place for an extended (on-line) community.

The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) is a computer-based information utility run from the offices of The ‘Whole Earth Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review in Sausalito, California. It was co-developed with NETI (Network Technologies, International) of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

As a regional telecommunications utility, The WELL is poised somewhere between national services like the Source or CompuServe, and the endlessly proliferating special-purpose BBS systems that serve local users and run on PC or Apple-sized micros.

Basic functions available to WELL subscribers include teleconferencing, electronic mail, on-line chat, and file transmission. On-line HELP and optional menus guide the new user through desired functions and features.

Currently active conferences include:

• Legal

• Jokes

• Music

• Writers

• Science Fiction

• Games

• IBM PC

• Word Processing

• Spreadsheets

• Macintosh

• Programming

• Hackers

• Currents in The Well

• System news

• Help

• Politics

• Garage

• Medical

• Spirituality

• Human Resources

• Video

• Telecommunicating

• Commodore

• Databasics

• Fido

• CP/M

• Unix

• Programmers

• Hosts

• Net

• Design

• Video

• LapTop

• BMUGSIG

• Manual

Each conference holds a series of numerically identified conversations. Any conversation consists of a “topic” (a conversation-initiating message), and a series of “responses” (conversation-continuing messages). Interactive prompts guide the user to BROWSE a list of current topics, SEE a specified topic and associated responses, ENTER a new topic (i.e., start a new conversation), or RESPOND to an existing topic (i.e., join in an on-going conversation). Helpful system features allow you to:

• by-pass conversations that are not of interest;

• make a Conference List that automatically strolls you past conferences you want to follow;

• get an automatic display of all new comments in any specified conference since the last time you checked that conference;

• find out what other users are on the system simultaneously with you (which means you can initiate an on-line “chat” with them);

• find out what other users are participants in any conference or on The WELL itself;

• find out the last time that a specified user logged onto The WELL (handy when you want to know if someone has picked up their mail yet);

• find out what remarks another user has made about him/herself by way of introduction to other WELL users.

There are numerous other features as well.

The Electronic Mail function is very straightforward. Messages and responses are routed between WELL users. An exciting feature is the ability to route mail to and from users on certain other telecommunication networks. Links are rapidly being built to various national and international systems.

You can transmit (upload) regular (ASCII) text files and store them on The WELL. Any other WELL user can read or capture (download) such a file if they know the file name and user ID of the file creator. This feature allows conference conversations to direct readers to external files that might — for example — hold a list of local events relevant to that conference. It also allows a group of people to work together on the development of a co-authored document. Additionally, special facilities allow the transfer of binary files — so The WELL can be used to transmit graphic images as well as public domain software.

Using basic features of The WELL is relatively simple. Ample prompts and HELP notes are available to aid the novice. An on-line Manual can be downloaded and printed from your computer. Each conference has a host, who — like a good host at a party — assists newcomers, keeps relevant conversations flowing, and directs irrelevant conversations to more appropriate conferences. New hosts are welcome.

The response time is very fast. Unlike any other BBS we’ve tried, it gives no reason to wish for more speed.

We found The WELL to be a very friendly place — not just an easy to use computer system, but quite literally— a place where one might make some very good friends.

The price of this service is one of its friendliest features. Its hourly access fee is from one fifth to one tenth that of the Source, and for many of us — authors included — that’s a make or break difference!

Using more advanced features of The WELL takes more time, but that’s the price of power, and there are some incredibly powerful features available to the initiated user. (Space limitations prevent even a partial list.) Continued evolution of the system promises to make more and friendlier power available to subscribers.

The cost of using WELL services is an $8 per month member fee and a very low $2 per hour access fee. These charges are billed directly to the user’s credit card account (VISA or MasterCharge). Pacific Bell costs are the normal fees charged for calls between your phone area and Sausalito, and show up on your regular monthly telephone bill. These phone costs can be cut by about 50% by arranging for ORTS service to Sausalito with Pacific Bell. Rates are much cheaper at night, of course. The WELL will soon be accessible via UniNet, TeleNet or TymeNet, which will reduce phone costs significantly. For about $300 you can purchase a lap-top micro with built-in modem that will enable you to communicate on The WELL.

To register with The WELL by computer, call (415) 332-6106 via your modem. As prompted, type “newuser” (lower case, without quotes) as your login ID; then enter your VISA or MASTERCARD number and expiration date. You will then be asked to choose a user identification code and a password. For personal assistance, call (415) 332-4334.

We asked Stewart Brand and Matthew McClure of Whole Earth Access Link about their new venture. The WELL has been up and running since April, 1985, and it seems to be off to a fine start.

Who’s behind The WELL, and how did it get started? How did the Whole Earth people and the NETI people get together?

Matthew McClure: When we were putting together the Whole Earth Software Catalog, we used telecommunications extensively to gather reviews. We used mostly New Jersey Institute of Technology’s EIES network — The Electronic Information Exchange System, a national teleconferencing network. Our catalog authors would send their word-processed documents to EIES. We’d pull them down to our own micro-computers, run them through a couple of electronic transmogrifications, and transmit them to the typesetter. So, that was a lot less work for us. We’d also use the EIES network to hold online conferences, and we met a lot of interesting people. So, we recognized it as a valuable tool. We saw a lot of ways that it could be used that it wasn’t being used. And we looked at things like CompuServe and the Source and saw that they were expensive, monolithic, not too friendly, and often very slow. We wanted a regional information utility and conferencing system. Coincidentally, NETI, in Ann Arbor, had this software called PICO-SPAN that they had developed, and they were looking for places to put it. Their idea is to set up regional networks like The WELL, around the country, and then to hook them up in different ways, so that you can have some kind of communications in the whole area.

Stewart Brand: I’d known of Larry Brilliant (founder of NETI, who also directed SEVA, a service organization) for years, and so had reason to be interested in NETI. I ran into him at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, where I was a faculty person, teaching classes on-line for senior corporate people. They would get into the EIES network for two years and meet every six months face-to-face in La Jolla. At one of those occasions, Larry Brilliant was there, and we chatted about NETI, and about his idea for regional teleconference systems. I got very interested because I realized that regionally is something new to the process, that there was a middle ground between BBS systems and the national networks, and that that middle ground is very congenial to the kind of thing the Whole Earth has been at all these years.

The stories Larry tells mostly relate to the work of fighting blindness that SEVA’s been doing in Nepal and India the last couple of years. Doing eye operations and logistically horrendous projects, bringing in helicopters to the high mountains. He found that a lot of their coordinations involving technical and political people scattered all over the face of the globe — which would have taken months or years, or been impossible in the past — were able to move quickly thanks to teleconferencing capabilities.

Asynchronous teleconferencing especially pays off when you have a lot of people in different time zones. So he was already sold on teleconferencing as a tool for World Saving, and he thought there was so much commercial potential there that they could fund many of their own service activities by pursuing the commercial opportunities.

MM: So we got together. They were in a position to put up some money so we could get a computer and the software. What we put up, of course, is our expertise, our connections and the people who run the system.

What made you decide to offer a service like The WELL?

MM: In terms of facilitating information gathering, input and participation, teleconferencing is a terrific tool. The Bay Area is an interesting place full of interesting people. Our idea was that if we could facilitate communication among these interesting people, unpredictable synergies would result. And so far they have. Our whole system has gotten several orders of magnitude easier to use, and more powerful and interesting just as a result of our users, who have a wide variety of expertise, and have offered this arid that kind of suggestion and cooperation among one another, with the result that it’s gotten better, more sophisticated, and easier to use. I think that’s wonderful.

SB: The attraction of The WELL to me is that it’s the most rapidly adaptable medium — certainly business medium — that I’ve ever seen or been involved in. That is, once you have the basic apparatus set up, the range of possibilities gets wider every time you think about it. We’re trying to establish The WELL as a really open invitation to business people in particular, and everybody in general, to try stuff, to discover new uses for this medium. And this is consistent with what we’ve done from the beginning with Whole Earth — the idea is access to tools.

So this could be a home for anyone’s experiment?

MM: Yup. That’s what we’re doing it for. To find out what are the possibilities with the teleconferencing. So far they’ve been fairly limited by the corporate environment. Or, they’ve been limited by storage capacity, processing speed, and limited number of phone lines. We are working on getting rid of all the limitations we can find, so we can first find out what’s possible, and then assess its usefulness.

SB: People who get on are participating in the shaping of the system. Because it is such a flexible, interactive, and populist medium, it’s going to be adapted to their realities to the extent that they pitch in.

One of the advantages we have is the software. PICO-SPAN is built to be highly adaptable. It has lots of hooks — places where you can attach it to other software that either exists, or that you develop.

MM: For example, we wrote a routine that would give you a list of all participants on The WELL, in alphabetical order. We wrote another routine that would tell you at the end of each session how much time and money you’d spent during that session. There’s a lot of different enhancements you can do, writing in either Unix or C, that you can just hook into PICO-SPAN.

What happens when and if you get into a space crunch? Though you’ve got excess storage space right now, it has to run out at some point.

MM: No it doesn’t. The economics of the situation, as near as we can tell, are that once we have enough people talking that we run into a space problem, we will have enough money that we can pay for another disk. So, the system is designed to pay for its own expansion.

SB: So, the trick is to keep it growing rapidly enough so that the cash flow makes sense, because it’s an expensive system, but slowly enough so that it doesn’t get ahead of us to where suddenly people are getting too many busy signals or we just lose control.

You’re basically operating from a perspective of plenty, which assumes “there is plenty of room now, we can afford to buy more as we need it, and we can serve all needs. Businesses . . . individuals . . . just no limits . . .”?

MM: That’s right. We haven’t run up against the limits yet, and we have plans for dealing with most of the limitations that we are aware are likely to come up. So, yes. It’s pretty wide open.

Who sets priorities & guidelines for The WELL? How are decisions made, such as what conference subjects are welcome — or internal decisions about The WELL?

MM: Mostly that’s being done by Stewart and myself. Our main guideline is: if it looks at all interesting, let’s try it and see if it works. The whole thing is so amazingly experimental that it’s like having a giant sandbox, a pail, a shovel, and water . . . new forms begin to appear. Some of them are strong, and some of them just go back into the sandbox.

What type of inter-active audience do you see this reaching, as opposed to CompuServe or the Source?

SB: I think there will be more very straightforward business use of this system than with CompuServe, for example, because of the very low cost — especially small businesses, or businesses that have a number of regional nodes. That want a good electronic mail system, or a place where they can get together and hash something out without all having to drive to the same place, work through a contract together, all of these collaborative writings that go on.

So you are encouraging businesses to use The WELL as a utility?

MM: Yes. We will be offering a business service that includes two primary features — “E-FORUM” and “E-MEMO.” The business class WELL provides excellent teleconferencing and electronic mail systems.

Another thing that we’re doing is developing transactional software, so that companies like the Whole Earth Access Store can put their catalog on-line and have people order from them directly through The WELL — home shopping, basically.

SB: . . . and all manner of services that people are performing for one another directly through The WELL. Another business use of The WELL is what they’re calling “virtual” businesses. It’s a phenomenon that we’re starting to see on the various teleconferences, and is based on the idea of virtual memory and virtual reality. These angelic businesses form, a business plan comes out, work gets performed, the various people get paid, and they never have to meet face-to-face.

What other uses do you expect people will find for The WELL?

MM: Some people may wind up creating a private conference to go write a novel collaboratively. That’s happening now, on EIES. They have what they call “The Soap Opera” . . . and we may start a Soap Opera conference towards the end of the summer. Also, we want to provide listings of stuff like local movies . . . tell people what’s playing at the different theatres, concerts, restaurants.

What about using The WELL to start up a barter network?

SB: Yes. One of the most interesting ranges of software to me has been the DIAL-A-MATCH stuff. The sex software that runs on various bulletin boards in the Bay Area. You have to call in at three in the morning in order to get on, they’re so busily finding each other. You can do that with barter or you can do that with people looking for jobs or employers looking for workers — obviously there’s a whole range of matching that can be done. And it’s especially nice in a regional network, because then you can do the face-to-face part, you can take a look at the thing that’s being offered and show them what you’re offering back. Sure, barter would be great.

MM: Also, there are different projects that are springing up. Some involve computer projects. Some involve politics. The idea is that if you can increase the free flow of information, you’ll probably wind up with better decisions being made at the end.

The way that we hope the system is going to grow is sort of like an epidemic, that people will catch it from one another. And it seems to work that way, because once people discover the magic of electronic mail, they want to contact their friends and get them on-line.

SB: The system should not become characterizable as only one thing, or perceived as just a techie hangout, or a new age hangout, or a business hangout, or a telecommunications nerd hangout, but a place where basically anyone will find something, and hopefully lots of things. It’s just another form of connection. □

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What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

I’m a little behind this month, so the poll will only be open for 3 days.

Here are this month’s choices:

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The Company

I couldn’t find any information about New Generation Systems, Inc., using my usual sources. There were several companies with the same name, but they were incorporated after MicroShell was released.

According to a review of MicroShell in the April 1983 issue of Lifelines, Rick Rump was both the creator of MicroShell and the president of New Generation Systems.

The Product

Let’s start with an overview of MicroShell from the version 2.0 manual:

MicroShell is a CP/M program which adds powerful, user-friendly capabilities to the CP/M operating system similar to many of the functions available in the UNIX operating system. Compatibility with existing CP/M software is retained while adding the UNIX features to the operation of existing CP/M software. New software applications and tools can be designed and implemented with much less effort using the features available in MicroShell. MicroShell can be tailored to a user’s system and experience level, providing additional information and help for a new user or crisp, elegant power for an experienced user.

MicroShell requires CP/M 2.2, at least 32 K of memory and at least one disk drive.

MicroShell requires 8K of system memory when loaded, residing directly below CP/M. A 64K CP/M computer will thus appear to be a 56K system to a program running under MicroShell. As most commercial software has been written to run under MP/M, where only 48K is normally available to user programs, this memory requirement does not normally restrict the operation of a program.

The minimum disk space required by the MicroShell program and its overlay is 20K, although once loaded, neither MicroShell nor its overlay are necessary for most of MicroShell’s functions.

Here is a summary of the creation of MicroShell from the Lifeline review:

Rick Rump, creator of MicroShell and president of New Generation Systems, was introduced to Unix in 1980 on a PDP-11. Like all of us small system programmers, he was less than enthusiastic about having to learn to live with a very large operating system. Finding that Unix was not only very powerful, but to the surprise of all, easy to learn, and gaining more experience on a DEC VAX, Rick became convinced that what CP/M needed was a "shell". By 1981 he made his dream a reality. Rick created a Unix-like shell to replace CP/M's CCP, the console command processor. Originally written in BDS C, it was rewritten in assembly to keep it down to a mere 8 K bytes.

The v2.0 manual also included a longer history and design overview:

We began using CP/M in January 1978. It was a vast improvement in microcomputer operating systems; relatively easy to use, efficient in memory and disk usage and a tremendous bargain for its price. We happily used CP/M and its facilities to develop software adapting to its various features and limitations. Then in 1980 a revolutionary event occurred: we were introduced to the UNIX tm operating system developed by Bell Laboratories for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer series. We were elated. Always having been shy about “big” computer operating systems and their complexity, UNIX pleasantly surprised us. It was easy to learn, easy to use and very powerful.

The user-interface to UNIX is its “shell” program, equivalent to CP/M’s Console Command Processor (CCP). The idea for MicroShell really began when we used a DEC VAX minicomputer. Instead of being greeted at the terminal with DEC’s operating system, VMS, we saw what looked like UNIX’s “shell”! The Software Tools, which began in a book by the same name by Kernighan and Plauger and were later expanded by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, had been installed “on top of” DEC’s operating system. The Software Tools include a UNIX-like “shell” and give the appearance of running UNIX without losing compatibility with the native operating system or requiring the development of a whole new operating system for the VAX.

The idea was born! Why not develop a “shell” to lie “on top of” CP/M?! And in the spring of 1981, MicroShell was thus conceived.

It was decided to implement the best functional features of the UNIX “shell” in MicroShell. The initial language chosen for development of MicroShell was “C” - the language developed by Bell Labs for writing the UNIX operating system. The Software Tools had been developed in RATFOR, a structured preprocessor for FORTRAN, which resulted in good transportability of the Software Tools from one operating system and computer to another. It was decided that the code generated by RATFOR was too large for the limited CP/M environment. In addition, transportability was a secondary goal. So BDS C was chosen as MicroShell’s language.

By June 1981, MicroShell in “C” was up and running and in daily use with CP/M. At 12K, MicroShell still was larger than desired. So a rewrite of portions of MicroShell into assembly language was begun. The current version of MicroShell is written entirely in assembly language and requires about 8K bytes. Overlays are used for functions which are not time-sensitive. This has allowed expanded error messages, extended shell functions and command line editing to be included without impacting on the resident memory requirements of MicroShell. The BDS C package is still used for management of the 90+ individual modules, linking and overlay management. This package (BDS C) represents an excellent assembly-language development environment.

MicroShell is executed from CP/M by typing “sh”. CP/M loads in MicroShell which then relocates itself below CP/M (just below the Basic Disk Operating System - BDOS). MicroShell replaces the CP/M Console Command Processor (CCP) and performs all of the functions of the CP/M CCP plus additional UNIX-shell-like functions. It remains resident during execution of programs until it is deliberately exited by the user. In this respect it is similar to Wordstar and other programs which themselves perform CCP functions while remaining resident.

Alan R. Miller wrote a review of MicroShell for the July 1982 issue of Interface Age:

The operating system of a computer is responsible for execution of user programs, hardware operation, organization of files and task scheduling. For several years, CP/M (Digital Research, Pacific Grove, CA) has been the most commonly-used operating system for 8080, 8085 and Z80 computers.

UNIX is an operating system with many desirable features. It was developed at Bell Laboratories for minicomputers. UNIX-like systems are beginning to appear on the 16-bit machines, but UNIX is not available for 8-bit machines. In response to this void, several packages have been developed that bring valuable UNIX features to the CP/M operating system.

Microshell (New Generation Systems, Reston, VA) is a program that runs in conjunction with CP/M. It adds many UNIX-like features while retaining all of the regular CP/M capabilities.

…

Microshell incorporates all of the six CCP built-in commands. For example, the current disk directory can be viewed by typing: DIR. Most executable COM files can also be run. For example the command: STAT*.* will display the directory in detail.

The powerful file-searching feature of Microshell can be observed by moving the drive B and executing a program located on drive A. Give the command B: to change the default drive. Suppose that STAT is located only on drive A, but the default drive is B. With CP/M, you would have to give the command: A:STAT*.* to execute STAT since it is not present on the logged-in disk. However, with Microshell, the simpler command: STAT *.* can be given.

…

When a program is executed under Microshell, the user’s directory on the logged-in disk is searched for the requested file. This action is the same as it is for CP/M. However, if the file cannot be found, Microshell will try to locate the file under user 0 on the logged-in drive. If that is also unsuccessful, Microshell will then look on drive A under user 0.

…

Another powerful feature of Microshell is multiple commands. Several consecutive commands can be given on the same line if they are separated by a semicolon. For example, the expression: ERA * .BAK; STAT *.* will erase all backup files, then display the remaining files in alphabetical order.

…

All lower case characters typed at the CP/M command level are automatically converted to upper case. However, additional input (after a program has begun) is not automatically converted. Filenames are normally stored on disk in upper case letters. Consequently, if an executable program needs a filename, either it must be entered in upper case, or the program must make the conversion. Some programs can do this and some cannot.

…

Some programs will operate normally under Microshell, but cannot take advantage of the new features. Microsoft Basic version 5 is one of these. For example, the command:

MBASIC > + FILE

cannot be used to send console output from Basic to a disk file. Microshell incorporates its own version of SUBMIT with more features than the original. Microshell is another example of the high quality of programs currently available for CP/M.

Christopher Kern wrote another review of MicroShell, this time for the December 1982 issue of Byte.

Microshell is a replacement for the CP/M command interpreter that provides I/O redirection, pipes, and a number of other useful features. The Unix command interpreter is known as the “shell,” hence Microshell’s name. In addition to the simple redirection commands, “<” for input and “>” for output, Microshell lets you echo output that is being directed to a file on the console (”> +”) and to append directed output to an existing file (”>>”).

As I mentioned earlier, Microshell provides pipeline capability by using temporary files. As an experiment, I created a pipeline to list the individual words in a text file in alphabetical order, using utility programs that (1) placed each word in the file on a separate line, (2) sorted the lines alphabetically, and (3) filtered out multiple occurrences of the same word. This pipeline didn’t break any speed records, but it worked. And if you have an occasional need for a sorted list of the words in a file, connecting existing utilities in a pipeline is certainly an easier way to get it than writing a new program. Programs that read their input, alter it in some way, and then send it to their output are known as filters, which fits in with the plumbing analogy of the pipeline. (Incidentally, the source code for the programs I used to construct this word-list pipeline comes from an excellent book, Software Tools, by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger [Addison-Wesley, 1976]. The programs in the book were written in RATFOR, a FORTRAN preprocessor based on the C language. The book is a good source for explanations of concepts, such as filters, which came from Unix. It is also available in a Pascal version, Software Tools in Pascal [Addison-Wesley, 1981].)

…

It is often useful to execute a batch of commands, one after another, without sitting at the computer console and entering each command individually. CP/M provides such a batch capability with its SUBMIT program. Improved batch processors have been developed by various CP/M users (e.g., Ron Fowler’s SUPERSUB in the January 1982 issue of Lifelines magazine). But none equals the simplicity of Microshell’s shell files. The Microshell command interpreter itself — rather than a separate program — reads a script of commands from a text file and performs them in sequence. Automatic argument substitution is provided, control characters can be included in a shell file, and a shell file can provide input to a program that would normally come from the console (this is similar to CP/M’s XSUB program). Shell files can also be interrupted easily, cutting short a long batch sequence.

Shell files under Microshell are not as flexible as they are under Unix, however. Unix allows shell files to be nested (a command in a shell file can be another shell file). It also provides control structures that can be used to vary the command sequence. But Microshell’s shell files are a big improvement over CP/M’s SUBMIT. For shorter batch jobs, Microshell provides a nice alternative: multiple commands on a single line, each separated by a semicolon. This is a faster way to execute a simple series of programs than by using a shell file.

…

In some respects, Microshell slows down CP/M’s performance. Checking for shell files (batch commands) and automatic command and file searching all require extra disk accesses. It is possible to restrict automatic command searching and to turn off automatic file searching altogether, which will minimize the delay. Restricting automatic command searches to a single disk (i.e., having a “system” disk that contains all executable programs), which most users will probably want to do anyway, will set a maximum of one extra disk access each time a program is invoked.

In one very important respect, however, Microshell speeds up overall system operation; it eliminates the warm boot — the resetting of the system — that occurs after most CP/M programs. (It provides an explicit log-in command for use when changing disks.) On balance, on my system, Microshell makes things happen somewhat faster than they do when the CCP is in place.

Another review appeared in the January 1983 issue of Microsystems and was written by David Fiedler.

While CP/M 2.2 is generally acknowledged to be the most widely used operating system around, most serious computer users have complaints about it. These usually range from the whining “It’s not UNIX” to the more reasonable “Why don’t the standard utilities have a little more intelligence?” Actually, CP/M isn’t that bad for a system that wasn’t intended to be much more than a program load-and-go facility. A few brave souls have ventured to bring some of the flavor of their favorite operating system (UNIX) to the CP/M world.

MicroShell is a product of New Generation Systems, Inc., 2153 Golf Course Drive, Reston, VA. 22091, (703) 476-9143, and costs $150. A brief overview of this package should prove useful. MicroShell is a single program that actually replaces the CCP (Console Command Processor, or user interface portion) of CP/M to provide I/O redirection, pipes, and a variety of automatic file search conventions that can be used with any program that runs under CP/M. It runs on any CP/M 2.2 system with at least 32K of memory. MicroShell also implements pipes with temporary files, allows redirection of console output to either a disk file or the printer, and provides for “appending” output in chunks.

…

MicroShell generally works with all CP/M programs, including those that “fool around” with address jumps in low memory, except if they expect the regular CCP to be there. The only two known incompatible programs are SUBMIT.COM (which MicroShell replaces anyway) and MOVCPM.COM, which is used for modifying your system size and not run very often anyway. I have a relatively small memory size and run some big programs, and find that MicroShell (which takes up 9.25K) sometimes gets in the way. This can be worked around by a special shell file that removes MicroShell and automatically reloads it after running my big program.

…

The MicroShell package delivers, as advertised, some UNIX-like features to CP/M 2.2 systems. It is invaluable for and recommended to serious software developers. If I had to make a choice between MicroShell and Unica, I would get Unica only if I had a hard disk (due to its user area support and the large size of the individual programs) and MicroShell only if I had floppies (due to the ease and speed of performing its functions).

Of course, MicroShell is extremely useful with a hard disk also, especially due to its file/command search capabilities. MicroShell in particular might be good for use in turnkey operations, where it is not necessary that a customer know the difference between a shell and an executable program.

Other programs and patches are available which accomplish some of the functions of this package, but this is the cleanest, best integrated, and most usable implementation I have seen yet.

Our final review was written by Walter G. Jung and entitled “New Generation Brings the Charm of Unix to CP/M”. It appeared in the January/February 1985 issue of Sextant.

MicroShell is a completely new “front end” or “shell” for CP/M 2.2 on the H8 and H/Z89 and CP/M-85 2.2 on the ‘110 and 120. In effect, MicroShell replaces the console command processor (CCP), adding many Unix-style operating enhancements while doing so.

The CCP is that portion of CP/M most apparent to you as a user. It provides the interface between your keyboard commands and the system itself. In its most raw and un-adorned form (what you in fact get with Heath/ Zenith’s CP/M-80, or CP/M-85), CP/M’s CCP is not a very friendly system. In fact, it can be a source of irritation to some users completely new to its use. The CCP is responsible, for instance, for such nuisances as having the TYPE command scroll a text file off the screen before you can read it.

Importantly, MicroShell increases CP/M’s ease of use, and user friendliness. It requires virtually “zero installation” before it’s ready to run. And it is usable not only on the Heath/Zenith CP/M implementations (on the H8, the H/Z89 and ’90, and the H/Z100), but on just about all CP/M-80 systems.

MicroShell improves CP/M in the friendliness department by providing a number of features. First, it retains all of the standard and familiar CP/M-80 CCP commands we all know and love. They operate essentially just as before (DIRectory, ERAse, TYPE to screen, SAVE memory sectors to disk, REName, and USER n).

…

MicroShell’s prompt is distinguished from the standard CP/M prompt (a>). The default MicroShell prompt is “a(0)”. The letter A represents the drive you are logged in on; and the number 0 corresponds to the USER area you are logged in on. (Score one in the friendliness department. Ordinary CP/M doesn’t prompt with the USER number when you are running from one of the USER areas. It leaves you in the dark, with a single prompt whether you are in USER 0 or USER I0!)

…

All the things described thus far about MicroShell are certainly useful in themselves. But to my mind, the real power of the program lies in the shell files (.SUB files). Why? Simply because of their programming usefulness, which brings everything all together, adding synergism to boot

As mentioned, shell files allow built-in SUBMlT-type processing, as well as the XSUB function. Shell files support the use of single or combined .COM files and intrinsic commands, as well as the extended shell commands. Used creatively, customized shell files allow some very useful functions to be implemented, for both the programming and the office environment. And they execute faster than do conventional SUBMIT files, since they are read into memory only once, initially.

Shell programming under MicroShell is supported by a number of flags, which act as toggles for certain functions or individual commands. For example, “-1” relogs disk(s); under Heath CP/M, it even allows you to change to disks of different density. Other examples are “—x”, the exit to CP/M; “—v” (or “+v”) turn off (or on) command echo; and “-s”, shell-status report. Use of the -s command will yield a status report of the current shell conditions, as in Listing 2. (This example is for the default SH.COM, before any customization.)

Here are some resources to check out:

• Review from the December 1982 issue of two/sixteen

• A detailed review with examples from the April 1983 issue of Lifelines

• Review from the March/April 1984 issue of The Boston Kugel

• Review from the May 1986 issue of Profiles

Did you ever use VenturCom's VENIX? Do you know anything about its history? Let us know in the comments below.

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Computer Ads from the Past

Computer ads from the old days, delivered to your inbox weekly.

By John Paul Wohlscheid

I found this ad after Tax Day, but it’s still close enough to count.

The Company

The Internal Revenue Service was established in July 1862 when the US Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862. The Act was designed to raise money to pay for the ongoing US Civil War. It replaced an earlier Revenue Act of 1861, which imposed a 3% flat tax but didn’t create an organization to enforce the tax. George Sewall Boutwell was appointed the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue in July 1862.

And the rest is history.

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This month, we’re looking at comics from a magazine for “business, professional, and scientific members of the TRS-80 community”. Enjoy.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

Company

In the early 1970s, two chaps (Bruce Artwick and Stu Moment) were attending the University of Illinois. Bruce was studying computer engineering, while Stu was focusing on the arcane world of marketing.1 (My major was marketing, too.) Stu financed his higher education journey by working as a flying instructor. Eventually, all things being equal, Stu taught Bruce to fly. At the time, Bruce was working on a “microprocessor based 3D graphics package” for his Master’s thesis. (His finished thesis was entitled “A Versatile Computer-Generated Dynamic Flight Display”.2)

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The Company

I couldn’t find any information about Bridge Computer Company. Neither the Massachusetts’ Secretary of State or the OpenCorporates has any info. I did find a listing for the company in the Newton, MA city directory. In the 1980s, the company was an authorized distributor for InterSystems computers.

According to the ad, BCC was a division of Sea Data Corporation. The Massachusetts’ SOS notes that Sea Data was incorporated on May 12, 1972 by I. Winfield Hill and Virginia Burns Hill. In February 1987, the company’s name was changed to S. D. Liquidation Corp. The company was finally dissolved at the end of 1990.

One time support

The Computer

I couldn’t find any reviews for the Bridge 3C system, so here is the contents of the above ad.

Develop two programs for the time of one.

Does this sound too good to be true? Just fill your tank with the BRIDGE 3C Formula for SPEED and shift into “overdrive” with your BRIDGE 3C Compiler System. Leave the others behind, let us provide you with the fuel for higher productivity. How?

3C SPEED = 256k + MEMDSK + Cache BIOS + Compilers

If you are a software developer and need a powerful computer then you’ll understand. Our new fully integrated BRIDGE 3C System includes 256 dynamic RAM memory, MEMDSK (a memory disk emulator) and Cache BIOS, two major operating system enhancements. To complete the formula add the PASCAL/Z, C and a completely structured FORTRAN compiler.

Execute your compiler work out of memory. The components of 3C SPEED allow your files to reside in memory after your first run so that with your second run you move from one area of memory to another, rather than from disk to memory.

Compile at 3C SPEED and...

• minimize disk access time

• cut disk wear dramatically

• see your productivity increase immediately

And now BRIDGE Computer Company also allows you to express yourself “graphically” with our high resolution PLOTPAK graphics package designed to run on CP/M systems. Source code is available for all BRIDGE Enhancements.

Integrated hardware consists of:

InterSystems mainframe including...

• 6MHz Z80B CPU with memory management

• 256k RAM memory (expandable to 1Mbyte)

• Disk drive options: two 8” or 5.25” disks (single & double-sided), or 8” or 5” hard disk (expandable to 40 Mbyte)

• Televideo model 925 or 950 terminal

Unique Software consists of:

• CP/M 2,2 enhanced by Cache BIOS performing disk buffering, and MEMDSK, the disk emulator.

• Operating utilities and diagnostics.

• FORTRAN-80 Compiler with BRIDGE-Enhanced library. Easy-to-use file manipulation subroutines and functions.

• Aztec C II Compiler with BRIDGE-Enhanced library. Generates assembly language source code.

• PASCAL/Z Compiler. Generates efficient ROM-able and reentrant code

Options consist of:

• System calendar, 3 interval timers, one additional serial port, and a 9511 Floating Point Processor with complete software interface,

• EPROM development package including programmer, emulator and unique dual port memory for emulating 2716s, 2732’s and 2764’s.

• Hardware and software drivers for 16 channel A/D converters (30kFiz throughput) and 4 channel D/A converters

• EASYPAK, math library including vector and matrix operations.

Run your stream of needs under our “BRIDGE” and move to a high performance 3C Computer System. For complete information and prices, call us at (617) 244-8190, circle the reply number or write today.

Have you ever used any Bridge Computer Company products? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine

A candid discussion on microcomputer design, marketing, and the industry’s future.

by Phil Lemmons

More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry. After getting a bachelor of science degree in engineering physics in 1959, he worked for 11 years for General Electric in all aspects of its computer enterprises. In 1970, Peddle started a company to make intelligent terminals. “Too early,” he now says. He started a word-processing company in 1972. “Too early,” he now says. He then went to work for Motorola, where he participated in the design of the 6800 microprocessor family. Peddle did the architecture for all the peripheral chips of the 6800 and all the I/O (input/ output) structure. The 6820, a peripheral interface adapter (a parallel I/O chip), secured several fundamental patents in that area.

Peddle took a team from Motorola to MOS Technology in 1974 to do a low-cost microprocessor and was chief architect in the design of the 6502 microprocessor and its family of chips. By producing the 6502 and selling it for only $25 while other semiconductor houses were saying the price would never fall below $200, Peddle made the personal computer possible.

The 6522, the PIA (peripheral interface adapter) in the 6502 family, extends the concepts in the 6820 by adding some integral timers and shifters as well as other features. The 6522 appears in several places in the Victor 9000 (see “Victor Victorious,” page 216 of this issue).

MOS sold 6502s to Atari and Steve Jobs, and then Commodore bought MOS Technology. Peddle transferred to the West Coast and started Commodore’s systems business. At Commodore, Peddle developed the world’s first personal computer, which he designed to Radio Shack’s specifications. In January 1977, Peddle showed the first PET to Radio Shack at the Consumer Electronics Show. Radio Shack and Commodore were unable to make a deal. Radio Shack did its own microcomputer, Commodore brought out the PET, and Steve Wozniak made the 6502-based Apple II. The PET and the Apple II were simultaneously announced to the public in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire. Apple shipped Apples first, but Commodore showed the PET first.

Peddle has since left Commodore, founded Sirius Systems Technology, and designed the machine sold in North America as the Victor 9000 and elsewhere as both the Victor 9000 and the Sirius 1. BYTE’s West Coast editor, Phil Lemmons, interviewed Peddle late in July 1982 about his goals in designing the Victor 9000/Sirius 1 and about the direction of the microcomputer industry in the next few years.

PL: What were your general goals in designing the Victor 9000/Sirius 1?

Peddle: I think there were three generations of microcomputer products. The first generation was the board-level computer, like the KIM-1, which was the thing that we did at MOS Technology, the Apple I, the Systems Group — that kind of computer. They were really hobby computers, meant to be used by people looking to develop computer skills.

The second generation — the PET, the Apple II, the TRS-80— were designed as stand-alone, plug-’em-in-and-they-work computers for people who wanted to have computers of their own, for whatever reason. The evolution of that kind of product into high memory, disks, and so forth, leads you to see that those products, which had really been conceived for a different purpose, were starting to be used heavily in business, where they really had a lot of limitations.

PL: Forty-column screens, that sort of thing?

Peddle: Well, just the whole concept. They were aimed at a different market. If you look at the VIC-20, it is really the original PET repackaged at a lower price — that kind of thing.

We believed that a third generation of microcomputer was coming that would be compiler-oriented, would have multiple high-capacity disks, lots of compute power, synchronous communications, and high-resolution screens, a product that would be designed to be used as a desktop machine in an office network. It was going to be used professionally. It was an office product as opposed to these other products.

We felt that several developments— the new architectures of new micros, the dropping prices of 64K-bit RAM [random-access read/write memory] chips, what had happened in floppy-disk capacities, what was going to happen in hard disks, what was going to happen in networks— basically gave us the opportunity to design a new generation of product. So the goal for the Victor 9000/Sirius 1 was to have a true, very competitive, desktop, entry-level product that could be marketed by the office-products dealers but would also be sold by a sophisticated computer dealer as really a replacement for the higher-end applications of the personal computers and the lower-end applications of the pseudominis and minis. That’s a very crisp market definition, a very crisp generation definition.

PL: How long did the design of the computer take?

Peddle: We fundamentally formed the design team in late December of ‘80 and started operations in January ‘81. We showed the first prototype product in April of ‘81.

PL: How many people were on the design team?

Peddle: Basically about eight people. It grew after that as we built things.

PL: What processors did you consider and why did you choose the 8088?

Peddle: We looked at the dual 6502, which was fine except there was no programming base — a small base in Europe, but none in the United States. We looked at 6502 and Z80 combinations, which would have given us an Apple look-alike and a CP/M look-alike. But we concluded that the memory-management problem, while it was solvable, would lead to the sort of machine from which a software base would not naturally evolve. If we were a world leader, like DEC or some firm like that which has its own proprietary software, it might be worthwhile. But these two approaches wouldn’t satisfy our software needs.

We then looked at the Motorola 68000. You know, even though I’d been with the Motorola family from almost the beginning, the conclusions were that product was never going to be as cost-effective as the Intel 8086 family was going to be, the support languages were not there at the time, and the 8088 was a very interesting alternative to the 8-bit micros, which we felt we had to compete against from a cost standpoint, but the 8088 also had the ability to migrate upward into 16-bit software.

PL: Is there an 80286 [Intel’s new very high performance version of the 8086] in your future?

Peddle: There’s anything that Intel does in our future.

PL: The standard memory in the Victor 9000 is 128K bytes. Is that true of the Sirius 1 too?

Peddle Yes, the Sirius and the Victor both. The business strategy for that is very simple. Victor was literally with us from the time we started Sirius Systems Technology. The company was a partnership. We talked to Victor within a week after we formed the company —

PL: It’s more than the traditional OEM relationship?

Peddle: That’s right. Victor and Sirius were partners right at the beginning. We talked about the concept. Our business strategy was to compete for Victor’s business with Japanese companies, giving Victor the same kind of pricing they would have gotten out of the Japanese. Letting them build a volume base for us in the United States, while we, because of our special knowledge of the international market, would concentrate outside the United States market. We were trading volume for specialized market, in this case, to get higher profit margins. The decisions that went into the computer design were always based on this premise. Therefore, the boards in the Victor 9000 and the Sirius 1 are the same, the power supplies are the same. It’s basically the industrial design that’s different.

PL: The 128K bytes of standard memory was a huge amount a year ago, and it’s still a lot, for standard equipment. But now that memory’s gotten much cheaper, are you thinking of adding more memory in order to take advantage of the new operating system improvements that I keep hearing about?

Peddle: Remember two things First of all, we offer the most memory expansion in the market.

PL: Something like three quarters of a megabyte?

Peddle: It’s more than that, it’s really over 900 kilobytes. We have announced a 256K version of the machine that we’re currently supplying with a 128K expansion We’re shipping all of that expansion product, and so the answer ic that we see an evolution for the development machines almost exclusively to 256K, and some level of application machines to 256K. You’ve got to watch it The market’s such that when you have to compete against the Z80 and 6502 machines, you’ve got to be careful not to have too much in your baseline machine when you have to go in — at least on a price-quote basis — against these machines with a lot less capability, and we’re able to come close in price.

PL: After you decided you wanted to have something in the range of 1.2 megabytes of floppy storage, why did you choose 5 1/4-inch drives instead of 8-inch?

Peddle: Cost, packaging. The Victor 9000 has the smallest footprint of any word processor in the marketplace, much less any personal computer.

PL: And that couldn’t be done with 8-inch thin-line drives?

Peddle: No. The form factor on that design was very, very compact. It was designed to sit on the side port of a secretary’s desk. Remember our primary market is Europe, and Victor wants to be a factor in that market too, and therefore we had to meet the latest European ergonomic standards. Packaging 5Vi-inch drives led much more easily to that. Typically 5 1/4-inch drives are cheaper by far. We believed that we could pack the 5 1/4, and we could get enough capacity into that size on the basis of techniques that we’d used previously. And we were able to do so without any sacrifice of system reliability. In fact, we have a more reliable system. We’ve done some tests on alignment. We’re less sensitive to alignment problems than normal 48-tpi (tracks per inch) drives.

PL: I had the machine for several months, longer than I intended, for several reasons. I tried to do things with huge files to cause problems, and I haven’t been able to generate a single disk error. So I’m convinced.

Peddle: Yes, if you look at the way we’ve done it, the systems concept is much more inherently reliable. We’ve got a very tuned phase-locked loop, which we’re operating very effectively at a single frequency, but we have none of the normal droop and signal-to-noise problems that most disk drives have because we’re really recording at constant density all the way across the disk.

PL: The constant linear speed is a factor too7

Peddle: Right. The combination of the phase-locked loop and the constant linear speed is unique.

PL: In order to include these two characteristics, did you have to design your own disk-controller board7

Peddle: Perhaps, but quite frankly, the system is optimized for cost as well as performance. We get higher-capacity disks and higher-resolution screens. We consider our forte to be systems design. That’s what we are — systems designers, systems architects, as opposed to just logic people. We have a mixture in our company of big computer people and microcomputer people, specifically for the purpose of doing a better job of systems architecture from the top down.

PL: Why did you use the 6522 parallel I/O chips for the disk-controller board and other input/output? Specific design virtues?

Peddle: Yes, basically. We used them for some things we do with printers and particularly for our parallel ports. Look at the way we did our IEEE or printer port. We needed to have the ability for our I/O devices to be glitchless when we change states and directions. Intel parts aren’t. Motorola parts and MOS Technology parts are, because we designed them that way. By the way, I used Intel parts to begin with. Had to redesign.

PL: Why did you choose Group Code Recording [a technique of compressing data by squeezing out zeros] as a method for increasing disk-storage capacity? Were there other options?

Peddle: No. We proved to ourselves long ago that Group Code, with the higher bit densities and the kind of recording scheme we had, gave a much more reliable recording. It’s a question of reliability as much as it is higher capacity.

PL: Is the encoding itself done in the BIOS [basic input/output system]?

Peddle: No, it’s done in the disk-controller chip that does the speed control, and yeah, there’s a small amount in the programming. The system is really a combination of micro- and multiprocessing, if you will. Some pieces of the stuff are done in the chip itself. Some of it’s done in a ROM [read-only memory] that’s outboard — it’s currently being implemented into a gate array — and some of it’s done in the outboard micro that’s in the controller. So it’s — I don’t like to overuse the term “systems design,” but in fact that’s what it is. It really is a totally integrated design. You partition pieces of it but the focus is constantly architecture.

PL: The high-resolution monitor is one of the computer’s most striking features. A lot of computers now have separate RAM for the screen. Your computer has some screen RAM, but it also gives the monitor access to main memory. Why did you choose that approach?

Peddle: First, cost. Second, programming ease — the ability to move memory around for some of the high-resolution kinds of things we do. Third, it’s a trade-off. You can use character graphics part of the time and give yourself back about 40K of memory. If you want to go into high-resolution mode, you give up that memory. So it’s an architectural decision. The only memory we have outboard is there because for timing purposes we needed another memory. We’re already really doing a 32-bit fetch for the screen right now. We needed some parallel memory in order to be able to do that.

PL: Why the Hitachi 46505 CRT-controller chip?

Peddle It’s a third-generation computer. Therefore we were looking at a state-of-the-art product that was just coming out. Look at what we did with the CODEC [coder-decoder for digitized voice]. Look at what we did with the communications chips. We were looking for the thing that was the best product at that point in time, even though the price was high, because we felt that we didn’t want to redesign later. So we went with the best ICs we could get, under the assumption that the price would drop.

PL: For the RS-232C serial ports, you chose the 7201 programmable communications chip. I know one programmer who’s been singing its praises as something to use in writing communications software. But why that particular chip?

Peddle: We felt that you needed a channel of synchronous communications. The 7201 gives us two channels, totally under program control.

I want to contrast what we consider different in the third generation from the second generation. Second-generation computers were basically ROM-based machines, right? They were designed to power up, run, and go. They were designed to be used by fairly trivial programmers to write simple programs. What we discovered was that all those architectures kept getting in the way of the more sophisticated programmers. On this machine, we felt that almost all programs would be written by sophisticated applications programmers, and you would have a higher level of operating languages and utilities. And, therefore, we wanted to make the machine absolutely as soft as we could, so that programmers could just get in and do anything. The keyboard is an example of that. The whole concept of the keyboard is to allow universal configurability by the programmer so that you can have a machine that is so personalized that the user buying the product believes he is buying a unique product. What he’s really buying is a general-purpose piece of hardware, which we built, and a very sophisticated, specialized piece of software written by a creative programmer who’s solving that particular problem. But if those are married and properly packaged and presented to a user, he’ll believe this machine is tailored for him, whereas you couldn’t do that with products from the previous generation.

So the whole idea was to put enough hardware in the machine — the communications chip, programmable data rates, and so on — to stay out of the programmer’s way.

PL: I guess there’s no reason why the keyboard couldn’t be switched to a Dvorak format?

Peddle: Absolutely. Whatever you want. Have fun.

PL: Is anyone doing it yet?

Peddle: No, we haven’t seen anybody do it, but we’re already supporting 31 different keyboard styles. We intend to support as many keyboards as people want to create.

PL: The 8048 microprocessor seems to be a popular choice for keyboards, but it’s really a general-purpose microprocessor isn’t it? What suits it especially to scanning and so on?

Peddle It’s available from Intel, and it’s quite reasonably priced. You know, there are a couple of others that were probably equally doable, but I think the answer is really that it’s an Intel product.

PL: What applications did you have in mind for the CODEC voice capability?

Peddle: It’s our belief that machines in the business environment are going to have to become increasingly user-friendly. That’s the reason for the high-resolution screen. If we could do it, voice input would be in the product right now. It will be if it ever becomes available. You could buy a Datsun 280 ZX that has a pretty voice to tell you the door is open. You’re going to be able to buy a refrigerator that will talk to you before long. We believe voice is the competition that the Japanese have chosen for the next generation of consumer products. We feel that the use of the voice to personalize training, to interrupt for electronic mail, is something that will be required by customers in the near future. High-resolution graphics on the Apple II showed us something about what this marketplace is all about. On the PET, we put in character graphics because it was cheap and it was available. We won design awards with the PET character graphics because the average programmer could jump all over them and was made happy quickly. In the long run, the Apple graphics won because more creative programmers could do more with that product, to the point that we felt that a next-generation product couldn’t not have high-resolution graphics. We think voice fits the same category, that by making it available, we will have a whole generation of programmers start to use it.

You know, we showed the concept of what I consider to be the first personal computer to the financial community. The first announcement and demonstration was in New York in early ‘77. People said, “Why do people buy these things?” Kind of a funny question. I answered them with Edison’s concept about the electrical industry: “What use is a baby?” Okay? And in fact, I think my implied prophecy was correct. Fundamentally, we’re at that stage with voice. People will find a use for it.

PL: What part of the design of this computer gave you the most satisfaction?

Peddle: [Laughs] Making the company happen, for me personally, because I got a chance to do only a little bit of the design work this time. I did less on this computer than any of the things I’ve done over the past few years. I think the fact that we met all our goals, achieved all the things that we set out to do. This is the most sophisticated product that has been done in this kind of a marketplace. We had to bring together several talents who had not worked together before. Making all those talents come together — the guys that understood IBM-compatible communications along with the guy that designed the VIC-20. There’s a lot of space between those people. Bringing them all together was satisfying. So I guess the answer to your question about the most satisfying part of the design of the computer was “none of the above.”

PL: What do you think general-purpose business microcomputers will be like two years from now?

Peddle: Network. Lots of memory. Very, very hard-disk-oriented. Sold through a different channel from that which the current marketplace is mostly being sold through.

PL: What sort of channel do you see?

Peddle: I think that you’re going to see more use of the mixture of direct and pseudodirect sales. I think you’re going to see a lot of follow-on selling. More service-oriented kind of selling. I think you’ll see computer retailers change into people who are more market-focused. I think you’ll see a lot more vertical markets. Some of the people that others think of as more traditional retailers are going to focus more and more on selling this product in a packaged kind of way. I think you’ll see dramatic changes in point-of-sale presentation. I think videodisc will be very important in both applications and point of sale.

PL: What do you think home computers will be like two years from now? How many of them do you think will be around?

Peddle: Luckily, millions. I think the market for computers split two years ago. I’m going to define two major segments, and there’s a smaller middle segment. One major market segment is the throwaway computer, the concept that the Sinclair [ZX81] epitomizes — the kind of computer that nobody should buy but everybody does. Truly disposable. You get the VIC-20, the TRS-80 Color Computer kind of thing, which has meaning and usefulness in terms of computer literacy, games, some form of that kind of activity. And then you get the more serious, third-generation computers that are really aimed at solving problems. They’re big, they’ve got enough disk capacity, and hooked together they really attack. I think what’s happened is the guys who started this market find themselves in the middle. They’re not powerful enough to compete with the higher-end guys, and they’re too expensive to compete with the low-end guys. Other than the education market, which I consider to be a very specialized market and which I expect Atari to dominate — in this country at least, because they’ve got some real strong leads in that area — I think you’re going to see a real dropping out of what I call the middle-range computer buyers. You’re going to see a lot of stuff under five hundred dollars, and a lot of stuff in the three- to five-thousand-dollar price range, and relatively little in between.

PL: Looking at the other end of the microcomputer market, how much do you expect the superchips, like the Intel 80286 and the National Semiconductor 16032, to cut into the mini-computer market?

Peddle: I’m going to not answer the question but give you an answer as to what I think is happening to the minicomputer market. I’ve been a distributed-intelligence fan and dedicated to making that marketplace happen since 1967, working for General Electric and for several companies that were really all distributed. I think I made a contribution to that marketplace. I think the minicomputer represented, at the beginning, a first step in distributed processing. I think the microcomputer companies are, in fact, representing the next step in that. And I think networked microcomputers are, in fact, a new product. Now, the question is, what benefit do I get out of a 32-bit machine? If I get a bigger language, better memory management, those kinds of things, code that I need to move from some other place, sure, I’ll have that. But in fact, if you look at the number of new programmers and the number of people who have the opportunity to really crank out user-friendly and very meaningful programs, I think that’s the most exciting thing about the microcomputer marketplace. It’s not a given that the kind of programming that has to-be-done to make computers usable by people has to have that 32-bit power. Price drives people. Software availability drives people. But I think that the mainframe step-up in function is less important than what we do with databases, for instance. Does one of those micros make the generation of very powerful back-end database processing possible? Then it’s very exciting.

PL: So you think multi-user systems are going to fade away in favor of networking?

Peddle: I’ve believed that for a long time.

PL: Will multitasking, then, be an essential feature in single-user systems?

Peddle: I think so. Just to run the networks and to do local spooling and all of the things that you want a computer to do. A computer should do what you want it to do. If it’s capable of doing several things at one time and not slowing me up, it ought to do those things.

PL: Without regard to the limits of current technology, what features would your own dream-machine have?

Peddle: Voice in. Video messaging. A total product that allows me to work anywhere in the world and communicate with others anywhere in the world and with databases anywhere in the world.

PL: Portable?

Peddle: Both. One in my office and one in my briefcase and maybe one in every hotel room. I really want to be able to talk to them. I want to have all kinds of my own private storage. I want to have access to a worldwide network of storage.

PL: What competitors do you fear more, the small start-up companies with venture capital or the big computer companies? Is the time past for the small company?

Peddle: I felt that we were the last venture-capital start-up company— we’re not venture capital, because we’re funded by Kidde, but that was alternate venture capital. Fortune seems to be trying to prove me wrong. Grid does also. Grid has a specialized product. If we’re not the last, Fortune is, in my opinion. The minicomputer company that I fear the most is DEC. The big computer company I fear the most is IBM. The third company I fear the most is whichever Japan decides to let be the winner.

PL: You think they’ll decide that?

Peddle: I think if they don’t, they won’t beat either of the other two guys.

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What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

The Company

When I saw this ad, I thought the company was either a one-shot wonder or a parody. To my surprise, it was a real company.

Smoke Signal Broadcasting was founded in 1976 by Frederic "Ric" Hammond. The company initially focused on broadcasting consulting, but switched to creating peripherals for the Southwest Technical Products Corporation’s 6800 system. Their first product was a RAM extension board, followed by a floppy drive system. In the late 1970s, the company create their own line of Motorola 6800-based systems named the Chieftain. The system ran its own operating system: OS-68.

In the early 1980s, the company switched its focus to business systems, with the release of the Chieftain Business System line and Signal DOS, an update to OS-68. Around the same time, the company dropped "Broadcasting" from its name.

Smoke Signal introduced a Motorola 68000-powered microcomputer named the VAR/68K in 1984. The system used a Unix-compatible system named Regulus OS. In the late 1980s, Smoke Signal started to lose market share as competitors focused on more advanced architectures. There was also limited demand for the VAR/68K. The company ceased operations in 1991.

The Application

So, what exactly was the TP-1 Text Processing System? Here is a product description from the Smoke Signal Broadcasting October 1978 catalog:

The SSB Text Processing System is by far the most powerful text formatter available to the micro user. Over 50 commands are provided for easy paging, margin setting and spacing. Right, left, right and left as well as center justification modes are all handled. the SSB Text Processor is actually a formatting language allowing the creation of macros including variables. All of these features provide for very efficient footnote handling, special document preparation, and form letters.

Other features supported include page numbering (either Arabic or Roman Numerals), complete page size control (line length, page length, top, bottom, left and right margins, etc.), tabs, conditional formatting control, exact title placing, contiguous space and text control, plus much, much more.

The TP-1 Text Processor in conjunction with the SE-1 Text Editor will give your micro the powers of the best text processing system available.

I only found one article talking about TP-1. Ralph Roberts wrote an article for the January 1979 issue of Creative Computing entitled “Down with Typewriters!” The article mentions both the SE-1 text editor and the TP-1 text processor. Roberts wrote:

The reasons I have for being in personal computing have usually been unsatisfactory when trying to explain to friends why all these little black boxes are around.
…
I kept searching for that perfect reason, the justification that would capture the imagination and cause the person hearing it to not only understand why he should have a computer but to rush out and get one. Then I bought some new software from Smoke Signal Broadcasting and a blinding light dawned, it thundered loudly, and the ANSWER, I fully developed, popped into my head. The perfect solution, something many people want to do. I speak of writing, of processing words, of creating literary masterpieces. I, like many of the readers of Creative Computing, was for years a frustrated writer. Now the computer could help me write, prepare manuscripts, submit them, and with luck, sell my writings. Sell, that’s the key word, because it means a check for your writing and money in the bank for more bass boats, mistresses or a new high speed printer for the trusty old microprocessor.

…

There are two pieces of software that I purchased from Smoke Signal and use in the writing and preparation of manuscripts for submission. The first is the SE-1 text editor, the second is the TP-1 text processor. Both came on floppy disc for my BFD-68 floppy and both have very excellent documentation. With these programs, my computer became a very powerful word processor. With these tools, I don’t have to worry about making mistakes, I can pound out my stories in a fine creative fervor showing a kingly disregard for spelling and punctuation. If I make an error, it’s simplicity itself to go back and change it. If I fail to explain why the hero in one of my science fiction stories conveniently comes up with a laser pistol, I can add that paragraph later. By use of these two programs, I can completely defeat the aforementioned diabolical conspiracy of vindictive, tin-hearted typewriters and see my words in print.

…

Now we have this article written and polished and corrected and rewritten and repolished and recorrected. Here comes the “hard” part, it’s got to be put on paper neatly and in a professional format for submission to Creative Computing. (If Creative Computing doesn’t buy this article, it’s easy to use the editor program and put in the name of another magazine. Heh, Heh!). Actually, this turns out to be the easiest step of all. I merely call up the Smoke Signal TP-1 text processor and it prints merrily away on my Decwriter, formatting neatly with the correct number of lines per page and spacing so that both margins are perfectly even (right and left justification). The text processor also puts my name at the top of each page, the title of the piece and numbers the pages in order. All this, in case the pages get scattered at the magazine and need to be reassembled. I go have a cold soda pop or whatever while the computer does all the typing at 360 words per minute. Should a mistake have slipped by me in my earlier proofreading, it’s extremely simple to correct that error and print that one page over.

…

Using the text editing program I can control what I write and with the text processor I control formatting and manuscript preparation. It makes putting words together an immense amount of fun. It makes you, the person, more powerful and able to leap taller stacks of printed pages by using the computer as a tool to increase the amount of work you can do. The purpose of this article has not been to explain the inner workings of the Smoke Signal SE-1 Editor and TP-1 Text Processor but to put across to you the new justification I have discovered for owning my very own computer and to show how easy you can use the word processing power of a personal computer to achieve goals that might be impossible otherwise.

Have you ever used any Smoke Signal Broadcasting products? Tell us about it in the comments below.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

Since I missed last month, I knew I couldn’t miss this month. This poll will be live for a week.

Here are this month’s choices:

Read more

This month, let’s look at a couple of comics from a smaller Atari magazine. Enjoy.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

from the May 1, 1995 issue of MicroTimes magazine

Forsight: The Lessons of Borland, (and Hindsight) The Promise Of New Ventures from Philippe Kahn

By Dennis Erokan and Mary Eisenhart

The last time we went down to Scotts Valley to do a big interview with Philippe Kahn, Borland had just embarked on what was to be a spectacular roller-coaster ride. It had recently acquired the Paradox database software, and Kahn was gleefully demoing Quattro, the spreadsheet that was supposed to give Lotus 1-2-3 some serious competition. Still in the future was Borland’s startling acquisition of Ashton-Tate, essentially in order to have dBASE.

The wild ride took its toll on both Borland and Kahn, who was even then one of the few surviving founder-CEOs in the business. The company was battered not only by corporate culture clash from the merger and ferocious competition in the database software market, but by a long-running look-and-feel lawsuit by Lotus, claiming that the 1-2-3 compatible menus in Quattro infringed Lotus’s copyrights. As a Massachusetts court decided the case in favor of Lotus and levied a multimillion-dollar judgment against Borland, Kahn was beset on another side by shareholder lawsuits and attempts to oust him, citing such i issues as the Lotus suit and Kahn’s predilection for making (at his own expense) Borland promotional holiday CDs featuring himself jamming with stellar jazz musicians.

These days Kahn, who resigned as CEO and president late last year but remains as chairman, seems much recuperated from a traumatic ‘94. A leaner Borland i is focusing successfully on the developer-tools market—Quattro having been sold to Novell, and the database business having become commoditized—and he’s excited about his new startup, Starfish Software, currently residing in a vacated Borland building and rapidly developing its own corporate culture with a mix of ex-Borland and outside people. (“Starfish—you know, you cut off one of its legs, and it grows back,” says one person. “The Starfish Enterprise!” quips another.)

Founded last year by Kahn and artist/interface designer Sonia Lee, Starfish already has two successful products. The ever-popular Sidekick organizer and a productivity enhancer known as Dashboard were acquired from Borland, and the company is working on a host of Windows 95 products to ship when Microsoft finally releases the OS.

Meanwhile, things are looking up on the Borland side. An appeals court recently overturned Lotus’s victory against Borland, at least temporarily removing the threat of the huge judgment against them.

And, greatly to Kahn’s amusement, he’s been approached by Sony jazz maven George Butler about a commercial release of those much-maligned promotional CDs.

“Borland’s getting a little more stable now, and with this place taking off, it’ll be easier,” says Kahn, clearly tempted. “But as you know, music is a commitment. The guy wants to do it, but then he wants to tour, and I don’t have time for a tour. Unless we couple it with a user group tour...”

At what point in Borland’s history did Starfish come into existence?

Starfish was started in January 1994 by Sonia Lee and myself. Sonia is a graphic artist and user interface designer who started focusing on building better software to manage people’s lives.

She figured a lot of people had expended a lot of time focusing on managing businesses with software; Intuit had spent some time in managing personal finances. But very few people had focused on managing people’s lives and helping people be more productive—for professionals who have kids, there’s a whole bunch of balls that you have to juggle all the time, and no one was focusing on that.

She started Starfish to do that; sketched out a whole bunch of products and started building a few. I helped her out—didn’t have too much time, because Borland was taking a lot of my time. But over time we started hiring developers and designing the software that you’ll see in the Windows 95 time frame.

The focus was “Slimware,” building simple products with very visual user interfaces and a new approach to dealing with all of this organizational communications type of thing.

Starfish started evolving, and then Borland took the turn of focusing on development and development tools. There were these two great products, Dashboard and Sidekick, at Borland, and Borland was looking for a home for them. Several companies were interested—they had a lot of potential because they’re very good brand names and also good technology. Starfish made an offer that was more appealing than the other ones.

Dashboard is a productivity booster for Windows—it’s something that makes Windows easier and more efficient. It’s reviewed consistently as a great thing, and just won Editor’s Choice at _PC Mag_. We’re working on a version for Windows 95; we think that’ll be an opportunity.

At first people say, “Windows 95 will bring world peace and solve world hunger,” but the bottom line is that new operating systems mean new opportunities. because they never do everything. Just like the Macintosh has lots of utilities and different things.

Instead of taking Sidekick into the realm of “We’re going to build the best corporate-work-group product,” like Lotus Notes or something, we’re looking at making it the best personal communicator. We believe that where you keep your address book, where you manage your time, is where you want to do these things from. If I want to send something to Dennis, I look you up in Sidekick and I want to blast a note to you; I don’t want to change programs. The natural place to do that is in Sidekick.

“We do a little of that today in Sidekick 2.0, but we’ll do a lot of that in the Windows 95 version, which will be available when Windows 95 ships. The future of Sidekick is as your helper, your personal communicator.

This is a personal question, because I [Dennis] was the last known user of the Macintosh version of Sideick--you did feel as to the Mac version as you did to the Windows/PC version?

We like the Macintosh Sidekick, but the Windows is the one where we’ve put a lot of attention.

But that’s very interesting. As recently as a week ago, I started looking at every contact manager/organizer on the Macintosh, and they’re so weak compared to what we do in Sidekick 2.0, that we were starting to say, “Maybe we should do something in there!” (laughs)

All these products have some interesting aspects to them, a lot of them actually borrowed from work we had done over the years, because as you know we kind of invented the category back in ’84 with the first Sidekick. But nobody’s done a great job on the Macintosh, which might be an opportunity. I’m not announcing that we’re going to do something, but it’s interesting to see that there’s an open market.

We sure hope the Mac will be successful, but what we’re seeing there is that a lot of the better software is done by people who see a bigger commercial opportunity on the Windows side. Because if you’re a software developer, it’s hard to develop software for a platform that doesn’t have the volume, so the challenge for Apple is to get the volume up.

You were one of the first large companies to see that, back when you closed down your Macintosh side. Is it still just not enough critical mass for you?

What we see is that it’s about 10% of the marketplace. That could shrink when Windows 95 comes out. We don’t want that to shrink; it’s good that there’s a competitive market. But the challenge to Apple is to do what it takes to get a lot of Macs out there, whether it’s clones or licensing the operating system. Something’s got to happen.

If that were the case, it would make a big difference. But one of the key ingredients to getting good software is to have great tools, and one of the reasons Windows has an advantage is that today the development tools are better on Windows than they are on Macintosh. I think Apple has not paid enough attention to the tools market.

There are no tools such as [Borland’s] Delphi in the Macintosh market. Developing a modern application today is a very complex challenge, because the level of software is such that a single person, or two or three guys in a garage, have a hard time doing that level. It’s not just the design and the development process; it’s the quality assurance, the testing. Forget the distribution challenges, we’ll talk about that in a second. But the act of developing an application is extremely complex, and that has to do with the tools.

Traditionally on the Mac or even on the PC you have to do it in C++, or in C, and that’s a very complex process. The other category of tools that’s been available has been more interpretive tools—you can build your Visual Basic application under Windows, or your HyperCard application on the Mac. But everybody knows that a HyperCard app or a Visual Basic app are toys. You can distribute it; it’s good for a little medical application you write on the side. But it’s never going to be the next spreadsheet or the next word processor.

The result is that it’s very difficult for small companies to emerge in key markets.

About three years ago Borland went on the idea that a new kind of tools had to emerge, one that gave you the ease of design and conceptualizing what you wanted to do that you’d get from a visual development environment, and on the other side, the performance of a state-of-the-art optimizing compiler, which is what C++ does—it crunches your code into something real small and fast that can execute very rapidly. It allows you to do a number-crunching spread-sheet or a word processor that performs reasonably. But on the other hand, you need those rocket-scientist guys to build the software.

Bringing both together is something that people said couldn’t be done. Bringing those two together was kind of a technology challenge that was met, and the reviews of the product are great.

A lot of people look at Delphi as a product that’s great for client-server corporate applications, and it is. But what I think is much more important—the importance of Delphi in the next ten years, and tools like it, is that it will bring back the vision of having three guys in a garage being able to build the next killer app. Bring back creativity, if you want, to the software development process.

It seemed that in the last five years, the small company didn’t have a chance any more; it had to be the Microsofts, Borlands, and Lotuses of this world that had to build the software. That’s one of the things that Delphi can do.

I have the theory that the notion Wall Street and a lot of financial types have, that software is going to consolidate just like the car industry, is wrong. Yes, there’s going to be consolidation. Maybe there’s going to be more megamergers. But will there be small software companies, or software companies that can grow? We absolutely believe so, because unlike the car industry or the airplane industry, you don’t need a factory, a plant, to do that. The only thing you need is what we have here at Starfish—we have thirty-five people, out of which twenty-seven or so are doing software development, and the rest are doing marketing and sales.

The incredible opportunity for distribution, we believe, is twofold. There’s the explosion of retail—retail is the way most software is sold today. It’s not as difficult as people think to be in retail.

If you have a title that people like, they’ll just pick it up. For example, with Sidekick, at Starfish we came out with 2.0. and we became an instant retail hit. A lot of people said, “Oh, they’ll never give you distribution at retail!” We got instant distribution. and we’re already one of the two or three best-selling programs out there.

It’s a bit like the hit in music—if you can’t get your own label recognized, you can always find someone that will publish you if you have soemthing that’s right there. That’s what happens in the music business—you have this proliferation of labels out there. It’s exactly the same story in software, that’s what we’re contending.

The second piece is the Internet, electronic distribution. We have our Web site up—our Web site is probably better than Microsoft’s. Here we’re thirty-five people, a $10 million company, and we can give as good service as this huge $4 billion company.

So what are you doing on your Web page?

We do tech support, we take orders. Not only do we take orders, we have downloadable thirty-day unlockable trial versions of our software. The problem with electronic distribution, though, is the size of what you want to distribute.

Which leads me to one of the principles that we’re focusing on in this company—Slimware.

If you have something that fits on four or five disks, download times are very long. If it’s on a CD-ROM, forget it—electronic distribution just doesn’t work.

The concept of Slimware ties in with online distribution, because the download times are reasonable. On CompuServe, Sidekick 2.0 is available for download, the full product, and people get charged on their CompuServe account. On CompuServe it’s been extremely successful; on the Internet shopping network, I think we’re the most successful product right now.

One of the reasons, I think, is that everyone’s building these huge pieces of software, and we’re focusing on figuring out how you can make software small, fast, and compact, and very usable. This idea of Slimware is the idea of focusing on 80% of the functionality of a piece of software, that really will make it successful, rather than adding the last 20%, which will turn a one-disk product into a six-disk product.

And give you nothing extra that you can use.

That you really use.

So the idea is radical simplification of things. One of the key guiding principles of what we’re doing at Starfish is focusing on Slimware, focusing on communications and particularly on telephony, and everything that’s happened with the merger of digital communications and computers.

It seems like with a company of thirty-five, you can take time to make things slim, but when you’ve got a company with hundreds or thousands, just the political pressures involved make things fatter and fatter.

That’s true—but one of the things we’re looking at is setting the culture in the company. We’re thirty-five employees today; a month ago we were twenty. We’re growing fast; in this business you have to grow to some extent, as you know from your own business.

The challenge is to set a culture, a modus operandi that gets people to focus on building this kind of products. It’s not going to happen just because you’re a small company and you get to have your hands on everything, but because people have interiorized that mission, are fully empowered to make it happen, and make it happen.

That’s what we’re focusing on. Simple rules: Thou shalt fit thy product on one diskette. That kind of immediately limits things. People say, “I have to do all these things, I need a new release, and I need to fit it all on one disk. That means I have to streamline things.”

We’re back to one of the things that I think is going to be very important—software craftsmanship. The kind of people we have building software here are not coders, they’re architects and craftsmen.

That’s very important, software craftsmanship. It forces people to not put in everything they can think about, but focus on the difficulty of software, which is minimalism. The issue is never what you should do, it’s what you should not do. It’s like a Miles Davis solo. It’s got less notes. You can hear a lot of notes, but they’re not played, right? It’s this minimalist approach.

How much is this enabled by being able to use and reuse objects, and not having to write code from scratch all the time?

Some of the guiding principles here are to use an object-oriented architecture and to reuse code. For example, in a lot of software we have there is a communications component, because we do a lot of things that are going to be tied to communications. Those components are going to be reused. The more they’re reused, the more they’re streamlined, the more they’re debugged, the more they’re efficient.

On the time management side, there are components that get reused. Same thing with the storage components. So the ability to build software by components, and reuse these components and keep on streamlining some core components that we use, I think helps a lot, and will help a lot as we grow. That’s part of the challenge, to keep that going, because the natural temptation of a software engineer is to say, “Oh, I’ll rewrite this thing because I can do it better than these guys.” It’s never the case, but it’s always an illusion.

It’s not art history, it’s craftsmanship. As such, we want people to be those craftsmen.

And as time goes on, you expect to have an increasing library of objects that will be the foundation of the various products?

That’s correct. The idea is that as you evolve and grow, you have an increasing amount of these components that you reuse. Plug and play, wire them into different apps.

Do you see a lot of products that can be done on one diskette, or are you pretty much done with the two you have?

We see, indeed, a lot of products that can be done on a diskette. As a matter of fact, we think that most products can be done on a diskette, provided that we focus on what people really use.

If word processors nowadays were focused on what people really use, you’d probably need half of a diskette. You take 35MB, and what do you really use?

We’re not trying to do a word processor. Word processing per se is not something you do. What you do is you write a letter. You write a piece of email: You compose a fax or build a newsletter.

The focus we have here is looking at solutions—what do people want to do?—and try to see if we can do a good job of streamlining that process. People don’t really want a spreadsheet—they want to do their budget. But instead we’ve given them this incredibly complex tool called a spreadsheet from which they have to derive their budget. It’s not necessarily what most people would do.

We need to rethink, a little bit, how software works, and that’s what Starfish is about, rethinking what people are trying to do, and analyzing what they are doing, and saying, “If that’s what you’re doing, is that the kind of software you need? Or would a piece of software that did this and this be a better deal for you?”

We’re focusing on the solution, rather than have a solution looking for a problem. To a large extent those huge word processors are solutions looking for a problem, because most of us don’t need to do endnotes with footnotes and cross-references across the document and multilevel subjects—when was the last time you did that? [laughter]

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could use this stuff as modules when you needed them, but having to carry around all this excess baggage you’ll never use is a pain.

That’s exactly the point.

How did that happen? I think it happened because of a competition focused on winning comparative reviews in the PC Worlds, PC Magazines of this world. It’s a feature creep— “oh jeez, the other guys have the multilevel table of contents, and we need to have that!”

It’s gotten ridiculous, and it’s true for every category. It’s true for your paint program. It’s true for your draw program. People think they need Adobe Photoshop to do their usual little job, and it’s not the case. We have gotten to the point where the box is heavier than the machine you run it on! [laughs] Your notebook computer is lighter than Microsoft Office!

Something’s wrong!

It’s starting to look like the UNIX manuals.

It is! It is! We’re making fun of UNIX and all that stuff, but that’s what we’re doing. We’re building this nuclear power plant when really what we want is a little bit of electricity and AA batteries do the job.

People will keep on buying those things and using them, but our focus here is radically different.

One myth we need to debunk here is that it’s easier to write light software. It’s not easier, it’s harder.

It’s like writing haiku for a living.

Exactly. It’s being minimalist. You’ve got to spend a lot of time analyzing what people do, thinking through what people do. It’s not like “I’m going to build a word processor so I have to do all these things.” That’s easy. Then you just try to fit it into a user interface. Here, it’s “Oh, I only have one disk, and I need to solve this problem. How do I do this?”

It’s much harder. You know this—writing something in one page is harder than writing the same thing in five,

I think that’s an opportunity for people who have the creative juices and the impetus to make things happen. It’s also an opportunity for smaller software companies to succeed. It’s kind of the component software revolution.

Do you see the opportunity for small companies as being mostly niche markets, rather than competing head-on with the Microsofts and Lotuses in the mainstream applications?

I think there’s a lot of opportunities like that, but I don’t know what we call small niche anymore. Because if the big niche is Microsoft Office, Novell PerfectOffice, fine. But what will people use most of the time? It might not be those products, ultimiately.

I don’t think there’s any opportunity for any small company to compete with. Novell PerfectOffice or Microsoft Office. It takes three hundred people to write this kind of stuff, and it’s not even fun. It is not fun to do that.

Are the people who buy Starfish products the Same people that are buying Borland’s?

No. Borland is now completely focused on the market for software developers worldwide, in partnership with companies such as Novell. That’s who its customers are—ultimately professional software developers, or people who want to make a living that way.

Starfish is focused on everyone. What we’re trying to do is software such that if you have a personal computer, you’re going to want a copy of it. Hopefully we’ll be able to let you know with some marketing vehicle that you might want one of our products, such as Sidekick or Dashboard.

Sidekick’s an instant hit, though—it’s done well for lo these ten years and never really disappeared from the scene.

It never disappeared, but we made one mistake,

In 1984 we invented this PIM category, and we didn’t push it. We got distracted. That was probably one of our mistakes at Borland.

Somehow we focused on this big developer-tool stuff, not realizing Sidekick, just like Quicken, was something that everybody could use, and we could be in that business.

Starfish is private now? You own some, and who else?

One hundred percent private. Me, and Sonia Lee, and the employees here, and Borland owns 10%.

No VC?

No VC, no venture capitalists.

Life is sometimes simpler that way.

Yeah—Borland never had venture capital. At Borland we did the antithesis of a usual startup— we started with nothing and ran it to $450 million, and never received any venture capital. It was one of the only software companies that way.

You’re starting this company under somewhat different conditions than when you started Borland. There are some similarities of emphasis, like small-cheap-and-useful, the absence of hype, the lack of interest in feature wars—but the world is real different from what it was ten years ago.

In both cases, most people at the time, and today, are saying that it’s impossible to do a new software company. In both cases, I think, they’re wrong. They were obviously proven wrong before, and I think this time they’re wrong also.

The dynamics are the same, yes. At the time, the dominators of the industry were Microsoft already; IBM, who was selling a lot of stuff; and Digital Research. Lotus was emerging when we started. Those were the players at the time. Today the players are Microsoft and a whole lot of other companies.

Why is it possible? We discussed that—it’s that the channels of distribution are actually looking for other kinds of products, and customers are kind of tired of buying nuclear power plants every time they need to do something.

And besides, once you’ve bought it, you’ve bought it. You don’t go into the computer store looking for a new word processor every few weeks.

You got it! You’re looking for something else, such as Sidekick, such as Dashboard. We are focused 100% on software that will help you communicate, help you get organized. We’re not into the games business; we’re not trying to do Doom or Heretic or one of these products— it’s a different world.

In both cases, there’s an incredible opportunity. One thing that’s different is I think I’m wiser today than I was at the time. Some of the temptations—oh, let’s build everything, let’s grow, let’s move into a fairly alien area like buying Ashton-Tate—we’ll resist those.

Also, I think the incredible saga of Lotus and this lawsuit, fighting for five years on a position of principle, was the right thing to do. It’s something that’s really hurt our company a lot. But to some extent, that fight is hopefully behind us, and we hope that kind of sets the tone for intellectual property and that this will not repeat itself.

We certainly would have done some things slightly differently—the first court in Boston, Judge Keeton’s court, obviously was...

In the pocket of [Lotus CEO) Jim Manzi?

[laughs] I didn’t say that!

We should have done something.

You did try to get a change of venue...

Well, we tried, but I think that maybe we should have been more aggressive. We were playing this in a very ethical way, and we were hoping that the original court would find a balanced judgment, but we didn’t have it.

So I think we’re much wiser there.

The other area I think is different, where I think there’s more wisdom, is the understanding of the process of the growth of the company. The idea of finding people and setting up a clear mission at first, so we don’t err from that.

When Borland acquired Ashton-Tate, a lot of the original values in the company kind of disappeared. We became a much bigger entity, and it took a while—up until about six months ago—to just shrink it back to something we felt was more manageable.

From an industry standpoint, conditions are similar and different. Distribution channels are now much more receptive to simple component software because of what’s happening with the Internet. There’s something that’s happening today that wasn’t happening at the time, which is the convergence of computers and communications. That’s, I think, something that wasn’t happening at the time. What was happening at the time was the explosion of the personal computer in business.

Now the two factors that we see are the personal computer in the home, and digital communications and computers merging together. And I think those factors will help build Starfish.

Do you see little mobile communicators like Newtons and Envoys as an opportunity? Right now you’re just in Windows, but in the future, a portable Sidekick?

There’s not per se today a portable Sidekick, but there’s a connection between a Sidekick on Windows and a Casio or a Sharp Wizard.

But a product like your favorite pager— [waves pager] the next generation of these is a two-way system and needs a hub. Part of what we’re looking at is creating a hub in Windows with Sidekick. We believe when you go to two-way paging, this is much cheaper than cellular technology, because it’s radio wave.

The latest ones do acknowledgement and send-back stuff—you can program them to say several things—yes, no, etc.; or when the person sends you a page, part of their message sends you an assignment of each one of these keys, so when you press one of these keys it means “Yes, I agree with the meeting,” “No, I don’t agree.”

So it supplies its own answers?

Yes, because the answer is part of the question.

That’s the next generation. Those pagers become great personal communicators, and I think the explosion is going to come from this side tied to kind of a PC-type hub; more, in my opinion, than a Newton, which is a nice device, but after all, how many devices are you going to have?

Our vision is yes, there’s going to be little devices, but to a lot of people these pagers are cheap and communicate in an extremely efficient way. Envoy and all that builds on cellular technology, and cellular is expensive.

We believe that pagers, for example, are going to be a huge factor in home computing. Abstract from home computing, educational software, and those kinds of stuff, that’s fine, that’ll be very successful, But what are people going to do with their home computers?

I think people will want to give these pagers to their kids, to be able-to page their kids, know where their kids are—because the next generation of these also has GPS or some locating device so you know where people are. We think there’s going to be an explosion of that, and cellular phones are way too expensive for people to give to their kids. You’re not going to give your kid a cellular phone, but you might give him a pager.

I think that’s a very important piece of what we’re doing. When we say “personal communicator,” we’re talking about making it easy to send something. You’re in Sidekick, and “Oh, I want to blast Dennis! Bang!” It knows you’ve got one of those. It blasts it directly out. It’s very simple and immediate. If you acknowledge it, that shows up on my screen. Then if I’m not around it automatically knows where I am and automatically redirects it to my pager.

There’s a study that was made about these devices that include a locating system. They found out that most people loved the idea, except males between the ages of sixteen and forty. They absolutely did not want to be located. So there’s a lot of implications of all this— Big Brother Is Watching You kind of stuff.

I think the next ten years are going to be very interesting. A lot of people make’‘a lot of the Internet, and that’s really important, but I think there’s a whole other world of communicating besides setting up your home page and all these other things, which will always be kind of geekish. There’s a geeky quality to that—setting up your home page, and people saying your home page is like a porch, and you make it nice like your house...

Well, only a certain category of people are going to spend a lot of time setting up their home page. I have something else to do other than setting up my home page, and I’m pretty geeky. I’m a developer, right, but I’m not sure I want to spend a lot of time doing that. But I certainly will spend time communicating with others and doing these things in Sidekick.

Plus, many times the Net’s totally useless, It’s great for surfing and having fun; it’s an exploring device. Very few times do you do anything really useful on the Internet.

Taking this in a different direction and going back to the Borland days—did you like running a large company?

There’s positive sides and negative sides to that.

The positive side is that you have a lot of latitude and a lot of budgets to do interesting things, things that you wouldn’t do in a small company. The negative side is that because you have all these budgets, you tend not to have the same sense of urgency and pressure to make things happen. The big negative side is that you get consumed by things that are not necessarily what’s most important, but sometimes what’s most urgent.

But there’s both sides of the story. There’s things that Borland the company could do, like Delphi. If we wanted to build Delphi here, we could not do that. This is a big project, a three-to-four-year project with fifty people. To do that kind of software, you need a large company. That was the big advantage. To do Sidekick is more difficult in a large company because you don’t want to do things in a large way. You want to be minimalist.

So I don’t think large companies will be great at Slimware. Large companies will be great at building Novell PerfectOffice and Microsoft Office and products such as Delphi and Borland C++ or Visual C++. Those are the projects that fit a big company.

It was an interesting experience, though. That was a big multinational company. The advantage of a large company is also a multinational presence, places all around the world where you can actually build and sell software.

However, with Starfish we’re already present in Japan—we immediately created a presence in Japan with a Japanese version of Sidekick, for Kanji Windows. Windows is not the clearly dominant operating system in Japan, but we think that within two years Windows will dominate.

Does the Mac make more sense as a market in Japan?

Yes, the market share of the Macintosh in Japan is much higher than the market share of the Macintosh anywhere else in the world. Macintosh has about 25% market share. One of the reasons is that Apple did a good job early on building a Macintsoh market, and Windows was late.

So to some extent Japan shows what Macintosh could be if it was managed in a competitive manner with Windows. They’ve had tremendous success in Japan, and they could do better. They could take it to 40%.

How do you handle localization issues when you’re a small company like Starfish?

Well, we handle them carefully and efficiently. To build a Japanese version of Sidekick takes two engineers, so we have two engineers doing it. In a company the size of Borland, it’s a project for fifteen people!

Which includes managers and people to spin information up and down the corporate ladder?

Exactly. You can.do the same things on a much smaller scale with at least the same level of efficiency. So the challenge is to keep it in the right way.

What’s your relationship with Borland right now?

Well, I’m the chairman of the company, and so I’m involved in everything that has to do with strategic partnerships, anything that has to do with working with the Novells of this world and all of that. I’m involved with anything that has to do with the technology, the vision, the product strategy, with what the company does. That’s what I’m involved with. But I don’t run day-to-day operations. Gary Weitzel’s doing that.

You’re still a stockholder?

Yeah, I’m still probably the largest stockholder of the company.

So you still want that company to do great?

Oh, absolutely. Not only do I want Borland to do great, but I think that the products and technology Borland has built with Delphi, etc. are extremely important to the industry. Delphi really makes it possible for three or four people in a garage to build the next hit.

That’s not only my Borland hat; it’s also a matter of growing the industry and making sure that ten years from now there’s lots of software companies. It sounds kind of utopian, but I think it’s very important. That’s what led the PC revolution, and it’s seemed like we’re going to this concentration into large companies. I think that opening it up and making sure there are lots of software companies and lots of software creativity out there is very key.

The CD-ROM industry seems to be developing along the same lines as the record industry, with a lot of people doing individual products and finding a distributor. Do you see a lot of that happening in the software industry the same way?

Yeah, I think you’ll have a full-service turnkey type of publisher, and you’ll have people who set themselves up as independent publishers.

Would Starfish do something like that, if some guys got going with Delphi, for instance, and came up with something great?

Yeah, absolutely. We’re not counting on that, but if some guys come up with something that fits in our strategy and our vision and are people we want to work with, we would entertain that.

Now our vision and mission is not that—our vision and our mission is to build ourselves a lot of this stuff. But we would welcome that, absolutely, to be a publisher for these guys.

I think you’ll get both sides. You’ll get guys who say, “Hey, we’ve got distribution, we’ve got a name, we’ll do that.” And then there’s the other side of the business, which is “We just want to develop something; we want somebody to distribute it, and we want to have royalties.” Those guys will do well too, provided they find the right publisher.

You’ll get new labels, because yeah, sure, they can go to Microsoft, but there are pluses and minuses to going with a product that you’ve developed to Microsoft. Or you could go to Starfish or somebody else.

There’s always pluses and minuses. In a large company you can get lost, a lot of people get to see your software, so how do you protect your ideas when it’s a large company?

You know that a small company makes a commitment to your software; it’s an important commitment, they want it to succeed and you don’t get lost. The downside is that you maybe don’t have the power of a Microsoft getting behind something.

So how did Microsoft’s acquisition of Fox play out vis-a-vis your acquisition of Ashton-Tate?

Well, they really pulled the rug out from under our feet.

The first thing we did when we acquired Ashton-Tate was to announce that we were dropping all the lawsuit stuff [Ashton-Tate was, at the time, engaged in suing pretty much the entire dBASE clone community]. Immediately as we did that, Microsoft went out and bought FoxPro. Which was fine, because we decided not to sue them...

And then they dropped the prices dramatically. MicroWarehouse ads have a FoxPro competitive upgrade of $19.95. That really pulled the rug out from under Borland, because from a $695-795 product, we’re talking about a sub-$100 product. That made it very difficult; they really played hardball.

So where does all that stand now? What’s happening with Borland’s database products? Are they being redefined specifically as application generators?

A lot of that is the case. If you look at the latest Infoworld, it’s got a comparative review of programmable databases, and they decided that Paradox was the best one by far, over Microsoft Access and all the others. Paradox is one of the best products out there.

dBASE is probably the best product for the XBASE community. The XBASE community in the US has shrunk; in Japan or in Germany, it’s still very important.

But the size of those businesses has decreased. The desktop database business for Borland is probably a sub-$100 million business.

Where have the customers gone—migrated up to Oracle and Sybase?

No, I think they’re there, the pricing has just gone down. The units are actually pretty high, but the dollars are much less. There’s been some competiton from Access—Microsoft established itself. There’s still a reasonable number of units, but the prices have shrunk, and that changes the business.

It’s a business that could have been a $400-500 million business, and it’s now a sub-$100 million business. Ultimately it’ll be a healthier business, very streamlined, etc., but that’s been tough competition.

If you had it to do over again, would you acquire Ashton-Tate?

With 20/20 hindsight, the answer would be no, but that’s always easy. I think the strategy at the time was “Well, if we own Ashton-Tate, we will be bigger and stronger, and Microsoft is getting much stronger...”

I think that was a mistake. The strategy was not to be bigger and stronger; the strategy should have been “Let’s be focused and do what we do best.”

But, you know, you learn from that.

That was a big lesson.

How have the last couple of years been on you?

I think the last two years have been tough, for one precise reason— the criticism of the CDs, the criticism I got for continuing the Lotus lawsuit. We took this position of principle that we would not give in, because the issues that Lotus was bringing up were wrong, and if Lotus prevailed and we did not win an appeal on this, the whole industry would be seriously screwed. Because compatibility and a clear definition of what is copyrightable and what is not is absolutely key to this industry.

Lotus was contending, essentially, that chord changes were copyrightable. Not that software’s like music, but if chord changes would be copyrightable, when’s the next time you’d write a new song?

They’d all be done!

Right! Melodies certainly are copyrightable, but chord changes aren’t. They’re functional, and maybe you can get a patent on the twelve-bar blues, but you certainly can’t get a copyright! I’m sure some obscure judge somewhere who’s never heard a piece of music would be willing to decide to copyright chord changes, and some smart lawyer like Lotus’s would be able to convince the judge that was the case.

That’s really what happened. It’s obvious when you talk about chord changes and melodies, but when it comes to talking about software it’s pretty sophisticated.

What was really hard on me was the constant criticism I got for pursuing the position of principle. Lotus used this to basically undermine the company greatly, convincing Wall Street that we were going to have to spend $300 million paying them, we’d go out of business, and the Wall Street analysts believing that, and annoucing that we were going to go bankrupt.

That was really hard, because you’re torn between two things—one way which is “Oh jeez, we should really settle this thing and let it happen”; the other says, “You can’t do that!” There was so much criticism that it didn’t make sense any more for me to continue in that position, and it was hard.

A lot of people say Borland’s shrunk. Well, other companies have shrunk more than Borland, like Software Publishing. Actually, Borland is a leader in tools today. But that was hard.

What was the complaint about the CDs? You were paying for them with your own money, after all, not the company’s. Where did the shareholders get off thinking they had anything to gripe about?

Well, what happened was that people assumed that while I was doing that I wasn’t managing the company, it was a bad thing to do, and blah-blah-blah. “No value in doing this.” That started fundamentally with criticism in different publications, coming from different shareholders.

It was the image.

You were fiddling while Rome burned?

Right. “You should not be doing music, you should be managing the company.”

What people didn’t realize was that part of what our customers liked at Borland was that personal relationship, and the fact that there was more than just software.

As a matter of fact we should have called them multimedia CD-ROMs, and nobody would have said anything about it! [laughter]

It was part of silly criticism, and I think when it rains it pours. I think the main issue was the Lotus litigation. I think Wall Streeet and a lot of the business commentators assumed that we were the bad guys, Lotus was right, we copied. It was in many publications—we were the bad guys and we copied the order in which the words appeared in the menus, and therefore we probably were bad guys.

Just like if we had written another twelve-bar blues, you know?

So according to the decision of the appeals court, if Paperback Software [a Berkeley company founded by Adam Osborne that folded in the wake of a judgment that its VP-Planner spreadsheet infringed on Lotus copyrights in the same manner Quattro was alleged to do] had managed to last this long, would they be okay too?

Oh, it’s absolutely clear that Lotus put Paperback under in a totally unfair way. I’m glad you’re bringing that up. It’s clear that Adam Osborne was right, that Lotus destroyed a software company once, and tried to destroy Borland in exactly the same way.

If you took the ruling of the appeals court and applied it to Paperback they would have been fine.

So is Lotus going to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court?

They have, they announced it last Thursday. They are appealing it to the Supreme Court. It doesn’t go further than that.

We really hoped that that was defo us and that bac would stop spending money on lawyers.

But the Supreme Court may just decide “Forget it, we’re not even going to look at this.”

They just did that with Microsoft and Apple.

I think Lotus is wrong, that the Court of Appeals with three judges totally unanimously agreed on that, there’s no question. Chord changes are not copyrightable! [laughs]

I think it’ll be rejected and they’ll lose again. Fundamentally I don’t understand Lotus; they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars already in legal fees, and so they want to continue this. And they will lose. They will lose bigtime on this one.

It’s wrong. It’s yet more money spent on litigation rather than innovation. If I was a user of Louts products, whether it’s Notes or SmartSuite or 1-2-3, I’d be very worried, because what they’re telling users is that they believe that Notes APIs, Lotus 1-2-3 macros, are totally proprietary, meaning that if tomorrow Lotus stops evolving the product, you’re stuck, because they’d sue anybody who’d build a compatible product, even without taking any copyrighted stuff.

It’s even worse, if you think about it. If Lotus was right, Microsoft could close the industry forever. Because if anybody has some functional APIs to protect, it’s Microsoft. It is amazing that Lotus can’t see that—if Microsoft was using the same arguments that they’re trying to have pushed in their decision, they would never be able to write a Windows app ever! It makes no sense! It shows that they have no clue what they’re doing!

At the press conference when you guys acquired Paradox, you got up and said, “Of course this doesn’t mean we’re turning into a bunch of corporate assholes.”

And you didn’t. But you sure e did get big, and you sure did have to deal with a lot of corporate bogosity you didn’t have to deal with before. How do you propose to avert these problems from Starfish?

Well, I think we’ll have the same philosophies, but there’s things we can’t avert. Like if we get sued by someone for some reason, well, we’ll have to defend ourselves. If there’s positions of principle we need to take, we’ll take them; there’s not much we can do.

Do we want to be big? That’s not important to us. What’s important to us is to make our vision of building personal communicators happen, to build solutions for customers. The consequence for this is to grow, and that’s great. But growth for the sake of growth is not the goal of the company; the goal of the company is to provide the best software and the best service to customers, and as a consequence to grow.

Of course a lot of people here are excited—they’re part owners of the company. That’s exciting because it’s a great opportunity—how many startups are there that actually reach the stage of a $5 million in real sales? A lot of them never make it.

Growth has its attractiveness and has its challenges, and I think we’re trying to take everything we’ve learned from the Borland experience and try to apply it here.

To give you an example—you asked about the Ashton-Tate acquisition. One of the mistakes we made when we acquired Ashton-Tate was that we did not hire a new team in charge of integrating both companies. I certainly had no experience, and certainly none of the people on the team had any experience.

And there was a lot of cultural difference.

Absolutely. And none of the people on our team had any experience. So we kind of laid off everybody.

We did not do this right. That’s part of the execution side that could have been better, and if we ever. do something like that at Starfish, we certainly would know better. It’s bringing outside talent, not just having ingrown talent, and attracting the best people.

Today Starfish is trying to attract the best creative software engineering types and architects in the Bay Area and other places. But what’s very important here, unlike Borland where we were looking for very specific things, the kind of guys who like to build optimizing compilers, very special kinds of people—in the case of Starfish we’re looking for people who have that vision of building small, focused software. We’re not looking for people who want to be part of a team of fifty people building the same product, but people who want to be part of a team of three or four or five people.

Will you get involved in each of the products as they get developed?

I’m fairly involved in the products; that’s part of what I do best, the architecture and the strategy. But you don’t need to micromanage it. You can be involved in that at the inception of the product, or through weekly or biweekly reviews. You don’t need to be there every day.

My role is to be the producer of the albums. I don’t want to write the songs. I’m certainly going to make sure that they’re polished; I might say, “Hey, how about this kind of song? We need this kind of song on this thing.”

We only exist if we are successful with key products. The vision here is not to produce two hundred titles and to have five successful. The vision here is to produce very few titles but have them successful. It’s focused on having very few and really crafting them.

Because our vision is that there’s an opportunity to get into this careful crafting of each product. That does not mean micromanaging; that means working with the teams and empowering the teams, but still having a feedback loop with regular reviews.

Which is one of the things that happened very positively at Borland, it’s still happening that way. Borland got criticized for a lot of things, but never for the quality of its products. That kind of process worked well.

How much time do you now devote to music?

The answer is usually “not enough.” I try to play an hour a day or more. I don’t play much with others, but I play a lot with records. In the last year I’ve been kind of secluded, but I get to play with a lot of good players on CDs! It’s just so convenient, turn the CD on, it’s three in the morning....

I’ve got a music studio in my home. I bought Leon Patillo’s house, Carlos Santana’s singer, and he had built a studio in the back. That’s been great, because you can play at four in the morning and make as much noise as you want. So now it’s a combination music studio and software development studio. It gives me an opportunity to play a lot at weird times—how can you get some musicians in and say, “Hey, let’s play together! And by the way, it’s going to be at three in the morning! [laughter] “What? I got a life, you know!”

It’s not enough music, and that goes with the territory.

One thing I don’t do is play with computers and music.

You want real reeds.

Exactly. I spend so much time with computers that I just want to play. I want to blow on a horn. Blow on a flute.

Maybe if you do keyboards you want to program it more. But I have this resistance to MIDI stuff. I have Jammer Pro and all this stuff, but it’s so boring! Here I am programming again! I just want to play!

I’m much more interested in that aspect of things.

Share

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.

Good morning,

You may have noticed that this month, there wasn’t a poll for the Plus post. That’s because I forgot. Once again, I got busy with life, and I forgot something. This does give me a chance to catch up on the Plus posts. Don’t worry, the poll will return next month.

Now for the request. I’m looking for issues of the Japanese computer magazine Super ASCII. I’ve only been able to find 8. I have access to these issues:

• August 1990

• September 1990

• October 1990

• November 1990

• March 1991

• October 1992

• August 1996

• July 1998

I would like to read these issues:

• December 1990

• January 1991

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Your friend and fellow nerd,

John Paul Wohlscheid

The Company

IMS Associates, Inc. (commonly referred to as IMSAI) was founded in 1973 by William Millard. According to an employee, the acronym stands for Information Management Services Association Incorporated. Millard has previously worked as a manager in “finance and industry”. He worked on a project involving data storage before joining IBM for a short time. In 1969, he founded a software company named System Dynamics. The company closed three years later after it ran out of money.

In the beginning, IMSAI was a one-man band. Millard ran a computer consulting and engineering firm out of his home. As the contracts got bigger, IMSAI added staff. Initially, the company focused on software contracts, but eventually worked with hardware, as well.

Read more

from the June 1985 issue of MicroTimes magazine

Borland’s Software Anarchist, Philippe Kahn

Surprising People And Disturbing The Establishment

By Jeff Spurrier

They said it couldn’t be done, of course: selling top-quality innovative software for extremely low prices. Philippe Kahn, newly arrived from France and unable to find work in the industry since he didn’t have a green card, didn’t believe them. In 1983, he founded Borland International, which, with products like Turbo Pascal and Sidekick, has been turning the software world upside down ever since.

The interview with Philippe Kahn, President of Borland International, took place at the company’s crowded offices in Scotts Valley, near Santa Cruz. In keeping with the Borland image, most of the staffers appeared to be young, friendly, and easy-going. When Philippe Kahn arrived just before noon, he spent a half hour touring the various departments, checking up on what was going on. Most of his own programming work he does late at night at home, he later explained, since when he’s at Borland the daily demands of the company require his attention. Besides having an office at home, he also has a cellar full of electronic keyboards and computers.

Sidekick is one of your biggest successes; in one interview you made its development sound like almost an accident...

Any new idea is almost an accident. If it’s not, it’s probably not that new. If it was possible to arrive at new ideas by logical patterns, then you’d have machines and people trying to do that all the time. It’s like you’re in your jacuzzi and you look at the bubbles and boom! You have an idea. Is that an accident? Of course if you sit at a conference table with ten people and say ‘We’re going to come up with a new product!’ and six hours later you have it knocked out, I don’t believe it’s going to be great.

Is that what’s wrong with a lot of software today?

No, I think what’s wrong with software is the positions (of companies). We have something which I call the Basic Laws of Turbo Dynamics. First: high quality software; second: not copy-protected software; third: reasonable licensing agreements. All this makes what I call good software. What’s wrong with most software today is they fail in terms of copy-protection. That is going to be a major issue in the next year. No matter how you look at it, copy-protection is a hassle to the user. It’s a tax on honesty. It’s like going to the grocery store and every time you leave the store you’re searched. When you go in there they assume you’re guilty. I think it’s a fundamentally wrong idea. It’s a wrong way to start doing business with people. So I think there’s going to be a reaction in the marketplace to it.

Now as for licensing agreements, if you look at the licensing agreement on any product, you’ll need three lawyers to understand what it’s about. Our licensing agreement is called “Borland’s No Nonsense License Statement.” [He then reads verbatim the Borland licensing statement, a brief paragraph which simply states that the software is protected by U.S. copyright law and is to be treated much the same way as a copyrighted book would be. Backup copies are permitted but duplication for use by more than one user at a time is forbidden.]

That’s it. Now compare it with any piece of software. [Kahn then reads a non-Borland licensing agreement.] They don’t guarantee anything. It’s called the “No performance warranty.” Isn’t this amazing? “[Manufacturer] cannot and does not warrant the performance or results that may be obtained from using the program . . . The entire risk as to the results or performance of the program is assumed by you. Should the program prove defective, you and not [manufacturer] shall assume the entire costs of all necessary services and corrections.” [Laughs] Do you know any industry where anyone would dare sell something like that? And the Lotus one is worse. Can you imagine an industry where it’s written on the product that it’s useless, it doesn’t work, and you can’t copy it, and by just opening the package you accept all those terms? Isn’t this crazy? This is what the software industry is about these days.

How do your lawyers feel about your “No Nonsense Statement?”

We don’t ask the lawyers. If you ask them then you end up with what everyone else has. That’s what’s crazy. We believe what protects software is copyrights, so we rely on them. Period. Just like books or music. And we contend that our software does what we say it does. The

Turbo Pascal is a Pascal programming language and Sidekick is a resident index software organizer. We don’t say it’s nothing! You just bought nothing! Like with Lotus you just paid $495 for nothing!

At one time Sidekick was copy-protected. I thought...

Yes. That was because this advertising guy that worked here convinced me to copy-protect the product. And when I saw the reaction from end users I immediately released a non-copy-protected version of Sidekick. I also released the advertising guy. That was the first and last time Borland will copy-protect a product. That was June last year.

If you are a software publisher, and you don’t use your software yourself, that means you’re in trouble. It’s not useful. And I would never use a copy-protected version of Sidekick. It’s like if you’re in the music business and you never listen to the songs you publish. You’re in trouble. Or if you’re a book publisher and you hate the books you publish. We’re users. We have some 80 PCs in here and everyone uses our software.

Besides copy-protection, what do you think is wrong with most software?

Fundamentally that it doesn’t work. A lot of the people who write software probably never get to use it. A group of programmers are commissioned to write something, and after they finish it they move on to the next task. If they did use it they’d find it’s hard to use, not fast, took up too much memory space. People talk about user-friendly software, but the first element of user-friendly is speed.

And you think that’s the primary cause of bad software — program designers who don’t use their own product?

That’s one reason. A lot of times the motivation for people to make software is to make money, and that doesn’t make good products. It’s the same with music. If you’re making music just to make money, I don’t think it’ll be good music. It’ll probably be okay, if you have talent, but it won’t be good. It’s the same with software. You have to like what you do, have fun at it. It has to be a creative environment in the company — which is often not the case. I don’t believe having more than 10 or 15 people doing programming in one location is productive. Lotus has a hundred people in a building doing development. That kills creativity.

Why?

Too many people and too much oranization. Nobody knows anybody. No one can manage that. I believe in teams of ten or fifteen who know very well what the other guys are doing and act as sounding boards and are isolated and get excited about small projects.

A lot of your catalogue is language-related programs. Why?

Communications. That’s how you talk to computers. We believe that’s serious business. If you want to build a company that’s here in the long run you don’t want to be in the hits business. Lotus is in the hits business. They’ve got 1-2-3, and they need another one. And because they can’t find another one they have to become an obnoxious sue-people copy-protect software company to protect their revenue.

We believe the backbone of our business is programming languages because they’ll always be around. It’s not a hits thing, it’s a necessity. For education, for business, for hobbyists. That’s our main strategy now. We will have the Basic language, C, Modular 2, assembler, with the same strategy — a whole group of products [like the Pascal series]. Look at MicroSoft, that’s a solid company. They built the company around languages. The hits business is fun and we’ve got two hits now, Sidekick and Super Key. But one day we’ll miss, and if you base your whole strategy upon hits you’ll be in trouble.

You’ve made a point of avoiding borrowing money to build Borland through venture capital, yet everyone else in the industry does this. Why are you so adverse to venture capital?

Because we want to be independent. As soon as you have outside investors then you have to abide by their rules — copy-protect software, protect the company with stupid licensing agreements. We want to do business our way and I think our end users respect us. By protecting our customers we do protect our shareholders. Most companies don’t believe that. It’s a different philosophy [from most software businessmen]. People in this business are too greedy to get rich. We never started this company hoping to become millionaires, just to make a decent living. I didn’t have a choice. I was broke and no one wanted to hire me in those high tech jobs because I didn’t have a green card. The idea was to survive. We probably have become “millionaires” although I haven’t ever checked. That was never the goal and that’s probably why it worked — because it wasn’t important for us. What was important was to have fun and make great products and make our customers happy.

Is there any plan to bundle your software with hardware or software manufacturers? Recently you signed a deal with AST to include Sidekick with every board they ship...

We don’t bundle. I hate that word, I hate the words “free software.” Those terms were invented by Adam Osborne and now that he’s in the software business he feels bad about it. Software is not free and if you give the people the idea that it is, then, sure, they’ll copy it and rip you off. The AST deal is a distribution agreement — a fantastic distribution deal for us. They ship over 40,000 boards a month and in addition to what we sell, more than 40,000 other people are going to get an edition of Sidekick and a catalogue of Borland products. It’s a distribution deal, not a bundling.

Usually when they have bundled or free software it’s second-rate software that’s not selling anymore and they put it with hardware to generate revenue. Sidekick is a best-seller now. What we did was take the best-selling add-on piece of hardware for the PC, which is the AST SixPak Plus, and the best-selling product for the PC besides 1-2-3, which is Sidekick.

It’s a joint venture, an alliance. We believe in putting our products in as many hands as possible. There might have been some resistance because of how low we price our products. People say, “I didn’t buy Sidekick because it was too cheap. I bought the expensive one.”

Do you think that people think that Sidekick is a game because it’s priced so low?

I hope people do think it’s a game.

Really?

Sure. If it can make your daily work like a game instead of work, it’s wonderful. If using business software can feel like playing a game that’s great. That’s one of the taboos. A computer should be fun to use.

Do you think your low prices upset other software manufacturers?

I don’t care if it upsets them or not. I think it pleases our customers. If they’re upset then there’s a problem.

A lot of software companies are saying “Borland’s not viable. You can’t make a business by selling software at this price.” So why do they worry? Why do they scream? We’ll go out of business. They shouldn’t worry about it.

I think by now they know we won’t. I think it’s a general trend. Software prices will go down, and we’ve been the ones that have done it first, and we’ll continue to push them down to reasonable levels. It’s true in any industry, it always happens. Software was a new industry. Now you have 8 million PCs so you don’t need to sell a piece of software for $600 to make a good living if it’s a pretty horizontal product.

I’ve heard that sometimes you log on to the Go Bor board on CompuServe to chat with users. Why? How do people react when they realize they’re talking to the head of Borland?

With amusement. I do it because we want to be end user oriented, so we want to hear what they have to say.

And what do they say?

Suggestions. It’s amazing how by listening to them you can have great ideas for products. Instead of having three or four guys here trying to think of new products you suddenly have 25,000 people giving you great ideas. For free — if you’re willing to listen. I always want to see the complaint letters as well as the compliment letters. We don’t get too many complaints but sometimes we do. You get a lot of suggestions by users, because they do different things with the product and might have ideas you didn’t have, because you didn’t use the product with some other software or some specific condition.

Are you open to outside developers submitting to you?

We are, but we haven’t seen anything we want yet that will meet our criteria. So far we develop everything ourselves. I’m very scared of the VisiCorp/Software Arts syndrome. Software Arts developed VisiCalc for VisiCorp and then they started fighting about it. Software Arts wanted the glory and more money. They were getting $14 million a year just to sit there. Two guys. They didn’t upgrade the product for VisiCorp, so they lost the market and Lotus came in and bought them out. So we’re very scared of that kind of relationship. I believe in controlling your technology. As long as you control your technology, you have the ability to create new versions, upgrade your software.

Do you worry about industrial espionage?

Within the company? Yeah, we’re becoming more cautious. We’ve been had a few times. One guy left with a few ideas we’d had and tried to start his own company, but he failed because he didn’t have the ability to make software. Thinking of ideas is one thing but making it work is another. He even raised capital and persuaded investors that he had good ideas. So now we’re very careful about new ideas.

What do you see in the future for software design?

I don’t think anybody sees the future. If people tell you they see the future, don’t believe them. When a company becomes established — as we’re starting to do — they like to say they can see the future. But no matter how you look at it, a couple of guys in a garage somewhere — like we did — will come and show everybody. That’s the beauty of the software industry. You don’t need big capital investment to make a great piece of software. People say it’s a marketing game, but that’s not true. It’s a technology driven game. If you don’t have the marketing you might fail. But if you just have the marketing and no product you’re sure to fail in the long run. You must have good products. That’s cast in iron. You can’t create something out of nothing.

You have children. What do you think kids will be doing in 20 years on computers?

Kids are amazing because they’re not afraid of programming like adults. Twelve-year-olds will start writing Pascal programs right away. My impression is that [future kids] will blow us out, make us look real bad. They’re so natural and in tune with the object. It’s going to be tough coping with them. It’s like someone who touches his first piano at 20 compared to a kid who starts when he’s four and he’s a natural. Like young Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus. It’s amazing. I see my kids and they understand things so easily. We’ll see lots of new directions in software coming from kids because it’s the first generation that has had real tools, real computers at the age of five or six. What kind of musicians would we have if nobody could touch a piano until he was in college? Suddenly you’ve got a whole generation who has gotten computers when they’re five or six and they have lessons and and they have them at home. It’s a big difference.

How old were you when you saw your first PC?

Probably 15 or 16.

Do you remember what you did with it?

Sure. I had a summer job programming geometrical shapes for numerical control machines. You had a machine that would make metal parts, and it was driven by a computer. You needed someone who would translate a drawing of a shape, like a bolt, into mathematical equations and then into the language which the computer would understand. It was a very non-creative job. And then later at university we had mainframes. My first PC was an Apple II, in France. That was the first I had at home that I could play with, with an assembler and all. It was a good machine. It was a great toy.

What do you think Apple is doing these days?

I don’t know if they know what they’re doing. It’s really sad. Like a lot of people I think Apple made the industry. I would hate to see them disappear, because it’s healthy to have competition. An IBM-owned world isn’t a good world. IBM needs competition and Apple had the glow and the aura to compete. But they made a fundamental error with the Macintosh by closing the architecture of the machine. They’ll probably survive — I hope so — they’re rumored to have other machines. But what’s still making Apple is the II and the lie. It’s not the Mac. It’s amazing. The II is a dinosaur if you think about it. People say the PC is a dinosaur also, but the II is really a dinosaur. The II has been there for years. Everybody’s hat should be off to Steve Wozniak. Everybody talks about Steve Jobs, but the reason Apple’s here today is because of Wozniak’s Apple II motherboard. I think the problems Apple has now is because the II people and the Mac people are fighting for recognition and it’s obvious the II people should have it. They made the company.

Would you like to design hardware? What’s the ideal computer?

Maybe no computer. It should be transparent to the user. You just think about it and it logs on.

The problem with those stupid computers is that they’re very powerful when you have them, but when you’re somewhere without them and that power you’re lost. The hardware business is crazy. I wouldn’t touch that for the world. Making another PC today is crazy. How many IBM compatibles are there — 80, 90? What are they bringing to the table? Nothing.

Essentially there is IBM, Apple, and then Atari and Commodore. Apple’s main error was like what happened with minis and mainframes. There are all these companies like DEC and Data General that never realized that their real [mainframe and mini] market was the non-IBM customer. They all focused on IBM, never realizing their support base was the non-IBM market. Apple until now has not realized that their market is a non-IBM market. They can’t look at IBM’s market share and say “We’ll eat a slice of it.” They won’t. That’s IBM’s. Traditionally. And Apple is going to be in trouble until they realize that, because Atari and Commodore and Wang and all these other companies will eat up the non-IBM market while they’re focusing on IBM. It’s a fundamental strategic error. They had this wonderful $2 billion company and they thought “We’re going to take on IBM.” That’s arrogant. You can’t be arrogant with IBM. IBM is like a machine. And even now they’re still trying to go after IBM and show IBM people as bad guys through those ads — which are very creative, but do they sell PCs? I don’t think they ever sold one more Apple because of those ads. They’re image ads. And every time you waste money by selling image, essentially your customer is paying for it because your costs are going up.

You don’t sell image?

No, we don’t sell image. We sell products. All our ads sell products — not the company. We want people to buy products. Otherwise you end up building a cost structure that’s not manageable at the price levels we’re selling products. And then the consumer ends up paying the bills.

I get involved in the advertising and the R&D. I think advertising should be like news so that people learn something from it. I don’t want people to think we’re selling soap, with wonderful images. We do everything ourselves. We do all our R&D, our advertising, our banking — we don’t have loans. We live in a little closed world here. And it’s kind of fun.

What software do you like (besides your own) that’s out now?

I do like our software. I like Wordstar still.

No Microsoft Word?

I think there are good ideas in it. They did a good job but it’s too buggy yet and too slow for me. Wordstar is much faster and more powerful. I use Wordstar still, even though I have Word. I don’t use database managers because I’d rather write them in Pascal with our toolbox. It’s much easier to do and much faster and more efficient. And I have more control over things. The spreadsheet I like the most is SuperCalc 3. It’s much better than 1-2-3 even though that’s the standard.

You’ve made the comparison between software and book publishing. Do you really see the comparison so strongly?

There is a comparison in the act. We’re selling a book with a diskette that sells for a little more than a hardbound book and we sell in much the same fashion. That’s about where the comparison starts and ends.

When you buy a book you don’t expect the characters in the book to change all the time. Software changes. It bugs, it reacts differently, it moves. You have upgrades. A book might have a new preface in the 2nd edition but that’s all that’s different. And you don’t have technical support for books. And the process of creating also can’t be forecast. It’s a creative process — an accident like I said earlier. From that point on it’s hard work, scientific work, coding, choosing algorithms. Getting things to work. There’s nothing artistic about it. It’s almost like playing a whole tune and then having to write it down in staff notation. There’s not much artistic about all that — just hard work.

Do you see a connection between programming and music?

I don’t know if there’s a connection but I know that most people that are involved with software somehow are also involved with music — either they can play or have played or listen a lot. I carried my way through college playing music as a semi-pro in France. I used to play saxophones.

You don’t play anymore?

Only when a party gets wild enough or I’m drunk enough to pick up a horn. I don’t have time [to play] anymore.

Do you sometimes feel that maybe you got sidetracked from music? Would you rather be playing music?

I wasn’t good enough to make a decent living at it. I like music, but you have to be damn good to make a decent living and be able to play the music you want to play. Most of the people I know who play music professionally don’t play what they want. They do studio sessions, marriages, stupid stuff. They’re making money okay, but I think they’re having less fun than I’m having doing this, doing software. I was into modern jazz and that’s really no way to make a living. Rock maybe but modern jazz . . . who makes a living? Not even the best guys. So, there are no regrets.

Do you foresee increased software competition coming from outside the U.S.?

Sure. If you look at the costs of development in the U.S. and programming here, smart companies will do what hardware makers did with production by setting up production facilities in Hong Kong or Taiwan. Development will happen overseas. There’s no question. You already see it in the game business. A lot of the arcade games are not written in the U.S. anymore — some are written in the Eastern Bloc even.

Really?

Yeah, the Eastern Bloc is going to provide a lot of software development. We ourselves have two development centers overseas (one in London and one in Copenhagen) and we intend to set up a development thing in India also. You get excellent mathematicians and programmers there and the salaries are ridiculous compared to what you get in the U.S. A Ph.D. in India costs you $400 a month — and those people are smart. With hardware you need a lot of equipment. With software you don’t need anything. Just a PC and a plug, and then you need a little brains. Software is freedom. Software is a direct extension of the human mind. It’s just getting the machine to do things. It’s not making dreams come true.

Why don’t you have a development center in France?

We have a saying in French: “No one is a prophet in his own land.”

Do you think it’s still possible for two guys in a garage to build a multi-million dollar software company?

Sure. We did it. If they have a great idea, no problem. People who say it can’t be done just fear that it can’t be done. I say it can be done. It’s tough, but when we started everybody said it couldn’t be done without $10 million in venture capital. But we did it. It’s just people who love it to be impossible who say it can’t be done — large software companies probably.

What kind of image do you think Borland has in the Silicon Valley?

Crazy guys who are trying to turn around the industry. I guess that’s the image — software anarchists who do street marketing. That’s the image I want the company and myself to have, that we’re the wild cards. Whatever happens at Borland will surprise people and disturb the establishment. Maybe [the image is] the punk rockers of the software industry.

BREAKING THE RULES PAYS OFF

Ever since Borland International set up shop in late 1983, the small software house has refused to play by the rules. Besides offering drastically lower prices for top quality software, Borland went against the tide by concentrating on the less glamorous side of software — language programs, specifically Pascal-related programs.

Despite initial skepticism from industry insiders, Borland’s debut offering, Turbo Pascal (released in November 1983) sold over 15,000 copies in four months. Within a year it had sold more than ten times that amount.

That success was far surpassed by Borland’s second product, Sidekick, an “electronic organizer” that features a set of interactive, integrated windows, allowing a user to perform a variety of tasks without leaving a resident program. With Sidekick in operation, one can have 1-2-3 or Wordstar loaded while having the ability to take notes, do calculator computations, dial the phone, jot down appointments on a calendar, or perform ASCII conversions at the same time.

As Borland approaches its second birthday it has a full range of Pascal programs on the market including Turbo Pascal (for Z80 and 8088/86 microcomputers), Turbo Pascal 87 (for 8087 support on 16-bit machines), Turbo Toolbox (a program that works with Turbo Pascal and includes fast file access and sort capabilities), Turbo Graphix Toolbox (which provides a set of graphics to be used with Turbo Pascal) and Turbo Turtle (an introduction to Pascal with guidelines for developing assembly language procedures). Superkey, shipped in February, is a keyboard enhancement program which allows users to design a keyboard for their own personal use, replacing frequently used commands and/or text with a single keystroke.

Despite its small catalogue, Borland is clearly doing something right. The company was named “Company of the Year, 1985” by PC Magazine, and Sidekick was named “Product of the Year, 1985” by Infoworld. In addition, Turbo Pascal was included in the Top Ten Products of 1984 by PC Week and the language has been selected as the official language for a national student programming competition.

And what’s up for the future? Philippe Kahn knows but he’s not talking . . .

“Oh, there are lots of new things but our policy now is that when something new is ready we’ll call a press conference to announce it and the same day we’ll ship it,” he says. “We’re working on six or seven products now but there’s nothing we want to pre-announce.”

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The Company

I covered the history of Cromemco in a previous post about the Comemco Z-2D.

The Computer

Cromemco’s initial systems were more business-focused. In the 1980s, there was a growing demand for personal computers. In 1981, IBM released the IBM Personal Computer. Comemco decided to jump on the bandwagon and released the C-10 in 1982. This was Cromemco’s only entry into the PC market.

The C-10 has the following specs:

• Zilog Z-80 4MHz procession

• 64K of internal RAM

• 24K of internal ROM

• Cromemco enhanced CP/M

• High-resolution 12-inch CRT

• RS232 serial datacommunications port

• Parallel I/O expansion and printer port

• Serial printer port

This system was available in three different packages:

• The basic package included the C-10, a detachable keyboard, and a 390K disk drive for $995.

• The “Super Pak” (I also saw “Super Pack”) added $1,000 of professional software, including “a word processor, an investment analysis program, spread sheet calculator, and Structured BASIC” for $1,785.

• For an extra $1,000, users would also get a Daisy wheel printer, an ergonomic stand, and “access to a wide variety of other Cromemco languages—FORTRAN, RATFOR and COBOL”.

One of the earliest mentions of the C-10 I found was in the August 1982 issue of Electronics Today International.

The Marketing Manager of Adaptive Electronics, Mr. Adam Gatt, says that the Cromemco C-10 is perfect for the serious personal computer user, for the executive workstation, for distributed data processing or as a front end for a mainframe computer.

Starting at US$995, the new C-10 is based on the industry-standard high-speed Z80A microprocessor and has 64K of internal user-accessible RAM and 16K of internal ROM.

The C-10 comes with an integral intelligent high-resolution 12-inch CRT with a detachable, light and easy to use keyboard. It also has a wide range of peripherals available, including floppy disk drives and a new low-priced (US$895) letter-quality daisy-wheel printer.

Mr. Gatt envisages that the most popular configuration for the C-10 will be the special Super Pack, referred to as the C-10SP. This system configuration consists of the basic C-10, keyboard, 390K capacity 5%” floppy disk drive, along with a CP/M-compatible operating system, 32K structured BASIC, word processing and financial spread sheet software.

Besides access to the entire range of other Cromemco products (such as FORTRAN, COBOL and RATFOR), because of its CP/M compatibility the C-10 gives the user access to the widest possible range of microcomputer software products available.

The Australian computer magazine Your Computer published a review of the C-10 in their April 1983 issue.

Things are really rocking at the bottom end of the personal computer market - the under-$3000 machines with word-processing and spreadsheet capabilities. In the months AO (After Osborne), the market niche which that luminary found for himself has been invaded - in Australia, at least - by first Kaypro, then Morrow Designs, and now Cromemco, with the C-10.

The C-10 is a pretty little computer, designed to sit neatly on a corner of an executive’s desk. The main electronics and the screen are in a small moulded plastic cabinet, which is designed to sit atop a tilt-and-swivel stand. Attached by cables to the rear are a small keyboard and a single 13 cm disk-drive.

The machine is finished in two-tone brown and looks fairly friendly and neat, with a minimum of cables.

The display is 28 cm on the diagonal and is clear and easy to read. It features half-intensity, underlining and inverse video, as well as special symbols and chunky and line graphics. The screen-driver software emulates a Cromemco (Beehive) terminal, providing 80 by 24 display with a 25th status line, though this is normally switched off.

Intended to take up as little space as possible, the keyboard is compact yet ergonomically designed. It features all the usual characters and control keys, with the exception of a numeric pad, though one section of the keyboard can be re-programmed to provide that function. The keys have a soft action, and feature moulded keytops.

...

The innards are based on the Z-80A processor, with a 4 MHz clock and 64 Kbytes of memory. The basic design is not expandable - there is no bus structure - and is specifically designed to provide the functionality of an executive workstation.

The overall quality of construction is good; the box feels rugged and reliable. Because of its design, the machine can’t be described as portable, but it is light enough to carry and move around from location to location.

...

On power-up, the C-10 performs some diagnostics, and then boots off disk. The operating system is Cromemco’s CDOS, which is a modified upgrade (and descendant) of CP/M version 1.4. However, the first-time user is not immediately exposed to the rigours of the operating system. Instead, the system brings up a menu program which allows the user to specify what he wants to do.

...

WriteMaster belongs to the “What You See Is What You Get” school of word-processing. Text entry is much like on a typewriter - automatic wrapping at line endings is an option - so most users will hear the bell sound as they near the end of a line, indicating that return must be entered soon.

...

A feature I particularly liked is that parameters like varying margins and tabs are automatically saved with a file: that’s something WordStar won’t do for me.

PlanMaster, Cromemco’s financial analysis program, is similar to VisiCalc in its fundamental concepts, but has some significant differences.

First, the spreadsheet is not as large, and is organised somewhat differently: there are 10 pages, each with 30 rows of 12 columns plus row and column totals. Rows and columns may be labelled, with labels appearing in formulae.

An unusual facility is the ability to display numbers in hexadecimal format I’m not really sure why you might want

to do that, but then again it could be useful for working out memory maps or some such application.

...

The programming language supplied with the C-10 is Cromemco’s Structured BASIC. This is a large language with many advanced features, such as matrix initialisation, degree mode for trig calculations, and advanced control structures such as WHILE/ENDWHILE and REPEAT/UNTIL.

...

Other software supplied with the C-10 as standard includes a chess game which plays to a high standard and puts the C-10’s graphics to good use, and the usual selection of machine-specific utilities.

For programming in languages other than BASIC, a screen-oriented editor is supplied which is similar in operation to WriteMaster, but writes pure ASCII files, without any of the formatting information used by the word processor.

...

The documentation supplied with the system is excellent. The manuals are produced to a very professional level, and are intended for the first-time user. However, one area which I felt could have been more prominently covered was the initial copying of the system diskette, a task which most neophytes approach with considerable trepidation.

The only area not covered in depth is the CDOS operating system itself, though the CDOS manual is available as an extra.

Overall, the Cromemco C-10 scores well as a professional, personal workstation or small business computer. It has good software support from Cromemco, and can, of course, run a goodly percentage of CP/M 2.2 software. Though built to a price, the quality doesn’t seem to have suffered.

Australian Microcomputer Magazine briefly mentioned the C-10 in the “Hardware highlights” section of their April 1983 issue:

The Cromemco C-10 is atthe bottom end of the Cromemco range of computer systems. The machine is a personal computer, with good communications facilities, built to the austere and reliable standards that are the strength of Cromemco machines.

…

It should prove popular with users of large Cromemco systems as an intelligent terminal and standalone personal computer. Retail price from most Cromemco distrubutors is around $A2300 before tax.

Mike Hughes wrote a review of the C-10 for the June 1983 issue of Practical Computing.

The C-10 is being sold as an integrated package of hardware and software attractive to non-technical users. It is designed to offer the administrator or secretary a device which will assist them at work in much the same way as a calculator is used by accounts staff. The packaged software reflects this approach, being simple to use and well documented for a limited range of applications. It is not being sold as a high-technology system which might require technical expertise.

Yet these restrictions only come about from the way the system is being marketed. The C-10 has considerable potential for more sophisticated applications should the need arise. The operating system is basically CP/M with its unfriendly, albeit powerful, aspects cleverly hidden from the user by a menu-driven suite of programs. Word processing, financial planning and the ability to write ones own software using structured Basic are all included. Those with a knowledge of CP/M and the wide range of software available under it will be pleased to know that the system is capable of running most CP/M proprietary software in the conventional manner.

…

The three components of the basic system are housed in lightweight cream plastic cabinets. The display unit houses the CPU, a 12in. green display of 25 lines by 80 characters, and power supplies. At its rear there are sockets for the disc drives, keyboard, printer and communications, and a mains switch.

Conspicuous by its absence is a control to adjust the display intensity. By carefully reading the manuals I discovered that intensity is software controlled. Minimising the number of controls to protect against knob twiddlers is a good thing, but display intensity is a very personal choice and should be easy to operate.

The keyboard is of standard typewriter layout with mechanical alpha lock. The keys that will be unfamiliar to the average typist are Escape, Control and the four cursordirection keys. In many respects the initial impression of the keyboard is that it is more friendly than some of the more modern conventional typewriters. It is extremely light in weight, and connects to the display unit via a four-way self-coiling lead terminated in a standard American telephone jack connector. When extended, the lead allows the keyboard to be positioned anywhere within about 1.5 metres of the display. Unfortunately the featherweight keyboard does not have sufficient “stickability” to combat the recoil effect of the self-coiling cable when used on shiny desks.

…

The standard package of software is provided on a single disc, and a blank disc is also provided to allow the user to make an immediate back-up copy. The description of the hardware, operating system and software is contained in four very nicely presented manuals. Great care has been taken to make these easily readable by the non-technical user, and to keep them simple very little is said about the hardware, something of a frustration to your reviewer.

…

If you look at the system purely as an integrated package to perform office functions it is, perhaps, better to accept the fact that the hardware is neat, attractive and eminently straightforward to put together and get up and running, to provide the benefits of standard software as run on this configuration. Of the three major programs Write Master is clearly the one that most users will have the greatest need for. It is Crememco’s own word-processor package and has been designed to be simple to use. While having to make use of a standard keyboard it keeps the number of multi-stroke commands to a minimum.

To meet this requirement the top row of keys on the QWERTY keyboard are used in Control and Shift-Control mode to perform the more common word-processing commands like Scroll, Move, Copy, Insert, Delete, Centre Text, Print, Underline, Select Block, etc. There is a self-adhesive overlay showing these functions to stick above the keyboard, designating the function of each of the top-row keys in either Control mode. The less common and more complex functions are entered in free text or as abbreviated forms after a single press of the Escape key. After a little practice it becomes surprisingly easy to remember the commands. The user simply has to type in what needs to be done in full or using abbreviated mnemonics. For example, Escape followed by “underline selectedtext” does just that, or Escape followed by “find XXXXX” will find and mark all occurrences of the phrase “XXXXX”.

…

Conclusions

• The Cromemco C-10 is an attractive, friendly little computer.

• Without impairing its ability to run under standard CP/M the operating system and its integrated software provide low-cost word processing and management assistance for an office which lacks technical or computing experience.

• The price is reasonable, though it does not include the printer, and in all but the most trivial applications it is likely that a second disc drive will be required. A two-disc system with printer will cost between £2,000 and £2,500 — still quite viable, and cheaper than most dedicated word processors.

• The user manuals are clear and simple to understand but, perhaps, at the expense of providing sufficient information about the machine for more sophisticated applictions.

• The Write Master word-processor package is excellent in operation, attractive to use and comparatively easy to learn.

• The C-10 is a good buy for someone considering their first steps into the automated office.

The New Zealand Bits and Bytes magazine summed up their review like this:

Advantages: Compact, robust and reliable. Good screen clarity. Good disk capacity. Excellent documentation. Wide range of business software supported. User friendly.

Disadvantages: CDOS limits transportability of CP/M.

Comments: Cromemco is one of the longest-established microcomputer companies in the United States and has a reputation for keeping up with the state of the art. The C-10 represents good value for money.

Typical User: The C 10 would appeal to the small businessman or professional person who requires a database, financial modeller and word processor.

In 1984, Omni Publications published a catalog of available computer hardware and accessories. This is what they had to say about the C-10:

The Cromemco name is not as widely known to the personal computer user as it might be, largely because a fair percentage of the company’s products are sold to original equipment manufacturers for incorporation into other products. But the C-10 is highly regarded by engineers and others who require math and scientific applications. It is being used by the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the United States Air Force. The C-10 cannot be a toy with references like those, or with the backing of a company whose pedigree is as respectable as Cromemco’s.

Cromemco is the oldest company in the United States dedicated to the design and manufacture of microcomputers. It was founded in 1975 and incorporated the following year. Cromemco engineered the first color graphics adapter for a microcomputer, worked on the development of the S-100 bus, and developed both the first 8-inch Winchester hard-disk drive and the first 5 1 /4-inch floppy-disk drive for micros.

The C-10 is Cromemco’s first low-priced computer.

…

The operating system and indeed the entire user interface system is designed for the first-time user. Cromemco is reported to have good support services, and their machines are serviced by TRW nationwide as well. The operating system, a version of CP/M, is menu-driven and all programs and utilities are on the system disk. The system recognizes the user’s configuration— when one adds additional disk drives, the system automatically changes the directions to the user to reflect that addition. The use of CP/M means that most popular programs, like SuperCalc and dBASE II run on the Cromemco.

…

In addition to being a quality personal computer at a very reasonable price, the C-10 can act as an intelligent workstation in a multitasking, multiusing environment. There is a great deal of talk about 8-bit versus 16-bit CPUs. For many users, an 8-bit processor is lazing along when performing the most complicated tasks they can assign it. If one needs massive amounts of speed, however, the C-10 can be tied into Cromemco’s giant System 68000 through the RS-232 port. It can work as a stand-alone, and upload or download within the 68000/CROMIX context.

…

The Cromemco C-10 is a good choice for someone getting started with micros. Its ease of operation, its reasonable price, its ability to be tied into a powerful network, and its manufacture by an established company recognized as a pioneer all should provide the user with assurances of quality and satisfaction.

Dave Hilton wrote a detailed review of the C-10 for the 1985 Creative Computing Buyers Guide. Here is his conclusion:

The C-10 is a mixed bag. I gathered the information for this review over three months, during which time I was given four releases of the operating system and two different C-10 computers. Why so many changes? Because I was getting all sorts of strange results from the system. Many times while using WriteMaster and PlanMaster, the system would hang, hit the System Trap, garble and display, destroy my file, or retrench to some lower level of code on the operating system.

I did observe steady improvement through the later releases of the software, but I cannot ignore this general instability in the system. I do not nor do the people with whom I have spoken at Cromemco know just how many of the problems I experienced are bugs in the software and how many are attributable to hardware failures. Certainly, the latter part of the review process, after the original system had been replaced, went much more smoothly than the first part.

As far as I am concerned, WriteMaster is almost reason enough to buy the machine. Structured Basic and the Screen utihty offer the user who wants to write his own software enormous power. For these people, an assembler and additional languages are available as extra cost options.

It is a shame that PlanMaster falls so far short of the quality of the rest of the system. It is definitely the poorest program in the package.

The C-10 is also in desperate need of communications software, not only of the modem hookup variety but of the system-to-system-through-serial-interface-variety. I sat here for over two months with four other computers within arm’s reach and several hundred floppy disks and tapes full of software but no way to get any of it into the C-10.

Conclusion

When I was a little tyke, one of my favorite stories was “The Little Engine That Could.” I thought of it as I watched one of the high-resolution graphics demos on the C-10: a train was chugging its way across the screen with smoke pouring from its stack and the whistle blowing. It occurred to me that the C-10 is like that little train ... if it could just throw off some of the dead weight and get up a little more steam, it could make it to the top.

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Recently, I started flipping through European computer magazines. Svet Kompjutera (World of Computers) is a Serbian computer magazine that was founded in October 1984. I used Google Translate to translate the comics into English.

This comic is referring to the Sinclair C5, the result of Sir Clive Sinclair’s long-running interest in electric vehicles. Below is a picture of the vehicle.

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from the July 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine

Bud Tribble Explains it All

Before joining SunSoft as vice-president of object products in June 1992, Guy L. (Bud) Tribble was a founder of NeXT and its leading software architect. More than anyone, Tribble is the visionary behind OpenStep. He is also the software manager charged with making it a reality. A team of NeXTWORLD editors interviewed Tribble about the implications of the OpenStep announcement.

NeXTWORLD: Sun evaluated various options before settling on the OpenStep strategy. What were those options, and why did you decide to go with NEXTSTEP?

Bud Tribble: For the past several years, Sun has had a distributed-object program called DOE, or Distributed Objects Everywhere. The piece of DOE that actually provides the application environment, as opposed to the infrastructure, is the piece where we had some alternatives. There were basically three options that we were looking at. One was to build something from scratch ourselves. Another was to go talk to Taligent, which is the other company developing things in this space, and the third was NeXT.

What about Microsoft?

Well, Microsoft is another company that has a strategy in this space with Cairo, and we considered that. What it came to for us was looking for something that not only could fit into our distributed-object vision, but something that already existed, that was out there shipping and was customer-tested. Typically, when things ship, it takes roughly 3.1 versions to get a real product. I think Microsoft has proven that. We wanted something that had a time-to-market advantage.

To what extent did your familiarity with NEXTSTEP play a role in the decision?

That can be a double-edged sword. The closer you are to something, the more you can see what is good about it, as well as its blemishes. I would say our team did a good technical and business evaluation of each option.

Keep in mind that the original project for distributed objects actually started within Sun Microsystems Labs - the research arm of Sun - more than five years ago. About two years ago, it moved from the research stage into the product stage. For the past two years, SunSoft has been working together with the Object Management Group (OMG) and the other companies in OMG to create an infrastructure for building systems out of distributed objects. It’s kind of a backplane that you can plug objects into such that they can cooperate in running a company over a network.

The OpenStep technology adds the application framework. In other words, we’ve got this great infrastructure for having objects communicate over a network and for building distributed systems. But what are the APIs and what’s the GUI and what are the components for building applications?

In terms of timing, Sun’s OpenStep version of Solaris, or whatever the product will be called, is at least 18 months out. Taligent ought to have some kind of product in that time frame as well.

We actually haven’t announced a date for OpenStep from SunSoft. We expect to have a better road map available at our April developer conference, but I believe that we’re going to be able to field a product - OpenStep on Solaris - that is actually a year or possibly two ahead of similar robustness available from either Taligent or Microsoft.

We’re starting from something that’s shipping today. OpenStep is not going to be a redesign of NEXTSTEP. It’s going to be very close to NEXTSTEP 3.2 in how it works.

Now, just to play devil’s advocate, you could argue that NEXTSTEP was designed six or seven years ago. Something like a Taligent coming along today may be a generation ahead.

You’ve got to get perspective on this whole thing. Objects were invented by Xerox in the 1970s, and some people actually go back as far as Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s. We’re mining technology that was developed a while ago in terms of developing products that solve customers’ needs.

The big discontinuity is the object paradigm. NeXT is on the far side of that discontinuity today. Taligent and potentially Cairo, it’s hard to say, will also attempt to be on the far side of that paradigm shift. Within that shift there’s going to be gradations, but I don’t see there being huge, leapfrog, quantum differences between the various object systems.

Another factor coming into play is that you will see more and more of the object systems out there gravitate around some of the OMG standards. You even see Microsoft now with OLE and Cairo kind of centering around that. And that’s simply due to the fact that some level of commonality here is what’s going to be necessary to actually create an ObjectWare industry, as we go forward into this decade.

Open standards

What needs to happen for OpenStep to emerge as a broadly based standard in the industry?

First, we need to write the specification down and take it forward to the appropriate standards bodies. There is nothing magic about the standards process. I do think it’s important to realize that standards are necessary to enable an ObjectWare industry at some point in the future.

In terms of the technology itself, objects are at a fairly early stage. If you talk to people at OMG, when will they get around to standardizing the file choosers and such? Not for a while. They’re standardizing from the infrastructure on up. It’s not going to be an overnight process. Nor should it be, because you don’t want to put in stone a set of standards that turned out to be not the best way to do it.

Is it a foregone conclusion that OMG will take OpenStep as its standard? What about X/Open?

We will be promoting OpenStep as a standard, but it is not a foregone conclusion. One of the important things about standards if you go talk to OMG, for example, or X/Open, which is emerging as the standards body that’s interested in some of the COSE efforts, is that they will refuse to standardize something unless a proven implementation exists. So you have to ask the question, are there competing standards out there for objects or for object-application environments? Today, there really aren’t any.

Aside from some standards organization stamping something, what’s really necessary is market acceptance of a product. Do you expect to see other companies that have been associated with the COSE process step forward and adopt OpenStep?

I expect to see that happen, and I think that, over the course of the next year, we will see significant movement there. Both NeXT and Sun will encourage that within the industry and among our own partners.

Do you think Hewlett-Packard will step up with the kind of commitment that SunSoft has made?

That’s hard to say. We would certainly welcome that. As you know, HP has already made an endorsement of NEXTSTEP, and we would have to talk to them about whether they would increase their endorsement.

Ins and outs of OpenStep

Moving on to the future OpenStep product, could you help us understand what exactly it is, and what it will look like?

Let me give you the context. The application environment that we ship today - OpenWindows, soon to become the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) - is a procedural environment. We believe that we will be shipping that procedural environment through the end of the century and probably beyond. We have customers who have either lots of legacy stuff or no desire to retrain for objects.

But we also need a solution for customers who do want to shift to the object paradigm. We don’t have that today, so we’re adding the OpenStep standard. Now, instead of one application environment, there are two. In fact, there are three, counting WABI (Windows Application Binary Interface).

It’s like this. If you write apps to the Windows API, they run on Solaris in the WABI environment. If you write apps to the procedural environment, they run in the CDE enviromnent. If you write them to the object environment, they run in the OpenStep environment.

Now it may be that the dominant personality for someone is CDE, and they never run WABI, and they never run OpenStep. Or it may that the dominant personality for someone is OpenStep, and they don’t bother running WABI or CDE. What we have to do is make sure that there is smooth interoperability. I need to have all these windows on the screen at the same time and be able to cut, copy, and paste between them.

Which environment will the user see? Does OpenStep include the Dock?

If you’re in a CDE-dominant environment, it’ll basically look like CDE, but you will be able to run Windows apps and OpenStep apps. If you’re in the OpenStep environment, you’ll basically see the NEXTSTEP environment, including the Dock.

Now, over time, we may be able to have a Dock concept that spans both environments, and maybe even the Windows environment. There’s nothing technically that says you can’t do that. And that would actually make users’ lives that much smoother. We wish probably that these different personalities all had exactly the same GUIs, but we live in a real world.

It is similar to IBM’s situation, where you’ve got an OS/2 personality and a Windows personality and, someday in the future, you’ll have a Taligent personality.

But the key point is that you will get OpenStep with every shipped copy of Solaris.

You get Solaris and you get the whole thing. Clearly, there are installation options. You can decide to install one thing or another.

For third-party developers, both NEXTSTEP and Solaris, what do you recommend they do today?

Clearly, NEXTSTEP developers should not only keep developing, but they should feel better about it. As for our CDE developers, we are not saying they should all switch to NEXTSTEP today. In fact, if they want revenue today, Sun’s current developers should keep building CDE applications. What we’ll find is that more and more people will convert over time. Initially, that will probably be more the in-house developers than the independent software vendors.

And in the longer term?

There will be early adopters, starting now, who are very interested in objects and will see the benefit of moving to that paradigm. But the bulk of customers will probably stay with the procedural environment. Over time, more people will move to OpenStep, and, by the end of this decade, more people will be using objects than the procedural environment. You’ll have people who are at one end of the spectrum and people who are at the other end of the spectrum.

Kernel vision

Can you clarify which parts of NEXTSTEP are included in OpenStep? What about elements like 3DKft and RenderMan?

The OpenStep spec will include, if not every NEXTSTEP API, a robust enough set that 90 percent of the applications that are written today can run on top of what we define as the OpenStep spec.

You have to realize that NeXT is an evolving system, and some pieces of the system are more mature and customer-tested than other pieces. Clearly, the parts that we’re most interested in are the parts where customers have actually used them to develop mission-critical apps. If there’s something that is more recent and hasn’t really been used, it would perhaps not find its way into the OpenStep spec. There may also be a few cases where we work on parts where people want to see enhancements or changes.

How difficult is it technically to take those parts of NEXTSTEP and integrate them with Project DOE?

We don’t see that as a very big difficulty. One of the aspects of DOE and the OMG CORBA specification in general is that it was designed to be very general and to accommodate a variety of object models. We see a pretty good fit there with NEXTSTEP technology.

Okay, but there are some differences. What about the issue of NeXT’s use of Objective-C as opposed to C++?

The OpenStep APIs are today defined in terms of Objective-C. SunSoft will support Objective-C as another language offering. Many apps are written even today where part of the app uses Objective-C and other parts use C++. With Improv, for example, the back end is in C++, and the GUI part was in Objective-C.

Part of our vision with OMG is that you raise objects above the language dependencies, and you define interfaces to objects in terms of the Interface Definition Language (IDL). Then you have bindings from IDL to a variety of languages. You shouldn’t have to know what particular language an object is implemented in.

In the procedural world, I can call a library, and I don’t know whether it’s written in C or assembly language or Fortran or Pascal. In the object world, we have to get to that stage.

Another issue is the imaging model. NEXTSTEP runs with the Display PostScript (DPS) server and Solaris uses an X Windows DPS server.

If you are going to have X Windows and DPS windows on the screen at the same time, you don’t want two different mechanisms to handle those windows. We will support the same DPS calls that NeXT does. Now, for some of the things, like the window management, NeXT has extended DPS. We will stick to the Adobe DPS. For the window management, we will do that through the AppKit calls, which is what everyone does anyway.

Resource Allocation

All this may be feasible, but it still takes work. What are the resources at NeXT for the SPARC port and the OpenStep implementation?

Well, first of all, welcome to the software business. NeXT has a lot less to do than they used to. In terms of the native NEXTSTEP port to SPARC, yes, NeXT has work to do. They’re actually getting pretty good at that, now that they’ve done Intel and PA-RISC. They’re building up some expertise. In terms of the OpenStep implementation on Solaris, we’re clearly the experts on Solaris and DOE. My group will provide the lion’s share of the work required to port to Solaris.

We’ve talked about different components of NEXTSTEP. What about different versions, such as future releases beyond 3.2?

The companies expect to work closely together as we go forward, though we are not committed to staying in lockstep. OpenStep today is a good core set of interfaces, but clearly you don’t want to stand still. NeXT has a lot of good ideas that we at Sun are in a good position to work with them on. We can either adopt those or do our own implementation when they come out.

Is this relationship your major responsibility here at Sun?

What I run is the DOE program, which was a preexisting program, and I took it over about four months ago and consolidated it. Prior to that, I was running the CDE program.

There is a lot of speculation that this is what you had in mind all along when you left NeXT, or even that you were actually sent by Steve Jobs. What’s the truth?

You’ll remember that at the time I came to Sun, NeXT was a hardware company. Clearly, there was no possible way that, given that situation, the companies could have gotten together. It was not even contemplated at NeXT at that point to become a software company.

So if you are asking was this all somehow planned out, absolutely not. At the same time, once NeXT did decide to become a software company, that set the stage for the possibility of synergy between Sun and NeXT.

In this deal, NeXT becomes a technology provider. In your view, to what extent do they continue as an independent platform provider and operating-system company?

At SunSoft, our business model is to do both - sell a complete operating system and also license people the technology - and we find it a very viable model. We will sell you an operating system, Solaris, and that’s a very good business. We will also sell you component technologies, NFS or the Common Desktop Environment or whatever and that’s a good business as well. It works for us, and I think that could be a fine business model for NeXT as well.

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The Company

I covered the history of NCR when I wrote about their PC4i system in 2024.

The Computer

The Tower 1632 system was announced in the December 13, 1982 issue of InfoWorld:

NCR Corporation, in a move to capture an increasing share of the OEM computer market, has announced a new small computer based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. The 16-bit multiuser and multitasking computer is called the Tower 1632. It runs an operating system derived from UNIX III and provides data storage with fixed Winchester disk drives.

All the elements have been packaged into a 29-inch-tall cabinet that can fit under an office desk. The basic unit has a list price of less than $12,500. The Tower 1632 can support up to 16 users.

In August of 1983, Datamation carried the second half of an article by Jan Johnson on major changes at NCR.

The Dayton, Ohio-based company has made a fundamental change in corporate strategy. It is attempting to reposition itself, both in terms of product strategy and organization structure, as a company that sells primarily to large organizations rather than to smaller ones.

While that may sound like a minor tune job, the decision led to some major changes in product strategy and corporate organization. To compete successfully for business from large corporations, NCR’s executives determined they needed products with leading-edge technology and a nimble development and production organization that could constantly generate new ideas and get them out the door—fast.

The development and production side of the house was one of the first organizations to get hit by a wave of renovation. The main thrust was to push decision making down to the plant level. Plant managers now operate much like small company presidents, with profit and loss and R&D responsibilities, to name only two.

…

“The previous [management] approach involved a group of staff people who had opinions but no responsibilities; responsibilities were greatly dispersed,” agreed Hugh Lynch, vice president, general purpose systems, who reports to Buster, “What we are trying to do now is give production people a great deal of control without having to have committee decisions.” Lynch’s organization developed and produces the Tower 1632 and the 9300, a breadbox-sized mainframe.

“We are as entrepreneurial as we could become. That was the idea behind the new structure.” That is how Don Coleman summed it up. Coleman, who also reports to Buster, is vice president, CI/MEG systems (commercial, industrial/medical, educational, government). Coleman’s organization developed and produces the Decision Mate V.

Under the wing of each of the 24 general managers is manufacturing, engineering, R&D, purchasing, financial, MIS, and product management. In addition, each GM is responsible for developing a business plan and directing his or her own development projects. There is a great possibility for product development overlap.

So how does a $3.5 billion company manage all that independence? To keep a lid on wild and uncoordinated product development efforts, such as producing a product that does not interconnect to any other ncr product, there is a rigorous review system in place. Each GM reports to a systems vice president, who in turn reports to executive vp Buster, who also serves as a member of the office of the chief executive.

Buster is one of five persons who sit on NCR’s new top-level management team. Other members of the office of the chief executive are William Anderson, chairman; Charles Exley Jr., president and chief executive officer; Manuel Garcia, executive vice president responsible for marketing and sales; and Don Herman, executive vice president (and founder of what is now NCR/Comten Inc.), responsible for integrated systems, basically those business units that are self-contained or don’t fit well anywhere else. Herman’s realm includes NCR/Comten, NCR/Telecom, Applied Digital Data Systems, micrographics, and the office systems division.

Auerbach Publishers compiled two volumes covering all available hardware and software. Here is the information they had for the Tower 1632:

Overview The NCR Tower 1632 is a multifunction, multitasking microcomputer system intended for the OEM market. The system is contained in a 29-inch-high cabinet, which can fit under an office desk, and supports word processing, data communications, electronic mail, and scientific applications.

The Tower 1632 is supported by NCR field engineering organizations in over 1,200 cities worldwide. Its self-diagnostic capabilities give users the option of maintaining their own systems.

System Design The NCR Tower 1632 features the 16-bit Motorola MC 68000 processor, supporting up to 6 microprocessor-based controllers. Main memory ranges from 256KB to 2MB, in increments of 256KB. The industry-standard IEEE-796 I/O interface and separate dedicated high-speed memory bus operate simultaneously and independently, limiting bus contention and increasing throughput speed. The Tower 1632 can support up to 1GB of disk storage.

The UNIX operating system from AT&T, enhanced by NCR, provides the Tower 1632 with flexibility and compatibility. Applications programs can be created with the N-GEN applications generator. Supported programming languages include Business BASIC, COBOL, C, and FORTRAN.

A typical configuration for the Tower 1632 includes the processor, 512KB of ECC memory, a battery backup unit, 1MB of diskette storage, a 32MB Winchester disk drive, 81/0 ports, and the UNIX operating system.

Available communications capabilities include RS-232C, ASCII-TTY, NCR DLC, IBM 2780/3780 and SDLA/SNA, X.21/X.25, and UNIX networking.

Winchester disks, diskette drives, and streaming magnetic tape provide additional Tower 1632 mass storage options.

Competition & Pricing The NCR Tower 1632 competes with the AT&T 3B2/300, Plexus Computers P/35, and Pertec Computer SYSTEM 3200.

The December 1983 issue of Computer Design carried an announcement of the 1632’s release:

The 29” (74-cm) high Tower 1632 is built around a 16-bit 10-MHz Mce8000 processor, a Unix III based operating system, a Multibus I/O subsystem, and fixed Winchester drives. The MC68000 supports up to 16 simultaneous local or remote users, each performing multiple functions. Up to six microprocessor based DMA controllers that handle the 5 1/4” disks, eight-channel I/O, and multiprotocol communications offload I/O functions from the CPU. Up to 2M eye of main memory in 256Kbyte increments and 60M bytes of Winchester disk mass storage in the main unit are supported. Add-on units can expand mass storage to more than 1G byte. Standard magnetic media interfaces include the sA400 for 1M-byte 5 1/4” floppies, the STS06 for 10M-byte Winchesters, an SMD for 8” Winchesters, and the QIC II streaming tape. The six-slot Multibus I/O system is separate from the dedicated two-slot high speed memory bus. The buses function both simultaneously and independently to minimize contention and maximize throughput. Unix optimized memory management unit with 256K ECC memory uses a full 24-bit addressing field and provides a clear migration path to 32-bit technology.

Five “menu personalities,” one for each of five programming sophistication levels, are part of the enhanced Unix. These personalities allow easy access to the system. To facilitate applications development, NCR’s N-GEN dictionary driven applications generator contains the needed software tools to generate quick computer programs. Cobol, Business Basic, Fortran, and C languages are supported. Two RS-232-C ports provide ASCII teletypewriter and Bisync 2780/3780 communications. Other protocols supported are NCR’s DLC, SDLC/SNA, X.21/X.25, and Unix networking.

Carrying features beyond industry standards, the Tower 1632 includes a power fail recovery system that preserves data in memory (without specialized applications programming) until power is returned after an outage. In addition, the intellectual properties protection system prevents both proprietary operating and applications software from running on unlicensed machines.

The $12,000 Tower 1632 will be sold to computer systems houses, OEMs, distributors, and dealers who can add applications software, specialized peripherals, and other subsystems to suit customized needs. NCR Corp, Dayton, OH 45479.

I couldn’t find any reviews of the Tower 1632 in my computer magazine archive. I did find a Usenet post from September 10, 1984 that talked about the system. Interestingly, the poster (MHARRIS) was associated with Bolt, Beranek and Newman (more commonly known as BBN). BBN was instrumental in creating ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.

A project I’m working on has a Tower, said to be the “first delivered in New England” (about a year ago). It has 3/4 mbyte, 30mbyte disc, 8-port card, and not much else. The supplied opsys was v7, and only by dint of pushiness over craftily obtained NCR internal phone numbers (”Who are YOU? How did you get MY number?”) did I get it up at all. Now they have Sys.V it is said, but I haven’t been blessed with an update. The machine is currently unused, since (1) the opsys is still unreliable as well as old, (2) getting files to/from it is difficult to impossible, (3) the promised “support for writing device drivers” never appeared, and (4) the disc is VERY slow (the second disk, in fact: the original one died a horrible death). We’d sure like to use the machine for something, though; maybe someone from NCR will read this.

--mh

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