Computer Chronicles Revisited, Volume 7

1988

S.M. Oliva

S.M. Oliva, LLC

2025-01-08

© 2025 S.M. Oliva, LLC, CC BY-NC 4.0

Introduction

Computer Chronicles Revisited is a blog reviewing the PBS series Computer Chronicles, which aired between 1983 and 2002. Each blog post reviews a single episode of the series, including a recap and extensive information about the people, products, and companies that were featured on the program. This volume contains the full text of the blog posts covering the second half of the fifth season of Computer Chronicles, which was originally broadcast from January 1988 to June 1988.

Chapter 1: The New Amigas

In February 1987, Compute! magazine published the first hands-on look at the Amiga 2000. Released just 18 months after the original Amiga, Commodore International’s new model was a spec bump rather than a next-generation computer. Still, Compute! assistant editor Philip I. Nelson seemed duly impressed. He praised the 2000’s low price ($1,500 without a monitor) and the presence of multiple IBM PC-compatible expansion slots. Commodore even offered an optional “Bridge” card enabling the Amiga 2000 to directly run PC software. Nelson saw this as critical for attracting “professionals who bring their work home.”

Commodore formally debuted the Amiga 2000 in March 1987 at a computer show in West Germany. But this was not the only new Amiga announced. Commodore also released the Amiga 500, which targeted home users and initially retailed in the United States for around $700. (The original Amiga was retroactively renamed the Amiga 1000.)

The new Amigas came at a critical juncture for Commodore. Under co-founder and former CEO Jack Tramiel, Commodore fueled the boom for low-cost home computers in the early 1980s with the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. Tramiel’s aggressive price cutting managed to drive his rivals out of the market. But it exacted an enormous toll on Commodore as well. After Commodore chairman Irving Gould ousted Tramiel in January 1984, the company struggled to stabilize its management and move beyond the success of the Commodore 64. This led to Commodore buying Amiga Corporation, which had been trying to develop a home video game console system, and essentially repurposing the Amiga prototype into the Amiga 1000.

By the time Commodore unveiled the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500, the company had reported profits for three consecutive quarters–a solid turnaround after posting a $114 million loss in June 1985. But this return to black could largely be attributed aggressive cost-cutting rather than higher sales volume. So the question was whether or not the new Amigas could actually propel Commodore to the next level, particularly with respect to multimedia applications.

Was the Amiga Finally Getting Respect?

This next Computer Chronicles episode from late January 1988 came nearly a year after the debut of the new Amigas. Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall opened the program looking at a demo of F/A-18 Interceptor (see below), a flight simulator game published by Electronic Arts for the Amiga. Cheifet noted the graphics and sound were spectacular. Indeed, when you talked about the Amiga, one tended to focus on graphics and sound. Overall, Cheifet said the Amiga was a pretty good personal computer but, like Rodney Dangerfield, it got “no respect” among the IBMs and Macs on the world. Why was that?

A screen image from “F/A-18 Interceptor,” showing a cockpit view from a combat aircraft.

Kildall said part of the reason was the Amiga’s Commodore heritage. The Commodore brand was associated with low-end computers. When the Amiga 1000 first came out, it was pitted against the Atari 520ST (produced by Jack Tramiel’s Atari Corporation), which cost $1,000 less than the Amiga. So the Amiga couldn’t compete on the low end. And moving upmarket was difficult because Commodore wasn’t established in those distribution channels. The Amiga platform also lacked the software base to compete with IBM and Apple. But now we were starting to see some really good software written for the Amiga, so that situation might change.

Photographer Bullish on Amiga’s Future

Wendy Woods presented the first of her two remote segments. This report focused on Larry Keenan, a San Francisco-based professional photographer and designer who used the Amiga as part of his business. Woods said that Keenan had added the Amiga to his collection of photographic equipment. Working with a video camera, a digitizer, and a software package called DigiView, Keenan could create new images directly on screen.

Keenan told Woods the Amiga-based system was a logical extension of his business. Because he worked with a lot of different elements in photos, the digitizing process was just like another brush or technique. It allowed him to take a photograph from a stock file, resize it, and take out elements. For example, say you had a favorite photograph with telephone lines or fences in the background. You could go in and digitize those things out.

Woods said that Keenan was well known for his work in advertising and magazine covers, and more recently for artwork used to decorate software packages. The computer gave him a definite advantage in dealing with the deadlines imposed by commercial work, and it let him be more independent. Keenan said the technology enabled anyone who was self-employed in the art field–artists, photographers, illustrators, et al.–to take an image, digitize it on their own terms, and present it, as opposed to relying on a technician to do that work.

But making the switch from a sharp lens to a fuzzy monitor was not without its problems, Woods noted. Keenan regretted the low resolution of a computer screen compared to photographic film. (The standard Amigas of this time period had a maximum graphics resolution of 640-by-400 pixels.) And Keenan found it hard to keep up with the constant changes to the technology. That said, he was optimistic, noting the trick was to learn the process, because that won’t change in the future, only the quality.

Producing Full-Color Animation at Home

Heidi Turnipseed and Adams Douglas joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio. Turnipseed was an animator with Five Rings Company. Douglas was director of product development with Microillusions, Inc. Kildall opened by noting that Turnipseed now used computers to help with her use of classical animation techniques. Why did she choose an Amiga over an IBM PC or Mac? Turnipseed said the Amiga was advertised as having full animation capability, including four-channel sound and a palette of 4,096 colors. That, combined with the Amiga’s reasonable price, were key factors in her decision.

Kildall asked Turnipseed to demonstrate her animation technique using Photon Video Cel Animator, a software package published by Microillusions. Turnipseed showed a pencil test she created in the software, a cycle of a galloping horse containing 10 separate drawings. She said she could test the animation at home, alter the drawings, re-digitize them, and save them back to disk until they were polished. Kildall clarified the drawings were done externally and not on the computer itself. Turnipseed said that was correct.

Cheifet asked about the next step in the animation process. Turnipseed said she animated a rider on a separate level, digitized that, mapped it onto the galloping horse frames, and saved them separately so she could always go back to edit one alone. Then she called up the pencil drawings in a paint program to color them.

Turning to Douglas, Cheifet asked about the actual software Turnipseed used. Douglas said it was the Cel Animator module of Microillusions’ Photon Video line of products. This was a set of modules you could use for various video applications, either at home or professionally. This particular tool was for animators to use in arranging and editing frames. It supported all of the different graphics modes on the Amiga and automatically adjusted to the amount of available memory in the user’s machine.

Kildall pointed out that graphics took up an awful lot of storage. So how much memory was required for animation? Douglas said it usually worked fine on an Amiga with 8MB of memory, which was what the demo machine in the studio had. For something like a pencil test, you could fit up to 1,000 frames depending on the graphics mode. And for longer, more complex color sequences, it was maybe 100 frames.

Meanwhile, Turnipseed called up the finished color animation of a man riding the horse. Kildall asked how the coloring process worked. Did you have to color each individual frame? Turnipseed said she did. She could fill a shape and incorporate the line around the outside of the shape, so that the line was actually a deeper shade of the fill color. This was something that was impossible in hand coloring due to the man-hour requirements of traditional cel animation.

Kildall asked if this output was commercially usable for something like a television broadcast. Turnipseed said that when used in conjunction with a third-party product, it was possible. Indeed, she was anxious to test that herself in the near future.

While Turnipseed loaded another demo, Cheifet asked Douglas about the hardware configuration necessary to run Cel Animator. Douglas said it would run on a standard Amiga with at least 1MB of memory. Cheifet asked if it would run on an Amiga 500. Douglas said it would. There were no special hardware video requirements.

Turnipseed then showed a completed animation sequence with characters and a background. The sequence featured an anthropomorphic rabbit jumping out of a top hat in front of a blue curtain. Turnipseed explained that she used the computer to color each frame, pick them up onto the full-color background, saved each of the 80 discrete frames to disk, and colored each one of them.

Kildall asked what this kind of technology meant to the animation industry. Turnipseed said for an individual classic animator such as herself, it meant she could produce her own full-color animation sequence at home. So she could be competitive with a bigger studio.

Producing Multi-Track Audio at Home

Talin of Microillusions joined Cheifet and Kildall for the next segment. Talin, who went under the name David Joiner at the time, was the programmer of Music-X, an audio software package for the Amiga. (Adams Douglas also remained for this segment.)

Kildall asked Talin what the Amiga meant for him as a musician. Talin said it essentially allowed him to set up a multi-track recording studio in his home. Modern synthesizers now all had MIDI capability. This meant synthesizers from different manufacturers could all communicate with one another, and the computer could receive and process that information in various ways.

Talin then provided a demonstration using a Roland D-50 synthesizer keyboard and Music-X running on the Amiga. He made a short digital recording in real time. He then stored it on the computer and played it back. He pointed out that Music-X had on-screen controls just like a take player. On the surface level, it was very simple. But at the same time, you could dig down deep into its innards.

Kildall asked how many separate audio segments could be managed at one time on Music-X. Talin said you could record up to 250 segments in the computer but only play back 20 at a time. Kildall asked how you managed multiple different segments in the software. Talin said the program contained a number of different editors. He pulled up a bar editor, which showed the music as a series of bars. Other options included a “librarian” screen that could send sounds directly to the synthesizer. There were also filters that allowed you to process your playing in real time and change the performance, as well as a key map to redefine the behavior of the keyboard using the functional equivalent of macros. Talin emphasized that he was interested in experimenting with the combination of human and computer musical composition.

Cheifet asked what Music-X did that was new in terms of music software. Talin said the software was affordable and ran on a color machine that was affordable. The Amiga also had a very “creative spirit” that attracted musicians.

Cheifet pointed out that Music-X was actually still in development. He asked Douglas when it would hit the market. Douglas said it would be out in about two months for a retail price of $290. Cheifet followed up, asking if Music-X was targeted primarily at professional musicians or was it for people who were not performers. Talin said the program could adapt to various levels of talent. He noted that he considered himself an amateur musician. But he also wanted something that a professional could use.

Cheifet noted that many musicians currently used the Amiga’s rival, the Atari 520ST. How did the Amiga compare for this type of work? Talin said the Amiga was a little bit more polished in terms of design. And he hoped that Music-X would be able to support a lot more features because of the multi-tasking capabilities of the Amiga.

The Power of Amiga’s Vision

Shifting gears from music to science, Wendy Woods presented her second and final report from the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, California. She explained that the Institute use dozens of computer-based visual experiments to study human visual perception–specifically, how motion helps people to see. The institute’s director, Dr. Ken Nakayama, created these experiments using Electronic Arts’ DeluxePaint software running on multiple Amigas.

Nakayama told Woods that when the Amiga first came onto the market two years ago, it was really the only machine available that could do the things he wanted to do. It had a great graphics capability and special hardware to move images around without the CPU knowing. That was something you couldn’t do on previous machines.

Woods said that Nakayama believed that Amigas, and microcomputers in general, opened up a whole new field of vision research. The motion that you could achieve on a computer screen simply could not be duplicated by standard eye tests. And the graphics experiments now underway at Smith-Kettlewell could end end up in clinical settings to test actual patients with vision problems.

Could an Amiga Replace a Professional Video Production Setup?

Tim Jenison and Paul Montgomery, the president and vice president, respectively, of Kansas-based NewTek, Inc., joined Cheifet and Kildall for the final studio segment. NewTek was developing an Amiga add-on product called Video Toaster. Kildall opened by asking Jenison why they chose the Amiga. Jenison said that of all of the computers currently on the market, the Amiga was the most well-suited for video use. It could produce NTSC video out of the box without the need for any add-on cards. The Amiga could also display 4,096 colors at once, which was enough to achieve photographic-quality images on the screen. And with certain co-processor chips and internal circuits, the Amiga was a real powerhouse.

Kildall asked about Video Toaster itself. Jenison said it was a peripheral that turned the Amiga into a professional video box. First, there was a display card that allowed the Amiga to display millions of colors on the screen at once at a higher resolution than a standard machine. Second, there was a “frame grabber,” or video digitizer, that could take images directly from a VCR or a camera up to 60 times per second in full color. This feature also made it possible to capture individual frames and store them on disk for later recall. You could also import saved images into a paint program.

Kildall asked for a demonstration of Video Toaster. There were two monitors on the desk hooked up to the Amiga running Video Toaster. Jenison said the software currently displayied a live video feed from a camera that was also sitting on the desk. Video Toaster captured 60 frames per second by default, but you could slow it down, which Jenison did for the demo. He then showed off the software, which could apply a number of effects to the video feed, such as causing the image to “tumble” or zoom. Kildall noted these kinds of video effects were typically quite expensive when done with professional equipment. Jenison concurred, noting such effects cost between $20,000 and $300,000 on traditional video equipment. He added that all of the effects in Video Toaster were software-based, so the more software they wrote, the more effects that would be available to the user.

Kildall asked who the customer was for Video Toaster. Montgomery said it was any of the seven million camcorder owners in the United States. It was also for people who produced video for the educational, sales, and training markets–basically, anyone who had an interest in video or a need to do video. Video Toaster would give those users the “slick” television look that people were becoming accustomed to. Kildall said that if he had a small business and wanted to do video for his public relations department, he could build his own solution using Video Toaster. Montgomery said that was right.

Cheifet asked if Video Toaster could replace the professional-quality broadcast tools currently in use. Jenison said he thought it could. Even if a television station currently had a high-quality unit, they were typically considered a “precious resource” that could cost you as much as $300 per hour to rent. Video Toaster enabled them to own a solution much more cheaply.

Cheifet asked about the next step. What features would be added to Video Toaster in the future? Jenison said there were a number of planned add-on products. The goal was to get the entire production process into a single box. So they were working on the remaining bits and pieces to achieve a “desktop video” solution. Cheifet said that made it sound like an analogue to desktop publishing. But what did that mean in practice? Montgomery said “desktop video” was the marriage of personal computers and video. Kildall asked Montgomery if he really thought consumers would be doing full video editing at home in the future. Montgomery said they would if it was easy enough.

Cheifet closed the episode by asking about the projected cost of Video Toaster. Jenison said that for a whole system, you wound need a VCR, a camera or camcorder, an Amiga, and the Toaster card. Altogether, that setup would run about $2,000. The Video Toaster board alone would cost $799. Cheifet then asked if NewTek was working on any other creative applications for the Amiga. Montgomery said they were developing an NTSC paint program to take the output from Video Toaster and manipulate it, as well as add-on products to do animation and video titles.

NewTek, Video Toaster Outlived Amiga by Decades

Video Toaster was not actually out on the market when this Computer Chronicles episode first aired in early 1988. Indeed, the finished product did not release until nearly three years later in December 1990. By then, the cost of the setup had more than doubled from Paul Montgomery’s on-air projection. According to a 2016 retrospective on Video Toaster by Jeremy Reimer of Ars Technica, the entry-level price was $2,399 for the expansion card plus eight floppy disks, with the complete Amiga package running about $5,000. Although to be fair, the shipped Video Toaster included a lot of the additional features that Montgomery could only speculate about back in 1988, including a title generator and an updated paint program to make graphic overlays.

Of course, there was a NewTek product already available in 1988, and that was DigiView, which Wendy Woods discussed in her first remote segment. Tim Jenison, a native of Topeka, Kansas, was a longtime computer hobbyist. Reimer noted that Jenison built his own digital computer for a seventh-grade science project. After dropping out of college, Jenison started a small business selling software for Tandy computers. Once Jenison purchased an Amiga 1000 in 1985, however, he quickly shifted his focus to the new Commodore machine. He sold the Tandy software business and started NewTek, Inc., to develop DigiView.

Paul Montgomery joined NewTek a short time later. Montgomery, a native of California, had been working at Electronic Arts during their ultimately failed pivot to the Amiga as its primary platform. According to Reimer, it was Montgomery who sold Jenison on the idea of developing what became Video Toaster:

Montgomery asked Jenison if the Amiga would be able to serve as the centerpiece for a video effects generator. Jenison liked the idea, but Montgomery kept pushing: “What about squeezing the image and flipping it?” he asked.

“No, that would take a $100,000 piece of equipment.” Jenison replied.

“OK, yeah, I knew that,” Montgomery said. “But it would be pretty cool if you could do it.”

In the story of the Amiga, there were many points in which an engineer was challenged to do something impossible. In this instance, Jenison went off and thought more about the problem. Eventually, he figured out a way to do the squeezing and flipping effect—and that was the beginning of the Toaster prototype.

When it finally launched, Video Toaster was an unqualified success. It quickly gained a foothold with a number of professional television productions, including the Steven Spielberg-produced NBC series SeaQuest DSV and J. Michael Straczynski’s syndicated science fiction show Babylon 5. In 1993, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded NewTek and Jenison an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy for their work on Video Toaster.

Of course, by 1993 the Amiga platform itself was on life support. While Video Toaster was in some respects a “killer app” for the Amiga, it did not lift Commodore in the same way that Aldus’ PageMaker had done for the original Apple Macintosh. And by July 1993, news reports suggested that NewTek might actually have to buy or bail out Commodore to keep the Amiga alive.

That didn’t happen, and Commodore decided to liquidate itself in 1994 and shut down. Video Toaster survived, however, as NewTek ported it to Windows-based systems. NewTek continued to update and service Video Toaster until 2009. The company itself relocated from Kansas to San Antonio, Texas, in 1997. In 2005, NewTek introduced its TriCaster line of video production tools, which effectively replaced Video Toaster. In November 2019, Norway-based Vizrt acquired NewTek, Inc. Shortly before this blog posted in September 2023, Vizrt officially retired the NewTek brand and merged both companies’ product lines, including TriCasert, under the Vizrt name.

Microillusions Another Flash in the Pan

The other company featured prominently in this episode, Microillusions, did not enjoy as long a life as NewTek. Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian published an extensive history of Microillusions in 2015. Talin learned to program mainframe computers while serving in the United States Air Force in the late 1970s. Like NewTek’s Tim Jenison, Talin initially got into microcomputers making software for the Tandy Color Computer. Talin’s first Tandy game, Guardian, was a 1982 clone of Williams Electronics’ popular arcade cabinet Defender.

According to Maher, Talin first learned of the Amiga 1000 from Jim Steinert, the owner of a Los Angeles computer store:

The seeds of MicroIllusions were planted during one day’s idle conversation when Steinert complained to [Talin] that, while the Amiga supposedly had speech synthesis built into its operating system, he had never actually heard his machines talk; in the first releases of AmigaOS, the ability was hidden within the operating system’s libraries, accessible only to programmers who knew how to make the right system calls. Seeing an interesting challenge, not to mention a chance to get more time in front of one of Steinert’s precious Amigas, [Talin] said that he could easily write a program to make the Amiga talk for anyone. He proved as good as his word within a few hours. Impressed, Steinert asked if he could sell the new program in his store for a straight 50/50 split.

Steinert subsequently formed Microillusions and hired Talin to develop software as an independent contractor. The new company’s first product was Discovery, a series of educational games for the Amiga. Talin was the sole designer and programmer on the project. He followed that up with The Faery Tale Adventures: Book I, an ambitious action-adventure role-playing game, which Maher described as graphically and musically “stunning” for its time yet also “kind of a mess as a piece of game design.”

Talin developed a basic editor called Musica to write the music for both Discovery and The Faery Tale Adventures. He then decided to make a new program targeting professional musicians. Steinert gave him the green light, and the result was Music-X. Talin provided a detailed walkthrough of his development process in a 2018 Medium article. He also described his experience demonstrating the Music-X prototype on Chronicles:

I had been in a panic because I had forgotten to bring the power cord for the Roland D-50. However, I was able to unscrew the back panel of the D-50, and using alligator clips from the electronic workbench at the TV studio, rigged a power cable for it just minutes before the session. You may notice that the arrangement of objects on the desk where I am sitting carefully conceals the jerry-rigged cables.

Like Video Toaster, Music-X was not ready for market when this Chronicles episode aired. Music-X finally released at the end of 1989. Talin later recalled he only made about one-quarter the money on Music-X that he did from Faery Tale Adventures, largely because he agreed not to take an advance against future royalties on Music-X.

Unfortunately, while Music-X reviewed well, it came out at a time when Microillusions was, in Maher’s words, “already in dire straits, their phones perpetually coming on- and off-line and rumors swirling about their alleged demise.” That demise occurred at some point in 1992 or 1993 based on California state records. Talin continued to work as an independent contractor before starting his own company, The Dreamers Guild, Inc., in 1991. Among the new company’s first projects was a sequel to Electronic Arts’ Deluxe Music Construction Set, the Amiga rewrite of Will Harvey’s Music Construction Set.

In 1994, Talin and The Dreamers Guild created an adventure game, Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb, for New World Computing. Talin said the game “was not a commercial success,” selling fewer than 20,000 copies at launch, although a German-language port did modestly better. Talin then decided to create a sequel to Faery Tale Adventures, which Encore Software, Inc., published under the name Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II in 1997. This game was also not successful, and essentially drove both Encore and The Dreamers Guild out of business.

Talin went on to work for a number of failed software startups before joining Electronic Arts’ Maxis subsidiary in 2002, where he worked on the team that produced SimCity 4 and The Sims 2. He left the games industry altogether in 2007 and moved over to Google for the next eight years as a software engineer. In 2016, Talin joined yet another startup, Nimble Collective, Inc., which Amazon Web Services acquired in 2019. Talin remained with Amazon until he retired in 2021.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was first broadcast in late January or early February 1988. The recording at the Archive is a rerun that aired during the week of July 14, 1988.

Paul Schindler’s software review was for a sample disk of Microsoft Excel templates sold by Heizer Software for $4.

Bob Dinnerman designed and programmed F/A-18 Interceptor for Electronic Arts. In a 2004 interview with Tom Steinberg, Dinnerman recalled that he’d been working as an arcade developer for Bally/Midway when he attended the 1984 SIGGRAPH conference and saw a demonstration of high-end flight simulation software. A developer approached him at the show and asked if he’d be interested in creating a combat flight simulator for the Amiga. He left Bally/Midway and proceeded to create a demo for Interceptor, which EA agreed to publish.

Heidi Turnipseed worked as an animator for both Walt Disney and Don Bluth Productions. Aside from assisting Microillusions in developing its animation software, she was also credited on the 1988 MS-DOS game based on the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Dr. Ken Nakayama earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Pennsylvania’s Haverford College in 1962 and later his his master’s and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. After a two-year stint teaching at a medical school in St. Johns, Newfoundland, Nakayama joined Smith-Kettlewell in 1971. He remained there until 1990, when he joined the psychology department at Harvard University. At Harvard, Nakayama started the Vision Sciences Laboratory, which he oversaw until his retirement in 2016.

Tim Jenison remained with NewTek as its chairman until the Vizrt acquisition in 2019. In 2013, director Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) released a documentary, Tim’s Vermeer, which chronicled Jenison’s attempts to duplicate the techniques used by 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

Paul Montgomery died in June 1999 at the age of 39 after suffering a heart attack while on vacation. Montgomery left NewTek in 1994 after a falling out with Tim Jenison and co-founded a new company, Play, Inc., which developed Snappy Video Snapshot, a PC image capture device. That company folded not long after Montgomery’s death.

Larry Keenan died in August 2021. Born in 1943, Keenan became internationally known for his photographs of the Beat Generation in the 1960s, which are now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent collection. He went on to become a successful advertising and corporate photographer who was among the early adopters of digital technology. Among his clients were Electronic Arts, for whom he designed the box cover art for the 1988 Amiga release of Deluxe PhotoLab. In 2011, Kurt Hemmer and Tom Knoff produced a 40-minute documentary on Keenan’s life and work photographing the Beat Generation.

Chapter 2: CD-ROM

At the 1985 summer Consumer Electronics Show, Jack Tramiel’s Atari Corporation demonstrated a CD-ROM drive running the Grolier’s KnowldegeDisc, a digital version of the Grolier’s encyclopedia based on software created by Gary Kildall’s Activenture, Inc. At the time, Tramiel and his team said they would soon ship a working CD-ROM drive for its new Atari 520ST computer that would cost no more than $500.

It was a ludicrous promise. The companies actually developing CD-ROM players in late 1985, such as Sony, Hitachi, and Philips, were all quoting retail prices of between $700 and $1,000. Even Tramiel knew that he wouldn’t be able to deliver a $500 CD-ROM drive in 1985. That didn’t stop him from continuing to promise it in 1986 or 1987 or 1988, however.

By the time this next Computer Chronicles episode first aired in late February 1988, Stewart Cheifet’s cold open featured him proudly standing over the Atari CD-ROM drive–now known as the Atari CDAR-504–proclaiming that after years of hype and hoopla, the company was now finally ready to begin shipping the device. Cheifet said the CDAR-504 could not only read data into your computer but would also play music off of audio CDs, all for around $500 $600.

Now, as I discussed in my post on the previous Chronicles look at optical storage devices from November 1985, Atari never managed to ship the CDAR-504 in any significant numbers. Indeed, two years after Cheifet proclaimed Atari would finally release the CD-ROM drive, Tom Byron wrote in the Atari-focused computer magazine STart that now, for real this time the product would ship to retailers. Well, maybe:

Rick Meyer is Atari’s product manager for the CD-ROM and he is well aware of the CDAR’s stormy past. Despite that, he remains optimistic that a product will ship as planned.

“Drives are out to developers and the CD-ROM is on the verge of shipping in the United States,” Meyer told START. He further explained that he is negotiating with some of the “major software houses” for their retrieval software, a move that would definitely widen the CD-ROM’s consumer appeal.

[…]

No formal rollout for the CDAR504 is planned; it will be like other ST peripherals, sold direct through Atari dealers.

Digging through sporadic newsgroup posts from the time, it seems that some development units did make it out into the wild. The feedback from those users was that the CDAR-504 played music CDs just fine. And it could also read CD-ROM data from any disc, including those formatted for Apple or MS-DOS. But in the absence of any Atari-specific control software, there wasn’t much the ST could actually do with that data.

Replacing Binders and Microfilm with a Single CD

Turning to back to our episode, we dispensed with the normal introductory host banter and went right into a product demonstration featuring Gary Kildall on the guest side of the table. Joining Kildall was Chris Bowman, the director of marketing and sales for KnowledgeSet Corporation. (Kildall changed the name of Activenture to KnowledgeSet after Activision, the game publisher, complained.) Cheifet noted that Kildall was always excited about CD-ROM technology. Why?

Kildall said CD-ROM was a brand new medium for publishing. It was based on the same technology as CD audio, and you had the advantage of being read-only. While some people saw that as a disadvantage, the read-only limitation actually made CD-ROM a very good publishing medium. It was also very high capacity.

Kildall then showed off a CD-ROM version of the Boeing 757 Maintenance Manual that KnowledgeSet produced for the Boeing Company. The disc covered an entire set of manuals, including 12,000 pages of text and 4,000 drawings, which normally required about 140 pounds of paper. The obvious advantage to the CD-ROM, Kidall said, was that you had the entire thing on one disc rather than a bookshelf full of paper manuals or five rolls of microfilm.

Bowman then conducted a demonstration of the Maintenance Manual. The user interface presented a visual representation of a bookshelf that served as the main menu. The user selected a manual to view. This brought up the manual’s table of contents. The table was presented as a hypertext document, so the user could click on an individual item to go to that section. Bowman noted there were also hyperlinks embedded in the text of a section that referenced drawings and figures. He clicked on a figure of a 757 wing and showed how the user could zoom in on the drawing to get a closer look at a particular part.

Continuing, Bowman showed that by hitting the F2 key, the user could split the screen horizontally between text and graphics. Hitting the key again would split the screens vertically. This made it possible for the user to scroll and read the text while keeping the drawing fixed on screen. Bowman also showed off the full-text search capability of the CD-ROM. The user could search the entire database for a specific word or combination of words. You could also enter a specific chapter and section and go right to that area.

Kildall reiterated the advantage of the CD-ROM was that you had all of this stuff on a single disc instead of having it on rolls of microfilm. This was especially important for the aerospace industry, as planes were very complex machines. So in order to remain current with all of the maintenance requirements, you basically had to keep that information in electronic form.

CD-ROM Helped Poison Control Officials in S.F.

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from the San Francisco General Hospital’s Poison Control Center, where the staff used a CD-ROM database called Poisondex. (This same product was previously demonstrated in-studio during a November 1985 episode on computers and medicine.) Woods said the use of CD-ROM had made a big difference in the staff’s daily routine. Dr. Kent Olson, the director of the Poison Control Center, told Woods that the biggest advantage was efficiency. Most of the calls to the center were urgent and in many cases emergencies. This meant the staff needed to find information within no more than a few minutes and relay it to a doctor or parent over the phone.

Woods added that along with speed of access and a simple interface, Poisondex offered a much greater depth of information about a toxic substance, including its degree of toxicity, the antidote, and symptoms. Staff members could begin a search with a brand name, generic type, or group. Even the code on a tablet or capsule was enough to track down its composition. The system then responded with a breakdown of ingredients and the proper treatment.

Before the CD-ROM system was installed, Woods noted, the staff had to rely on binders filled with about 200 microfiche cards, which were still on hand in case of a system failure. The Poison Center’s dedicated staff handled over 50,000 calls per year, sometimes of a life-threatening nature. The CD-ROM library made their job easier, faster, and perhaps just a little less stressful.

Microsoft Offered an Entire Reference Library on CD

Steve Michel and Bruce Phillips joined Cheifet and George Morrow, who took over as co-host for the remainder of the episode, for the next studio segment. Michel was the west coast editor for the magazine CD-ROM Review. Phillips was a product manager with Microsoft.

Morrow opened by noting that CD-ROM Review was the first publication to address the interaction of personal computers and CD-ROMs. He asked Michel how old the magazine was and who were the target readers. Michel said the first regular issues of CD-ROM Review came out in March 1987. The magazine had been publishing bimonthly but planned to start going monthly this year. The focus was on people who were publishing data on CD-ROM and developing products to use with it, as well as members of the general public. Morrow noted that there weren’t many “end users” of CD-ROM right now.

Chiefet said there had been talk about CD-ROM for the past couple of years, and it seemed like a market waiting to happen. Was it about to happen now? Michel said that we were right on the verge of it happening. There needed to be a couple of more good software products, such as additional encyclopedias and applications that demonstrated the interactive capabilities of CD-ROM. Morrow interjected that a little more aggressive (lower) pricing wouldn’t hurt, either.

Cheifet then turned to Phillips and asked about his company’s product, Microsoft Bookshelf, the first “major horizontal application” for CD-ROM on the PC. Phillips said that Bookshelf worked with a CD-ROM drive. For the demo, he used an Amdek Laser drive, which worked with any IBM PC or compatible. Bookshelf came on a single disc, which looked the same as an audio CD. (The Amdek also played audio CDs.)

Phillips explained that Bookshelf worked with your computer’s word processor. It could also work as a stand-alone program if you wanted to do pure research. In his demo, Phillips had a letter opened in a word processor. Bookshelf operated as a memory-resident utility that could access ten different reference works on the CD-ROM. Those reference works included a thesaurus, dictionary, spelling checker, usage alert, the Chicago Manual of Style, an almanac, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, business information systems, a U.S. ZIP Code directory, and a package of forms and letters.

For his sample letter, Phillips used the ZIP Code directory to find the missing ZIP Code for his addressee. He noted that the traditional ZIP Code directory was a two-volume set and laborious to work through. But with Bookshelf you could call up that information in two keystrokes. The process took about three seconds. And with one more keystroke, the ZIP Code was automatically inserted into the letter.

Phillips then demonstrated the included American Heritage Dictionary, which he noted contained the full text of the original. In the sample letter, Phillips looked up the definition of “occultation.” He called up the dictionary from the word processor and it brought up a screen containing the full definition. You could also switch between the original word processor screen and the dictionary screen. You could also paste the definition from the dictionary into the letter and the word processor automatically reformatted the text.

Morrow noted the use of different colors for the text in the dictionary screen. Phillips explained that in a print dictionary, you would see italics and boldface used. Since Bookshelf was a character-based application, it used colors to represent that formatting. Phillips added that Bookshelf was also Microsoft’s biggest product in terms of data, containing over 200MB. But it was also the lightest since it was on a CD-ROM as opposed to a floppy disk.

Using Multimedia to Teach Language Skills

Carolyn Kuhn joined Cheifet and Morrow for the next segment. Kuhn was president of Austin, Texas-based Software Mart, Inc. Her company was developing a CD-ROM product called The Visual Dictionary. Steve Michel also remained for this segment.

Morrow noted that Kuhn would be demonstrating her product on a Macintosh. Was the software limited to that platform? Kuhn said no. She said Visual Dictionary was an interactive, multimedia application of CD-ROM developed using MediaMixer, which was transportable. So Media Mart was developing its application for Macintosh, MS-DOS under Windows, the Atari 68000-based machines, and even the Apple IIe.

Cheifet asked Kuhn to explain and demonstrate Visual Dictionary. Kuhn said it was a language instruction tool being developed by Software Mart for two different publishers, U.S.-based Facts on File and Canada-based Les éditions Québec/Amérique, who created book-based products that her company was now converting to CD-ROM. The CD-ROM version added audio pronunciation to all of the content, images, and text in the print editions.

Kuhn then demonstrated Visual Dictionary on the Macintosh. She pulled up a picture of spores. The picture included both the English and French terms (both “spores”) and provided an audio pronunciation. Kuhn noted that Visual Dictionary used actual digitized recordings of human speech as opposed to computer-synthesized speech. You could also point to specific parts of the image–such as the stem of the spore–and the software automatically provided the terms in both languages and their spoken pronunciations.

Morrow asked if something like hypertext could be used in conjunction with Visual Dictionary so that teachers could develop supplemental material for language classes. Kuhn said there already was a built-in feature called “Mark Place,” which enabled teachers to create custom tours of material on the disk, both audio and text. There was also a “Drill and Practice” module that allowed the user to link and pictures and audio terms from the language database to create their own computer game-like session.

Morrow asked Michel for his opinion of Visual Dictionary. Michel said he liked the way it combined graphics, text, and sound, thus demonstrating the full potential of CD-ROM. If you had a lot of room on a disk, you could put a lot of different types of information on it. Morrow said it could make an interesting vertical product for schools.

Cheifet asked Kuhn about the target market for Visual Dictionary. Kuhn said the publishers were aiming the product at teaching foreign language and English as a second language in schools, at the university level as well as secondary schools. She thought there might also be demand in the consumer market and for certain multinational applications where custom dictionaries of terminology might be of interest.

Morrow clarified that Kuhn didn’t see her software replacing language teachers but rather helping to make them more productive. Kuhn said yes, she saw Visual Dictionary as supplemental material. It provided instructors with a large database of quality-assured pronunciation and voice inflection rather than simply audio cassettes or relying on a local teacher.

Cheifet asked Michel if the average consumer should go out right now and buy a CD-ROM drive to run something like Visual Dictionary. Michel said when there were a couple of more applications like this around, he could see it as a viable purchase for the home. Morrow added that it would also be useful for organizations that had to do language training.

Cheifet asked about the price of Visual Dictionary. Kuhn said the final pricing had not been determined. The production version would include Spanish, French, and English with over 5,000 terms in each language. Kuhn expected the final price to be under $1,000 for all three languages.

EA Had High Hopes for CD-i

Wendy Woods returned for her final remote segment, which featured that old standby Electronic Arts. EA was doing early research into another form of optical storage technology called Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-i). Specifically, an EA team created a prototype for a CD-i program that led the user on a tour of the company’s offices on a mission to “find information on the sudden kidnapping of the CD-i team.” Woods explained this was meant to be a simulation of what CD-i was supposed to do. Using a trackball as a pointing device, the user moved among real video images–not just computer animation–and heard real stereo digital sound.

Greg Riker, a CD-i developer with EA, told Woods that since the company’s founding they had been looking forward to the time when they could deliver interactive experiences combining very-high quality audiovisual media. In this case, combining television-quality graphics, digital audio, the quality of compact discs, and the high performance of interactive computing systems. And EA felt that CD-i was the first piece of hardware that combined all of those attributes into a single player.

But Woods cautioned that the CD-i player wouldn’t look anything like the hardware EA used to create its simulation. The consumer version would be a small box that hooked up to a television set. And while the technology was still in its infancy, CD-i players were expected to become major consumer products by late 1989, with manufacturers projecting sales in the tens of millions of units. And EA was planning to become the leading provider of games and other software for this new medium.

N/Hance Offered “Write Once” Optical Storage Option

Timothy J. Green and Barry Braden joined Cheifet and Morrow for the final segment. Green and Braden were the president and western area sales manager, respectively, for Massachusetts-based N/Hance Systems.

Morrow opened by noting that N/Hance produced optical storage devices called WORMs. What did “WORM” mean? Green said it meant, “write once, read mostly.” But he preferred to describe them as writable optical drives. He explained that N/Hance started four years ago by recognizing the need of people to store a large amount of data, yet there was no cost-effective way of doing so.

The N/Hance drive, called the N/Hance 525E, used special cartridges that contained CDs with a storage capacity of 240MB each. He added that N/Hance would soon release a model with over 1GB of storage.

Green inserted a demo cartridge into a 525E drive built-in to an IBM PC. He pulled up a directory listing of the cartridge, which the system recognized as the D:\ drive no different than a hard disk. Morrow noted the WORM disk broke the 32MB barrier. (The MS-DOS file system of this era could not recognize volumes larger than 32MB, which usually meant splitting larger disks into smaller individual volumes.) Green said that was correct. The user could set a partition size of any size based on their application and the 525E’s software would take care of the file system automatically.

Continuing the demo, Green showed the computer recognized a 120MB disk, which represented the storage capacity of one side of the cartridge. (Both sides were usable, adding up to 240MB.) He then copied files from the PC’s hard disk to the 525E cartridge to demonstrate the speed of the copy routine using the standard DOS copy command. (Actually, this was a proprietary command unique to the file system software.)

While the copy routine completed, Cheifet asked Braden what kind of user needed this massive storage capacity. Braden said many of their customers were handling large amounts of data. They took data from the bottom of the sea and used the rugged optical disk instead of magnetic disk out in the salt water because the optical disk was something that would be around for a long time. Lawyers also used the optical disks for litigation support, i.e., their depositions and pleadings. That gave them a fast, efficient way to search for information later, as opposed to thumbing through a lot of paper.

Morrow asked what input devices did people use to get those kinds of documents onto an optical disk. Braden said some used video cameras. Others used bitmap scanners.

Returning to the demo, Green showed a sample record from a database containing an employee ID system. The database combined images of the employee’s photographs and signatures with text information. Green noted that each image took up about 120KB of storage. Morrow asked about the cost of the 525E system. Green said the price was currently $1,599 for an internal system like the one used in the demonstration.

Cheifet asked if having erasable optical drives would be important to opening up the market. Green quipped that everyone had been waiting for erasable technology for some time. But he thought a writable optical disc like the 525E addressed a specific market niche where the need to retain information was critical for a professional or legal reason, while an erasable optical disc would tend to be more competitive with magnetic disk drives. Morrow observed that a lot of people thought of the write-once optical as a transition product, but the longer we waited for read-write optical, the more permanent a device like the 525 appeared to be.

Green added that N/Hance would shortly be introducing the 525E on the Sun Microsystems computer and the Apple Macintosh, and later in 1988 they would start seeing a “stackable” drive that could store over 100GB of information inside of a computer. Morrow asked how long it would take such a drive to switch between individual cartridges. Green said between 5 and 7 seconds.

The “Slow-Motion Fiasco” of CD-i

As this episode made clear, CD-ROM was nowhere near a consumer-level technology in early 1988. The only hint of a consumer application came from Electronic Arts, which was swimming against the tide by trying to develop for CD-i as opposed to the more widely accepted CD-ROM standard. This was in keeping with the mindset of EA founder (and two-time Chronicles guest) Trip Hawkins, who previously tried to focus the company on the Amiga as its lead platform. That effort didn’t work out much better than CD-i. The ever-present Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian offered a postmortem in a 2018 article on what went wrong this time:

EA embraced CD-I with the same enthusiasm they had recently shown for the Amiga, placing Greg Riker in personal charge of creating tools and techniques for programming it, working more as partners in CD-I’s development with Philips than as a mere third-party publisher.

Once again, however, it all came to nought. CD-I turned into one of the most notorious slow-motion fiascos in the history of the games industry, missing its originally planned release date in the fall of 1987 and then remaining vaporware for years on end. In early 1989, EA finally ran out of patience, mothballing all work on the platform unless and until it became a viable product; Greg Riker left the company to go work for Microsoft on their own CD-ROM research.

Philips, the Netherlands-based electronics conglomerate, was the main backer of the CD-i standard. It managed to ship its first CD-i player in December 1991. But at an initial retail price of around $800, it wasn’t exactly a strong competitor in the home entertainment market. When Philips finally abandoned CD-i in 1998, the company had reportedly sold only about 570,000 players in total, according to Blake Snow of GamePro.

Meanwhile, EA’s Hawkins would leave the company he founded in 1991 to start another venture, The 3DO Company, where he would try to thwart the video game dominance of Nintendo and Sega by creating his own CD-ROM-based console, also called the 3DO. It only cost $700. It failed yet managed to sell better than the CD-i, with GamePro estimating the final number of 3DO units sold at around 2 million.

“A Bunch of Librarians Talking to Each Other About Microfiche”

Returning to our early 1988 timeframe, it’s amusing to realize just how small the CD-ROM market was when this Chronicles episode first aired. A January 1987 report by Christine Winter in the Chicago Tribune cited industry analysts who estimated that there were only between 6,000 and 7,000 total CD-ROM units in the U.S. market. Another report from the New York Times in March 1987 cited a figure of 12,000 units sold based on estimates from Microsoft executive Thomas Lopez. He added that there were only about 130 total applications developed for CD-ROM, mostly replacements for paper manuals and online databases.

By March 1988, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates claimed there were about 50,000 CD-ROM drives in use. Jim Bartimo of Knight-Ridder cited analyst figures estimating the total sales of CD-ROM hardware and software for 1988 at $262 million, with that number growing to $1.4 billion by 1990. Gates himself told Bartimo that he believed a “CD-ROM drive could come standard with every $1,000 personal computer” by 1991.

Obviously, Gates had a vested interest in his prediction, as Microsoft was one of the earliest champions of CD-ROM software. The company hosted its third annual CD-ROM conference that March, just a couple of weeks after this Chronicles episode aired. Among the 600 attendees was Apple CEO John Sculley, who announced his company would be the the first major computer manufacturer to sell a CD-ROM drive at retail. And unlike Jack Tramiel, Sculley was as good as his word. Within days of the conference ending, newspaper ads started touting the new AppleCD-SC drive for $1,199. (Hey, Sculley never promised it would be cheap.)

Although there were less-expensive CD-ROM drives on the market for as little as $700, that was still too high a price point for mass consumption. And few consumers were as excited as Bill Gates and Gary Kildall over the use of optical storage for weighty reference materials. As one analyst told Bartimo after the Microsoft event, “The CD-ROM conference is like a bunch of librarians talking to each other about microfiche.”

Not surprisingly, though, people who wrote for a living tended to take a more positive view of the potential for CD-ROM as a reference tool. Allen Connery of the Calgary Herald wrote in December 1987, “Fellow writers, I have seen the future, and it is expensive, but it works.” Connery thought paying CA$1,795 for a CD-ROM drive and Microsoft Bookshelf was practically a bargain, given the word processor integration and on-line search functionality.

Another writer, Dan Gutman of the Miami Herald, was equally impressed with Bookshelf but worried about the potential drawbacks for society if CD-ROM caught on with the masses:

I’ve seen Microsoft Bookshelf in action and it’s very exciting. All these useful reference books are literally at your fingertips resting on the keyboard. You hit a key and a book jumps to the screen. My concern is that Bookshelf and the arrival of CD-ROM software points towards increasing computer potatoism.

[ … ]

I don’t know about you, but I like to take my fingers off the keyboard now and then. I need to get up and walk around the office while I’m working. If I stare at my computer screen for more than an hour or so, my eyeballs start falling out of my head. I look like something out of Night of the Living Dead.

[ … ]

Personally, I would rather read something from a piece of paper than a glowing screen. The more they put on the screen, the less anybody has to move a muscle. The result will be a more sedentary life style than office workers already have. Is anybody at the American Medical Association looking into this?

As a final note, Bookshelf did not originate as a Microsoft product. The previously mentioned Thomas Lopez founded a company called Cytation Incorporated in January 1985 to develop a CD-ROM reference disk that was initially called CD-Write. A year later, in January 1986, Microsoft acquired Cytation and named Lopez as vice president of its new CD-ROM division. CD-Write was then renamed Microsoft Bookshelf, which shipped in September 1987.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was first broadcast during the week of February 24, 1988. The video on the Archive is a rerun broadcast during the week of July 21, 1988.

Paul Schindler’s software review for this episode was Accolade’s Test Drive ($40 on PC), a racing game.

KnowledgeSet’s production of the Boeing 757 Maintenance Manual involved a fairly complex alliance with Sony. KnowledgeSet and Sony formed a third company, Publishers Data Service Corporation (PDSC), and Sony created a fourth company, Digital Audio Disc Corporation (DADC). Sony provided the hardware, KnowledgeSet created the search-and-retrieval software, PDSC handled the data preparation and tape mastering, and DADC performed the actual CD-ROM manufacturing.

N/Hance Systems was active from 1988 to 1992. The N/Hance 525E demonstrated in this episode retailed for $3,995. The hardware was actually an Information Storage Inc. 525WC drive combined with the proprietary N/Hance file system software. Simson Garfinkel, an MIT student in the early 1980s, developed the write-once optical file system and served as N/Hance Systems’ chief scientist.

Chris Bowman started his tech career at Atari, Inc., before moving to KnowledgeSet. After leaving KnowledgeSet in 1991, he spent two years as a senior product marketing manager at Adobe. In the early 2000s, Bowman shifted careers and became a high school teacher in Washington State.

Dr. Kent Olson earned his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He became medical director of the Poison Control Center at UCSF in 1983 and held that position until he retired in 2017.

Steve Michel worked as a columnist for MacWeek and authored a handful of computer books, including Steve Michel’s SuperCard Handbook (1989) and The Best Mac Tips Ever (1994). His tenure at CD-ROM Review was brief. The magazine debuted in June 1986 but ceased publication in December 1988. James McBrian of IDG Group, the magazine’s parent company, told the Boston Globe in 1990 that CD-ROM Review failed due to the lack of widespread adoption of CD-ROM drives at the time.

Carolyn Kuhn started Software Mart Incorporated in 1983. She previously worked for Control Data Corporation. Software Mart produced a number of early CD-ROM titles for the IBM PC and Apple platforms, including The CD-ROM Developer’s Lab (1989), a reference guide to publishing CD-ROM software.

Greg Riker is an electrical engineer by training. After spending the 1970s working in the music industry as a performer, recording engineer, and producer, he transitioned to the computer industry in the early 1980s. Not long after his Chronicles appearance, EA promoted Riker to be vice president of new technology. But as Jimmy Maher noted, Riker left EA after its CD-i development ended. He then joined Microsoft as director of its advanced technology group. Riker later assumed responsibility for the company’s early push into home automation technology, Microsoft Home, before leaving Microsoft altogether in 1998.

Barry Braden started his career in sales at Sony. He recalled to Kenny Gould of Forbes in 2019 that after spending 20 years in tech with a variety of companies, including N/Hance Systems, he decided to get out of the industry in 2001. Braden then had a stint in nonprofit management as chairman of the Endangered Species Coalition. But he decided he wanted to do something more entrepreneurial again, so he co-founded Fieldwork Brewing Company, a craft brewery and taproom, in 2014.

Chapter 3: Tax Preparation Software

Tax preparation software was always a favorite topic of Computer Chronicles. This next episode from March 1988 included some returning guests and updates to several products featured in prior shows. As I discussed in an episode of the Chronicles Revisited Podcast, this was a period when a number of small developers competed in the tax preparation software market. We would not start to see the industry consolidation towards TurboTax under Intuit for another 5 or 6 years.

Indeed, when Stewart Cheifet referenced TurboTax in the introduction to this episode, it was still published by its original developer, Chipsoft Inc. Cheifet noted that individuals looking for help with preparing their taxes could use books, such as the Price Waterhouse Personal Tax Adviser, or turn to a computer program like TurboTax. The advantage of software was that it included all of the rules, logic, and strategy contained in the books. For example, TurboTax could prepare amortization and depreciation schedules for you. The program could also move your calculations automatically from federal to state income tax returns.

But Cheifet wondered if these programs weren’t just a vertical application of a spreadsheet? Gary Kildall said it was in a sense. You took a general technique like spreadsheets and applied it to a specific problem. The benefit of dedicated tax software was that you could use the program to play “what if?” and see how different numbers affected the bottom line. Now you could just use a spreadsheet to do this, but then you’d have to pay a lot more attention to the tax guide. And by using the software, you might save enough money to actually pay for the program.

IRS Office Still Dependent on Paper Despite Computer Assistance

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) western regional service center in Fresno, California. This was one of ten regional processing centers. Woods noted that the IRS handled over 100 million tax returns each year. Roughly 20 million of those returns passed through the Fresno center, and most of them were still handwritten. The single-level building at Fresno was as long as 18 football fields, and almost everywhere you looked there were mountains of paper.

To keep from being buried under stacks of forms, Woods said, Fresno had to adapt computers to the physical manipulation of paper returns. Barcode readers in the mailroom pre-sorted and classified envelopes. Checks were sorted automatically by bank name or location. But people still did most of the data entry. Optical character readers (OCRs) could handle some forms like single-page returns, but they still required human assistance to identify a scrawled “6” or a sloppy “7.”

Norman Clausen, the chief of computer services for the Fresno center, told Woods that about 95 percent of returns were transcribed using key-to-disk systems. The goal was to eventually get 50 percent of those returns filed electronically. Then, for the remaining 50 percent, the IRS wanted perfect the OCR technology to automatically transcribe half of those returns. Any remaining returns could then be placed scanned and the images stored on optical disc.

Woods said that although a great deal of computing went on at the Fresno center, it was not of the “number crunching” type. The computers were there mostly for data entry and retrieval. And in fact, the office literally produced tons of hardcopy. High-speed laser printers consumed about 2 million feet of paper per month. This paper was turned into notices, warnings, and other correspondence. Clausen said the real breakthrough would come when practitioners–i.e., professional tax preparers–started filing electronically. In California alone, about 50 to 55 percent of all returns were done by preparers.

Desktop PCs were uncommon at the Fresno office, Woods noted, and when they were visible, it was usually as terminals. In fact, the agency saw a limited role for the PC either inside or outside the center. Clausen said that right now, there was no plans to make it possible for an individual taxpayer to dial-in to the IRS and file a return electronically. There were still concerns about the reliability and security of transmitting that data online. Clausen said the IRS wasn’t about to let people just dial-in to the agency’s mainframe. There would need to be an electronic “brake” in the filing process.

Tax Preparation via Spreadsheet

Ed Tittel and Nicholas Cofsky Sky joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio. Tittel was a technical writer and contributing editor with Macazine. Sky was president of Oregon-based Sky Computer Resources.

Kildall quipped that most people just took their W-2 forms and a stack of receipts down to their local tax preparer. Why would anyone use a computer instead? Tittel said there were a couple of reasons. First, a computer was more forgiving than a pencil and eraser. It was easier to do things over. And second, you could work through several different variations on your taxes and pick the one that came out best for you. Kildall asked if these programs came with updates, as the tax laws changed every year. Tittel said most vendors sold a standard program and then issued updates on a year-by-year basis.

Kildall turned to Sky and asked about his company’s software, Federal Tax Forms for AppleWorks. As the name suggested, this was a series of templates for AppleWorks, an office suite published by Apple Computer for the Apple II platform. Sky said the benefit of using AppleWorks was that it provided a standard interface that users already knew. It also made it quicker to create and ship the product, so users could receive Federal Tax Forms before they even got their W-2s.

Sky provided a demonstration of Federal Tax Forms on an Apple IIgs. He showed a sample Form 1040, which appeared as a spreadsheet within AppleWorks. Individual schedules were kept on separate spreadsheets. By using a keyboard shortcut, the user could pull up a menu to import data from a schedule to the main Form 1040 and vice versa. Once the user entered all of their data, they used another keyboard shortcut to perform the final tax calculations.

Cheifet asked if a user could print right onto the actual IRS Form 1040. Sky said yes, the software printed to the official forms and schedules. Cheifet asked about the cost of Federal Tax Forms. Sky said it was $39.95 for the basic packet, with additional forms available for $5 each. The program worked on any Apple II that used AppleWorks or an Apple III running III-EZ Pieces (the Apple III equivalent of AppleWorks.)

The Latest from MacInTax

Susan Morgan joined Cheifet, Kildall, and Tittel for the next segment. Morgan was president of SoftView, Inc., which published the Macintosh-based tax preparation software MacInTax. She also appeared in the previous Chronicles episode on tax software from February 1987.

Kildall asked how changes in federal tax laws for 1987 affected the use of tax preparation programs. Tittel said it made things a little more complicated, especially when it came to items like passive income. But he thought programs like MacInTax helped users deal with these new complications.

Turning to Morgan, Kildall noted that MacInTax had been out for quite awhile. What major changes had been made for this year’s taxes? Morgan said they added a number of forms and schedules. There were now about 50 schedules and worksheets available, which could calculate things like passive losses and depreciation.

Cheifet asked for a demonstration. Morgan pulled up MacInTax running on a Macintosh. The program showed a graphical recreation of an actual Form 1040. Morgan noted the user could point-and-click on individual items. Anytime you entered a dollar amount on a line and hit return, the software automatically recalculated all other lines on the form. Double-clicking on a line requiring itemization pulled up a separate data entry window.

All of the individual forms, schedules, worksheets, and statements could be accessed through the Macintosh menu, Morgan explained. She pulled up a sample schedule and entered some data. Once she was done with the schedule, the data automatically linked back to the Form 1040. Morgan then demonstrated a worksheet to calculate passive income and interest. She also showed off the on-line help feature. A user could double-click on any line of the Form 1040, which triggered a pop-up box containing the official IRS instructions corresponding to that line.

Once you were finished with the return, Morgan said you could print it out directly from MacInTax onto plain paper using either a dot-matrix or laser printer. This created an IRS-accepted form for the user to sign and mail.

Cheifet noted that MacInTax was now available for the IBM PC and Apple IIgs. Morgan said that was right. The software was marketed as TaxView on those machines.

Turning to Tittel, Cheifet said that he had referred to MacInTax as a “godsend.” Why? Tittel said because all you had to know was the numbers. The software knew all the rules.

Software for Professional Tax Preparers

Wendy Woods returned for her final remote segment, which profiled Bob Smith, a professional tax preparer with R.A. Planning. Woods said that for the first time this tax year, Smith was using a computerized program to do the planning and preparation of his client’s tax returns.

The system, PC/Professional Tax Partner, came with its own PC, hard disk, laser printer, and software, and was specifically designed for tax accountants. The software came with nearly all of the necessary tax forms. As the preparer filled out each form, the program automatically performed the necessary calculations.

Smith told Woods this was a very important tool, because he didn’t have to spend all his time going through calculations and forms manually. He simply had to input the information and get the results. Coupled with another program, he could then look at a client’s financial forecast all the way out to 1991.

Smith said this system allowed him to take on more clients since each return could be done faster. But Woods added that the computer would never be able to replace the planning and experience necessary to get you the fattest tax refund. So no matter how sophisticated the tax programs became, they were not expected to put people like Smith out of business anytime soon.

Do You Need a Pricier Tax Prep Package?

For the final segment, Dr. James E. Howard and Debra Miller joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio. Howard was president of HowardSoft and another return guest, having previously appeared in a March 1985 episode on personal finance software. Miller was the marketing director with Simon & Schuster Software.

Kildall noted there were a wide range of prices when it came to tax preparation software. He asked Howard, who produced one of the pricier packages at around $300, what you got with the more expensive software as opposed to, say, a $40 program. Howard said what you got was tax depth and automation. The expensive packages were for the more “involved” return.

Cheifet asked Miller to demonstrate her company’s product, J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax, which was one of the lower-priced packages at around $69.95. (Existing users could update for just $39.95.) Miller said the Lasser program featured a unique “interview” section. The software asked the user a series of yes-or-no questions. Based on the answers, the program highlighted the necessary tax forms. Miller filled out a sample interview. Cheifet asked what a user did if they didn’t know the answer to a specific question. Miller said you could pull up on-line help by pressing F1, which brought up a reference to the corresponding section of the print version of J.K. Lasser’s tax guide.

Cheifet noted that the software also allowed you to compare two different alternative approaches. Miller said that was correct. This was a new feature for 1988. She pulled up a “1040 Analysis” screen that allowed a married taxpayer to compare their tax liability if they filed jointly versus separately. Cheifet said the Lasser program was only available for the IBM PC and compatibles. Miller said yes, it ran on any PC with at least 256KB of memory.

Turning back to Howard, Cheifet noted his company’s product, Tax Preparer by HowardSoft, was at the top end of the price spectrum Kildall referenced earlier. What were the “power features” that the user got for $295? Howard said that as opposed to filling out a lot of on-screen forms with references to IRS instructions, Tax Preparer implemented those instructions in the software itself. In many cases, the user wouldn’t even have to look at a form or schedule.

Cheifet asked for a demonstration of Tax Preparer on the IBM PC, noting that it looked different than the other programs seen so far on the program. Howard said the program asked for raw data as opposed to having the user fill out forms. He entered some income data into Tax Preparer and showed how it automatically produced a finished tax return.

Kildall asked if there was any potential liability issue with having the software select forms for the user. Howard said there hadn’t been any issues like that with Tax Preparer. And if there was a problem, that meant there was a need for further testing of the software. Cheifet followed-up: If a user did get audited, could they blame HowardSoft? Howard said no, the person who signed the tax return, either the taxpayer or their tax preparer, was ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the information. Howard emphasized it was his software’s reputation, rather than potential legal liability, that mattered.

Cheifet asked Howard what kind of user needed Tax Preparer. Howard said the the typical case would be a two-income family that had enough money to invest in a business or rental property. Individuals in these situations were subject to many of the new tax laws, which were much more complicated than last year.

HowardSoft Still Going Strong After 44 Years

I didn’t delve into HowardSoft and its Tax Preparer program in detail during Jim Howard’s prior Chronicles appearance, so let me rectify that now. Tax Preparer by HowardSoft has a few distinctions. It was probably the first commercially sold tax preparation software program for the Apple II. It was definitely the longest-supported tax package on that platform. And I suspect that Tax Preparer is the longest continuously-developed software application demonstrated on Computer Chronicles, as it is still being actively updated and sold today by HowardSoft.

Stewart Cheifet introduced Howard as “Dr. Jim Howard.” Howard earned that doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1969. His first career was in radar design and research for Hughes Aircraft, where he worked from 1964 to 1976. When Howard’s bosses wanted him to earn an MBA and take a job in management, however, he decided to leave Hughes and join a small research and development consulting firm, Mark Resources, in Marina del Rey, California.

As described in an extensive profile of Howard and HowardSoft by David Hunter for the April 1982 issue of Softalk, Howard initially purchased an Apple II in 1979 for his children. But he ended using the microcomputer to write his own tax preparation program, initially just for personal use. Howard then decided to try his hand at selling the program locally–if for no other reason than to justify deducting the Apple II as a business expense. This first version of Tax Preparer only sold 50 copies, Howard recalled, and he continued to work full-time for Mark Resources while spending his nights and weekends continuing to refine Tax Preparer. The next year, 1980, he increased his sales fourfold to 200 copies. One of his customers, a professional accountant, then convinced Howard to pursue software development as a full-time business.

Howard quit his job to run HowardSoft full-time in March 1981, moving from Marina del Ray to La Jolla, California, where the company remains based today. He started building out his staff and developed two additional products, Creative Financing and Real Estate Analyzer. As far as I can tell, these programs and Tax Preparer constituted HowardSoft’s entire product line. The company dropped Creative Financing sometime in the 1980s and continued development on Real Estate Analyzer until around 2012.

But Tax Preparer endured. P.G. Torrez, writing for the San Bernadino County Sun in January 1988, cited one market analyst who estimated Tax Preparer had as much as 50 percent of the retail tax preparation software market. That figure was almost certainly too high. Indeed, in an article published a year later in the Los Angeles Times, another analyst told writer Elliot King that HowardSoft’s market share was closer to 10 percent. Obtaining actual figures was impossible, as all of the companies doing tax preparation software at the time were privately held, but Howard himself said they were selling “tens of thousands” of copies during tax season.

It’s also worth noting that Howard himself was not chasing growth. In contrast to ChipSoft, which grew TurboTax rapidly and found venture capital backing, Howard told King, “We purposely don’t get into products that will increase our value too high because then you lose the one-on-one contact with your customers.” Howard believed in the “small-is-beautiful” approach to business, and his goal was less about making money than “dealing with real people.” That’s why unlike TurboTax, HowardSoft didn’t offer state-specific income tax packages outside of the company’s home base of California. Howard said making packages for multiple other states simply wasn’t “fun.”

Howard’s dedication to his customer base, particularly on the Apple II, was nothing short of legendary. I found one review of TaxPreparer for the Apple II from May 1999, 20 years after the initial release and nearly 6 years after Apple finally discontinued production of the Apple IIe. HowardSoft’s own website from 2001 said the company would continue to provide annual updates of Tax Preparer for Apple II and MS-DOS systems “so long as there are still customers who want them.” Of course, today HowardSoft only produces Tax Preparer for Microsoft Windows. But I do wonder when the last Apple II update actually shipped.

J.K. Lasser Saves You Money from Beyond the Grave

While Tax Preparer by HowardSoft will soon reach its 45th anniversary, the history of J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax goes back even further. In fact, Mr. Lasser continues to advise people on the best tax strategies today in 2023 despite the notable handicap of having died in 1954.

Jacob K. “Yoc” Lasser was born in 1896. A first-generation American born to Austro-Hungarian parents, Lasser began his career working as a bookkeeper in a New Jersey factory. According to a 1952 profile in the Saturday Review by Bennett Cerf, Lasser also worked as a part-time sportswriter for the Newark Star covering high school football. One day, Cerf said, the sports editor asked Lasser to “compile some batting averages.” Impressed by Lasser’s work, the “startled editors wisely decreed that at an accounting course was what he needed, and packed him off” to New York University, where he took night classes.

After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Lasser returned to school, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Penn State. (Is there something about studying electrical engineering that drives people to get into the tax preparation business?) In 1921, Lasser passed the examination to become a certified public accountant in New York, and he joined the staff of the New York-based accounting firm Touche, Niven & Co. According to a 2011 profile of Lasser, it was likely exposure to the work of John Niven, an expert on the Revenue Act of 1916, that led Lasser to focus on income tax as his specialty.

In 1923, Lasser left Deloitte to start his own accounting firm, J.K. Lasser and Co., and quickly emerged as the go-to guy when it came to saving money on your taxes legally. As Bennet Cerf recalled:

One of Lasser’s most celebrated tax victories was scored on behalf of a nurse named Helen Harasghy, who, in 1940, has been refused permission to deduct from her income the cost of supplying and laundering her uniforms. By the time Lasser was finished, the Government meekly admitted that not only nurses, but cops, firemen, doctors, trainmen, and uniformed workers in general were patently entitled to this write-off. If all the people who benefited from this ruling were to write in J.K. Lasser’s name for President, he’d be elected in a landslide.

Lasser authored the first edition of his tax guide, Your Income Tax, in 1939. Published by Simon & Schuster, it initially sold for one dollar and became a perennial fixture on the company’s best-seller lists. Cerf, himself the longtime publisher at Random House, estimated the guide averaged sales of 500,000 units per year by 1952.

Sadly, Lasser died just a couple of years later, suffering a fatal heart attack in May 1954 at the age of 57. Death, however, did not stop Simon & Schuster from continuing to use Lasser’s name to sell its tax guides. Even today, copies of J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax carry the formal byline of “the J.K. Lasser Institute.” But as Brendan Koerner explained in a 2005 article for Slate, the “Institute” initially consisted of one of Lasser’s proteges, Bernard Greisman, backed by members of Lasser’s accounting firm, which continued after his death. Ironically, Touche Ross & Co., the successor to Touche, Niven & Co., acquired J.K. Lasser and Co. in 1977, which at the time was considered the biggest merger in the history of the accounting profession.

Simon & Schuster retained the publishing rights to the J.K. Lasser name and guide until 1998. In the late 1980s, the publisher’s software unit started producing the companion program demonstrated in this episode. Annual updates to the software continued until approximately 1996. Two years later, Simon & Schuster sold the J.K. Lasser Your Income Tax rights to Pearson plc. John Wiley & Sons then purchased the brand from Pearson the next year. Wiley continues to publish J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax today under the J.K. Lasser Institute byline, which is now composed primarily of accountants J.T. Eagan and Jaclyn Barkow.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was first broadcast during the week of March 2, 1988.

Paul Schindler’s review for this episode was the Ad-LIb Personal Computer Music System (Ad Lib, Inc., $250), a hardware-software package that included an audio plug-in card for the IBM PC and compatibles and a MIDI sequencer.

As I’ve previously discussed on the blog and the podcast, Susan and Michael Morgan started SoftView, Inc., in 1985 to market their program MacInTax. The Morgans sold Softview to TurboTax developer ChipSoft in 1991. Susan Morgan then went on to become an attorney. Intuit purchased ChipSoft in 1993 and continued to market MacInTax until the late 1990s, when it was folded into TurboTax.

Ed Tittel earned his computer science degree from the University of Texas-Austin. In the mid-1980s he worked for the oil and gas giant Schulmberger, developing FORTRAN-based applications to handle data logs from oil wells. In 1988, he joined Novell, Inc., as a network consultant. He remained with the company six years, eventually becoming director of technical marketing. In the 1990s, Tittel moved full-time into technical writing and content development, authoring more than 80 books. In recent years, he’s served as a professional expert witness in high-profile lawsuits involving tech patents.

PC/Professional Tax Partner was published by Virginia-based Best Programs, Inc., another company that I’ve previously discussed. Best Programs co-founder James Petersen appeared in the February 1987 tax preparation software episode to demonstrate PC/Tax Cut, which was the company’s personal tax software product. Tax Partner was, as Wendy Woods explained, for tax professionals. And it was priced accordingly. The software alone cost $1,000.

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon approved Fresno, California, as the site for a new IRS western regional service center. The building featured in this episode opened in October 1971 and started processing tax returns the following January. In April 1991, someone lobbed 10 homemade pipe bombs at the Fresno building during lunch hour. (Nobody was injured, but a few cars in the parking lot sustained damage.) In 2016, the IRS announced plans to close the Fresno center–which had relocated to a six-story building in 2003–citing the reduced need for processing paper returns due to increased electronic filing. The IRS permanently closed the facility in September 2021.

Chapter 4: Shareware

There were three basic means of distributing software in the 1980s: retailers, mail-order catalogs, and bulletin board systems (BBS). The latter provided the earliest form of “online” distribution, albeit one that was difficult to commercialize. After all, a developer couldn’t ask users to post their credit card number on a BBS.

But you could attach a message to a program uploaded to a BBS that invited people to pay you for software they found valuable. That’s exactly what Andrew Fluegleman did in 1982. Wendy Woods profiled Fluegelman in a January 1985 Computer Chronicles episode that I previously covered. His IBM PC communications program PC-Talk became the first example of “shareware” (although Fluegelman used the term “freeware,” which he trademarked.)

Fluegelman wasn’t the only programmer to have this idea. Author Richard Moss explained in his 2023 book, Shareware Heroes: the renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet, that a guest in our next Chronicles episode from March 1988, Jim Knopf, had his own epiphany around the same time as Fluegelman:

IBM employee Jim Knopf (a.k.a. Jim Button) had fallen in love with personal computing years earlier. He’d written two programs on his Apple II–one to print mailing labels for a local church congregation, the other to house general-purpose databases. Then when the IBM PC came out, he’d sold the Apple II, bought a PC, and converted the database program from the Apple dialect of BASIC to IBM BASIC.

He’d then share his program, Easy File, with his colleagues at IBM, many of whom were taking their first steps into the world of personal computing. Before long, its use had spread beyond IBM’s Seattle offices into the wider Seattle area. Knopf had tried to track all these users by recording their details in his own copy of the program, so that he could notify them when he had updated Easy File with new fixes and improvements. But quickly his costs–both in time and in postage stamps–had begun to spiral out of control.

To help cover his expenses, Knopf added a message to the program that asked for donations–purely on a voluntary basis–of $10 from each user. In exchange for the donation, a user would then gain access to his mailing list.

Knopf posted a similar message on CompuServe. Then, Moss said, another user saw Knopf’s post and suggested he get in touch with Fluegelman. The two men met and decided to cross-market each other’s programs. To match Fluegelman’s PC-Talk, Knopf renamed Easy File to PC-File. Within two years, Knopf was earning enough from “donations” to PC-File that he was able to quite his IBM job to run his own company, Buttonware.

By the time this Chronicles episode debuted in 1988, shareware had taken hold as a legitimate, if still somewhat underappreciated, marketing tactic for smaller software publishers to gain a foothold in the market. In the cold open, Stewart Cheifet briefly spoke with another earlier shareware developer, Vernon Buerg, whom Wendy Woods also [profiled in a previous episode. Burerg created The Buerg Utilities, which Cheifet said was one of his favorite pieces of software, although he never actually bought it. Instead, a friend gave it to Cheifet after downloading it from a BBS. Cheifet asked Buerg why he gave his programs away. Buerg said he didn’t need the money and he liked to share what he knew with other people–and he hoped that in turn, others would share their knowledge with him. (As I noted in a prior blog, Buerg passed away in 2009.)

After the main theme and the sponsor messages–incidentally, CompuServe was one of the underwriters for this season–Cheifet showed Gary Kildall a small collection of books on shareware and other free computer programs. Cheifet also demonstrated a shareware program called Pianoman by Neil J. Rubenking, which provided a full-blown music construction set using the PC keyboard. (This should not be confused with Electronics Arts’ definitely-not-shareware Music Construction Set.)

Cheifet said he couldn’t think of another industry where so many people gave away their products. How did Kildall–a programmer himself–explain this mentality? Kildal said there were three reasons. First, it was fun to program. It was really neat to take a concept from one line of code to a full-fledged application. Second, giving away software was part of the social aspect of the hobbyist and user groups. It was similar to ham radio operators giving away circuit diagrams for free. Third, it took a big investment to market, sell, and support a commercial software product.

SRI Scientists Turned to Shareware for Word Processing

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from the offices of an old Chronicles friend, SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Woods said that SRI’s life sciences department collected a lot of data from laboratory tests on potentially toxic substances. The department also produced a lot of paper output, such as proposals, reports, and test results. And the word processor that many SRI researchers used was a shareware program called PC-Write.

Jon C. Mirsalis, SRI’s director of genetic toxicology, said they had a lot of staff members with a background in biology, and very few of them had laid hands on a computer terminal or PC until recently. So it was his job to convince those researchers that computers would make their lives better. And what he liked about PC-Write was that it only required a very brief introduction to enable a novice to begin working with the software.

Woods noted that PC-Write was well-known for its 45 different help screens and its rapid search-and-replace function. The program also had the same kinds of features found on most word processors, like block editing, embedded printer commands, and single-key commands. But PC-Write also had some uncommon features. For example, Mirsalis said the program worked in “straight ASCII” mode. So you didn’t need a lot of crazy control characters the way some other programs did. That made it easy to move text output from, say, a database manager to a mainframe.

Of course, Woods said the biggest difference between the PC-Write shareware and the big-name programs was the price. You couldn’t spend more than $89 for a fully registered copy of PC-Write. And most users got their first copy for free.

A Graphing Database from One of Shareware’s Founding Fathers

Jim Button and Rusel DeMaria joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio. As previously noted, Button was the shareware developer of PC-File and founder and CEO of Buttonware. DeMaria was a technology writer and the author of the book Public Domain Software. (Jim Knopf used “Button” as a pseudonym. Knopf is the German word for “button.”)

Kildall asked Button if any money exchanged hands with shareware. Button said shareware was a distribution method that provided full-function demo disks that users could share with their friends. Money changed hands when the user decided they really liked the program, wanted to put it into productive use, and develop a relationship with the author. That relationship included things like receiving a written manual and customer support. Kildall asked about the typical price of shareware. Button said prices it from $15 to $100 depending on the program.

Cheifet asked DeMaria to explain the difference between shareware and freeware. DeMaria said they were different words that meant the same thing. They both described a “marketing principle.” It allowed a user to get software that was as good as commercial programs but cheaper. You could also get programs, such as utilities, that were not available in the commercial market.

Turning back to Button, Cheifet asked about the latest release of PC-File, which was PC-File+ 2.0. In this new version, the user could create graphs summarizing the data from a database. Using an IBM PC, Button pulled up a sample database of sales figures for the past five years that were “close to Buttonware’s sales revenues.” He used a keyboard macro to run the graphing summary, which produced a horizontal bar chart of monthly sales numbers. Button then showed how you could pull up a vertical bar or pie chart using the same data. Basically, it was an easy-to-use graphics extension for PC-File. Cheifet asked about the price. Button said it was $69.95 to register a copy.

Button then handed the keyboard over to DeMaria, so he could demonstrate a couple of his favorite shareware programs. While DeMaria got his first demonstration running, Cheifet asked Button to elaborate on the marketing principle behind shareware. Button said that shareware was simply about how the software was marketed and distributed. It said nothing about the quality of the program or what it did.

DeMaria finally got his first program running. It was Automenu by Marshall Magee, a front-end menu program used for hard disk management. The program came with a built-in menu. The user could then add to that menu or build their own. DeMaria showed a special “Computer Chronicles” sub-menu that he created for the demo. It listed several other shareware utilities installed on the disk.

Using Automenu, DeMaria pulled up his next shareware demo, HotDIR 2.1, which provided a multi-color directory listing of the MS-DOS filesystem. He exited that demo and went back into Automenu. DeMaria then demonstrated ProComm, a communications program. Basically, you used ProComm to dial into BBSes and download software. DeMaria said his Public Domain book explained the underlying protocols used in ProComm.

Kildall asked how the customer could be assured of quality control when using shareware. DeMaria said the quality control came from using the software before paying for it. The user actually had the program in their hands and could see if it was fit for their purposes. If it wasn’t, they didn’t have to continue using or pay for it.

Cheifet asked if there was much abuse of shareware because of how it worked. Button said he didn’t know how you would even define “abuse.” He gave users permission to try out the software for as long as they felt necessary for evaluation. He didn’t see there being much abuse. People paid for the good programs.

PC-SIG Offered 25,000 Shareware Titles on CD-ROM

Wendy Woods presented her second and final remote segment, this time from the offices of PC-SIG, the world’s largest shareware distributor, which had a library of over 25,000 programs. Woods noted that PC-SIG sold over 1,000 shareware disks every day. Mark Barnes, a spokesman for PC-SIG, told Woods that shareware was an alternative to high-priced commercial programs. Indeed, he said the shareware programs currently available were equal if not better than a lot of commercial programs–and hundreds of dollars cheaper.

Woods explained that PC-SIG served as a “conduit” between shareware authors and users. PC-SIG handled advertising and marketing for the authors while also guaranteeing quality for the customers. Barnes said that shareware authors submitted their programs to PC-SIG. A PC-SIG librarian then looked it over and ensured it met good shareware standards. An independent reviewer then conducted a separate review before the program was put into the PC-SIG catalog. Woods added that PC-SIG had full-time staffers providing support for every product.

PC-SIG’s success had allowed it to branch out into new areas, Woods said. It now published a bimonthly magazine called Shareware. You could also purchase all 25,000 shareware titles on a single CD-ROM (for $300.) And you could buy some of the titles in retail stores. The company had also branched out into selling hard-to-find videos.

Berkeley Mac Users Group Presented HyperCard Shareware

Raines Cohen and Stephen Howard of the Berkeley Mac Users Group (BMUG) joined Cheifet and Kildall in-studio for the final segment. Kildall opened by asking if authors actually made a profit selling shareware. Cohen said first-time authors did make a profit. He said that a number of successful developers started out in shareware before moving to more traditional commercial distribution.

Kildall then asked about BMUG itself. Cohen said it started out as a student group at the University of California, Berkeley, and it now had about 6,000 members around the world. Among BMUG’s functions was publishing a newsletter and maintaining a software library and BBS. Cheifet asked how a user group like BMUG saw shareware. What was the point? Cohen said the main point was for the user to “try before they buy.” The user didn’t have to base their decisions on looking at ads and trying to figure out which programs were “vaporware.” From the author’s point of view, it provided a means of distributing the software for very little cost. Other users–including groups like BMUG–essentially handled the distribution for you and got the word out.

Cheifet asked Cohen to demonstrate some of BMUG’s favorite shareware programs on the Macintosh SE. Cohen’s first demo was for Artisto+ by MegaMat, a $10 shareware utility for cutting and pasting a MacPaint image into another program such as MacWrite. He then demonstrated StuffIt, a $15 shareware program by Raymond Lau to compress and decompress data files. Cohen said StuffIt was often used by commercial and public-domain online services to distribute software since it reduced the size of the files that needed to be transmitted.

Cheifet then asked Howard to explain how BMUG priced its own shareware. Howard said BMUG distributed shareware disks for the costs of duplication, about $3 per disk. BMUG had no claims on the individual shareware programs, which were still owned by their original authors. Cheifet asked about the pricing of StuffIt in particular. Howard said the author, Lau, made it available for free to decompress files. But if you wanted to compress or archive files, he requested an $18 donation for registration.

Turning to our favorite subject for the season, Cheifet asked about shareware for HyperCard. Cohen said HyperCard had already had an incredible effect on the development of public domain and shareware software. It made it much easier for a person to express an idea in the form of software. He then showed a HyperCard-based catalog on the Macintosh of other HyperCard stacks available through BMUG. Cohen noted the BMUG library currently had about 25MB of HyperCard stacks available.

Cheifet asked about the relationship between shareware and commercial software. What did commercial software houses think of shareware? Howard said many commercial houses started out as a shareware author with a product that became successful and grew into a full-scale business. Other, smaller products remained as shareware, particularly when customers grew accustomed to the faster distribution. BMUG also planned to release a compact disc with hundreds of megabytes of shareware.

Cheifet asked about the role of the users group in shareware. Did BMUG see itself as a business or just a users group? Cohen said BMUG was an educational non-profit in the business of giving away information. So they did that by getting the software out there and helping people learn about it. Cheifet asked if Cohen and Howard wrote their own shareware. Cohen said he had written some stuff in HyperCard that he planned to distribute as shareware.

Finally, Cheifet asked about the future of shareware. Would it continue to be a healthy means of distributing software? Cohen said he thought it was, so long as it was still expensive to start a company, take out advertising, and go through a traditional software distributor. Shareware still provided a means for the small programmer to get started. Kildall asked about the best way to access shareware. Cohen said a user could contact a local user group like BMUG.

Button Co-Founded Shareware Trade Association

When this episode first aired in 1988, a number of software developers, distributors, and BBS operators had already taken an important step towards professionalizing the shareware concept–they formed a trade association. In 1985, Nelson Ford of the Public Software Library, a Texas-based shareware distributor, conducted an initial survey of programmers to ascertain interest in such a group. This led Ford to organize a conference in April 1987 in Houston, at which the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP) formed, with Jim Button as the initial chairman of the board. (The ASP later changed its name to the Association of Software Professionals and remained in operation until 2021.)

Button himself retired from the industry in 1992 after suffering a heart attack. And by this time, his company ButtonWare Inc. had pivoted from shareware to commercial sales of its software products, notably PC-File. In July 1993, McAfee Associates, Inc., signed a letter of intent to purchase Buttonware’s assets and product rights, but the deal fell through a few months later.

Button eventually found a new buyer, Texas-based Outlook Software Corporation, which purchased the Buttonware assets in early 1994. Later that year, Outlook announced the first version of PC-File for Windows. Based on Texas state corporation records, however, it appears Outlook went out of business in 1998.

Jim Button died in October 2013 at the age of 70.

PC-SIG Tried to Monopolize Shareware Distribution

Richard Petersen founded PC-SIG in 1984. According to Nelson Ford, Peterson started out by copying the shareware catalog from a local users group and advertising it for sale in PC Magazine at $6 per disk. This didn’t sit well with many user groups and BBS operators, but Ford noted that Peterson’s service was the first to “nationally advertise shareware disks for sell,” which was helpful for those users who couldn’t access a users group or BBS.

My guess is that Petersen didn’t care at all what user groups thought of him. In January 1987, NewsBytes reported that PC-SIG threatened to sue three user groups in the United Kingdom because they used the “PC-Sig” name for their own shareware and public domain software catalog. As NewsBytes pointed out, this was likely not a case of deliberate trademark infringement, but rather a recognition that “the PC-Sig system is as almost as generic as MS-DOS is on a PC.” And PC-SIG’s real beef may have been that the UK user groups were charging about one-third as much for their disks.

The following year, when PC-SIG launched its shareware collection on CD-ROM, it sued the second-largest U.S. shareware distributor, Blue Sail Software, alleging they had “stolen” the PC-SIG collection. Blue Sail had planned to launch its own CD-ROM in connection with another company. But after learning of the PC-SIG lawsuit, Blue Sail abandoned the project and shut down. (BMUG no doubt escaped PC-SIG’s wrath by focusing on Macintosh shareware, which PC-SIG had little interest in.)

PC-SIG continued to sell its shareware CD-ROMs through the early 1990s. In 1993, the company released the 12th edition of its library. But after that the company effectively disappeared. The last press mention I could find was a December 15, 1993, report from NewsBytes announcing PC-SIG’s plan to sell a new $20 CD-ROM of educational software. PC-SIG went defunct sometime in 1994 based on California state corporation records.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast in March 1988. The recording at the Archive is a rerun that likely aired in July 1988.

Jon C. Mirsalis has been with SRI International for over 40 years. Since 2005, he’s overseen SRI’s Biosciences Division and is currently a vice president. Outside of his scientific work, Mirsalis maintains a website dedicated to the work of silent film actor Lon Chaney, Sr., which he started in 1996. He also frequently plays music to accompany the screenings of silent films, as detailed in this 2017 profile by film historian Leonard Maltin.

Rusel Demaria has been a writer since the 1970s. He’s best known today as the author of dozens of computer and video game strategy books for Prima Games, where he was the founding editor and creative director from 1990 to 1996. He’s also the author of High Score! Expanded: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games 3rd Edition, published by CRC Press. In addition to his books, DeMaria has worked as a contract game designer and writer for a number of studios, including Acclaim, Interplay, Mindscape, and Ubisoft.

Raines Cohen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988, a few months after his Chronicles appearance. While attending Berkeley, he worked as an intern for Lotus Development Corporation, the publishers of Lotus 1-2-3. After graduating he wrote for a number of computer magazines, including MacWEEK, MacAddict, and NetProfessional, serving as the editor of the latter for its entire run in the late 1990s. Since the early 2000s, Cohen has worked as a database developer and a community organizer in the Berkeley area. He remained affiliated with BMUG, which he co-founded, until its demise in 2000.

Neil J. Rubenking authored Pianoman. He also created Player Piano, a conversion utility that enabled the user to turn their Pianoman files into a self-running program. Rubenking joined PC Magazine as a columnist in 1986. He remains with the publication today as its lead expert on computer security and privacy issues.

Marshall W. Magee authored Automenu, which launched his Georgia-based company, Magee Enterprises, in 1983. According to the website of the Association of Software Professionals, where Magee served as the founding president, he was one of the first shareware authors to report over $1 million in sales. Magee continued to support Automenu until his company closed in 2007.

Robert Woeger authored HotDIR. According to the original shareware documentation, Woeger got the idea and name for the program from a friend, John P. German, who wanted to make full use of a color monitor when using the DIR command in DOS. Woeger said, “I subsequently locked myself in my room until I emerged many hours later with a rough version of what is now HotDIR.” Woeger continues to make HotDIR available today via GitHub.

Bruce Barkelew and Tom Smith co-authored ProComm in 1984 and initially distributed it as $25 shareware through their Missouri-based company, Datastorm Technologies, Inc. According to a 1986 profile by Frank Ruiz of the Tampa Tribune, Datastorm earned $7,000 in revenues from Procomm during the first quarter of that year. But by December 1986, sales increased to $70,000 per month. And by March 1987, Barkelew told the Chicago Tribune that there were 20,000 registered ProComm users. In February 1988, Datastorm released a commercial version of the program, ProComm Plus, which retailed for $75. Over the next eight years, Datastorm steadily grew its commercial business, and in March 1996 the company merged with Quarterdeck, a server software company. A little over two years later, in October 1998, Symantec purchased Quarterdeck. Symantec continued to support ProComm Plus through the early 2000s.

Tom Taylor authored the initial version of Artisto and released it under the label of “Studbull Software.” The shareware demonstrated in this episode, Artisto+, was credited to “MegaMat.” I don’t know if this was another name used by Taylor or whether another author created Artisto+.

Raymond Lau authored the original StuffIt and released it as shareware in 1987. As Lau noted on his personal website, StuffIt quickly became the accepted standard file format for online services. And it was the de facto standard for Macintosh file compression. Lau continued to develop StuffIt until 1995, although he sold the commercial marketing rights to Aladdin Systems, Inc., in 1989. International Microcomputer Software Inc. (IMSI) acquired Alladin Systems in April 2004 and changed the company’s name to Allume Systems. A year later, Smith Micro Software Inc. acquired Allume Systems from IMSI for $12.75 million in cash and stock. Smith Micro continued active development of StuffIt until 2010.

Paul Schindler’s software review for this episode was Mentor, a collection of IQ testing and brainteaser puzzles for the IBM PC. Interestingly, Schindler showed off one of the puzzles from the program, which was identical to the puzzle featured in a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, “Lisa the Simpson.”

Chapter 5: The Commodore 64

At the June 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Commodore International announced a cut in the wholesale price of its Commodore 64 (C64) computer from $360 to $199. This move was the latest salvo in a price war initiated the previous August by Commodore’s arch-nemesis, Texas Instruments, which announced a $100 rebate on its TI-99/4A computer, bringing its effective price down to $199. This had been TI’s attempt to undercut Commodore’s VIC-20, the predecessor to the C64, which was then priced at $239. But now that Commodore had brought the price of the newer and more capable C64 down to $199, TI was boned.

Indeed, longtime Commodore president Jack Tramiel wasn’t messing around. He also slashed the prices of Commodore’s peripherals and software by as much as 50 percent. This spurred record consumer demand for the C64 and C64 accessories. So while Texas Instruments reported a $119.2 million loss for its second quarter of 1983 and exited the entry-level computer market soon thereafter, Commodore posted record numbers. For the company’s fiscal year ending June 30, 1984, Commodore International reported net income (profit) of $143.8 million.

Sadly, this would be the high-water mark for both Commodore as a company and Tramiel as a CEO. In January 1984, Tramiel suddenly resigned as Commodore’s president, the culmination of a strained relationship with the company’s longtime chairman and controlling shareholder, Irving Gould. A few months later, Tramiel took over the home computer and video game console assets of Atari, Inc., a company that had an even worse 1983 than Texas Instruments. Tramiel’s new Atari Corporation would then battle Commodore at the lower end of the 16-bit personal computer market for the rest of the 1980s, with both companies fading into irrelevance as the larger market embraced and extended the IBM PC compatible standard.

But throughout the late 1980s, the C64 continued to thrive, at least with consumers who were happy to keep buying millions of the cheap computers every year. In fact, when Computer Chronicles finally dedicated an episode to the C64 in March 1988, the machine had been on the market for nearly six years–an eternity for any computer–and it was still just halfway through its production life, which didn’t come to an end until Commodore filed for bankruptcy in 1994.

Stewart Cheifet opened the episode by showing Gary Kildall a new game recently released for the C64 called Tetris. Cheifet noted it was the first software program written by a Russian author to be published in the United States. But Cheifet was more interested in the fact the program’s U.S. publisher, Spectrum Holobyte, decided to release Tetris first on the C64, the “Model T of personal computers.” How come people were still buying these machines and writing software for it?

Kildall, briefly recapping the price wars, said that when Jack Tramiel ran Commodore, his philosophy was to minimize the end-user price and flood the market with product. Tramiel did it with a $10 calculator in the mid-1970s. (This was an earlier price war that also involved Texas Instruments.) And he did it by selling the C64 at under $200 when the competition was charging five times the price for their machines. Ultimately, Kildall said the C64 was just a good basic computer for a very affordable price. There were roughly seven million C64s in the United States alone, which provided a good bed for software developers who could amortize their costs across all of those units. So you also ended up with a lot of good software at an affordable price.

Berkeley Softworks Pushed the C64’s Limits with GEOS

Wendy Woods’ first remote segment featured Berkeley Softworks, the developers of GEOS, a graphical operating system for the Commodore 64. Woods said the history of personal computers was marked by some spectacular successes and failures. But the award for popularity had to go to the C64, the little 8-bit machine that refused to die. The C64’s commercial success and its enormous user base inspired developers like Berkeley Softworks, a company located next to the University of California, Berkeley.

Brian Dougherty, Berkeley Softworks’ CEO, told Woods that they looked at the existing markets–first the Commodore 64 and then the Apple II–and realized that it took awhile for people to really push a machine to its total limits. And it was only now starting to catch on that the key to pushing those limits was using sophisticated development tools. With such tools, Berkeley developed applications for these machines that people didn’t think were possible.

Woods said that GEOS was Berkeley’s most important product. GEOS provided a graphic interface for the C64 and Commodore 128, featuring pull-down menus, icons, and windows. As Doughtery alluded to, this new operating system opened the door to some very sophisticated applications, such as a spreadsheet called GeoCalc and GeoFile (see below), a database with user-designed forms. There was even a desktop publishing package, something that usually required a lot of memory and a big budget. But with Berkeley Softworks, it was all in the code.

A screenshot from Berkeley Softworks’ “GeoFile” for the GEOS operating system.

Dougherty elaborated that it came down to coding much more efficiently. The theorem of computer science was that any computer program could be implemented by a one-bit Turing machine. So even the C64’s 8-bit processor could do all of the things that a much more expensive computer such as a Macintosh or an IBM PC were capable of doing. Now, the C64 might not be able to do it as fast, but Berkeley tried to make up for the limitations by programming more efficiently. But Dougherty reiterated that you could technically do anything with the C64.

Knitting with Power on the C64

The bulk of this episode largely focused on actual Commodore 64 users rather than software developers. For this first studio segment, Mike Dunsmore and Lucy Morton joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio. Dunsmore was a member of the Commodore Users of the Peninsula (CO-OP). Morton belonged to the Diablo Valley Commodore Users Group.

Kildall opened by asking Dusnmore about the composition of user groups like CO-OP. Were they principally C64 users? Dusnmore said some user groups were just for C64 users. Some had both Amiga and C64 users. Kildall noted that these user groups commonly communicated over modems. Dunsmore said yes, there were two or three bulletin board systems (BBSes) used by his group. Kildall asked if the BBSes actually ran on C64s. Dunsmore said they usually ran on another machine, but there might be a C64 database.

Turning to Morton–who looked like she could be Dunsmore’s grandmother–Kildall said he might be presumptuous, but she didn’t look like the average game player using a C64. Why did she buy a C64? Morton said she had always been interested in computers. Her husband also did some programming, and it was very easy to program in BASIC on the C64, particularly since you could readily correct mistakes.

Kildall asked Morton to demonstrate a program she wrote on the C64 to help her make sweaters. Morton clarified it helped her to chart them; making them was something else. She explained that her program was interactive. Before you began, you had to know the number of stitches per inch and rows per inch that you wanted, which you obtained from a swatch of cloth. For her demo, Morton instructed the computer that she wanted to make a jacket with a knit-on band and a V-neck. Essentially, you answered a series of questions regarding all of these details. The program then produced a series of written instructions that the user could print out.

Cheifet returned to Dunsmore and asked him to explain how he used the C64 to make artwork. Specifically, Dunsmore created demo scenes, some of which he used as title screens for other programs. Cheifet asked about the tools he used in addition to the C64. Dunsmore said he used KoalaPad, a graphics tablet, and its included KoalaPainter software.

Dunsmore then provided a brief demo of KoalaPainter. He pulled up a sample image that he created for a BBS called “Wacko World.” Then he showed a menu that he designed for another program. Cheifet asked about adding artwork to the screen. Dunsmore showed how you could edit individual pixels in the image. Kildall noted that this was a composite video signal, the same as used by camcorders and similar devices. So you could use KoalaPainter to make titles and similar graphics for home videos. Cheifet pointed out that Dunsmore effectively had a complete graphics design station that probably cost him less than $400.

User Groups Supported C64 Neophytes

Wendy Woods’ second and final remote segment visited a Commodore users group meeting in Foster City, California. Woods said when you bought for price, you didn’t always get good service. That was especially true for Commodore 64 and 128 owners, whose low-cost machines received no support from the mass merchandise retailers that sold them. User groups like the one in Foster City allowed these computer owners to try out programs, trade tips, and just get the help they needed.

Ralph Hornbrook, a member of the Foster City group, told Woods that it was almost impossible to describe the help that someone like him–an “absolute neophyte” just 3 or 4 years ago–received. He started out knowing nothing about how computers worked. He knew he wanted to get into computer, but he didn’t know how.

Sam Gold, the organizer of the group, said they offered an informal hand-holding type meeting so that if someone didn’t understand how to use a computer, the other members would sit down with them, show them how to operate it, and how to do the various processes required to run programs. Basically, the group showed new users how to put everything together and use their computer to productive advantage.

Woods said that despite the fact the more powerful Amiga was now seen at Commodore user group meetings, interest in the C64 was still going strong. The price kept dropping and people kept buying them–which was why it should come as no surprise that membership in groups like the one in Foster City had actually increased over the years.

A Machine for Skateboarding and Wine Enthusiasts

Malcolm Lowe and Kelly Flock joined Cheifet and Kildall for the next segment. Lowe was a consultant and programmer as well as a member of the Commodore West users group. Flock was a product manager with Electronic Arts, one of the leading commercial publishers of C64 software.

Kildall asked Flock about the current importance of the C64 to EA’s marketing relative to other platforms such as the Apple II and the IBM PC. Flock said the Commodore was very improtant. In fact, it was EA’s second most-important platform behind the IBM PC and compatibles. Kildall asked what made the C64 a good target for games. Flock said it was the leading home computer with an installed base of about 7 million units. And since it was a game-intensive system, it was a natural place for EA to be.

Turning to Lowe, Kildall asked about his program, The Wine Steward, which was running on a C64 in the studio. Lowe said the program was designed to help people who were unfamiliar with purchasing wine to make a choice based on what they were going to have for dinner. Cheifet noted this program was actually used in supermarkets. Lowe said that was correct.

Lowe then demonstrated Wine Steward. He used the C64’s joystick to navigate the menus, but he explained that in a supermarket display the machine was in an arcade-style cabinet with buttons. (The software displayed the name of Lucky’s, a California-based supermarket chain.) The user first selected the type of food they were having–American, “International”, Dessert, et cetera–and then selected a more specific dish from a sub-menu. For his demo, Lowe selected “Deli and Picnic” food, and then “Cheese” from the sub-menu.

The program then showed three separate screens offering a choice of nine different wines to pair with cheese. The first screen showed three “budget wines” priced between $2.49 and $5.99. The second screen offered three “popular priced wines” ranging from $3.99 to $4.99. The third and final screen displayed “premium priced wines” priced between $6.99 and $18.98.

Kildall asked how customers liked this program. Lowe said they seemed to take to it quite well. Cheifet asked if there was any particular reason Lowe wrote Wine Steward for the C64. Lowe said it was an easy computer to program for. It had a lot of features, particularly color, and you could program different fonts for it.

Turning back to Flock, Cheifet asked him to demonstrate EA’s latest C64 game, Skate or Die. Flock said it was a “multi-event” game that functioned as a skateboard simulation. For the demo, Flock showed a half-pipe event (see below). The player used a combination of joystick moves and button controls to perform various skateboarding tricks. Flock then attempted to show some of these moves with mixed success. He explained there were 12 different moves in this half-pipe event, and the player received points for the variety of their routine as well as possible bonus points at the end.

A screenshot from Electronic Arts’ “Skate or Die” showing the half-pipe event.

Cheifet asked if Skate or Die was available on other machines besides the C64. Flock said right now it was only available on the Commodore. It was designed on the C64 and took advantage of some of that machine’s unique features, including hardware sprites, the 16-color palette, and the three-voice sound chip. But EA was in the process of porting the game to other platforms.

Kildall asked about other events in Skate or Die besides the half-pipe. Flock said there was a total of five events. The half-pipe was modeled on real-world skateboarding. But there were also a couple of downhill events where the player could break bottles or skate through bushes or a drain pipe. The were also a “joust” event where you could play against three computer-controlled players that you had to whop with a little marine bopping stick.

Kildall asked about the price of Skate or Die. Flock said the suggested retail price was $29.95. Kildall wondered if there was something about the C64 market that you couldn’t generally charge more than $30 for games. Flock said that as the Commodore market got older, it became more price sensitive. There was a lot more product developed for the C64 than, say, the Amiga, where there were relatively few games available. Kildall wondered if EA might then start to de-emphasize the C64. Flock said no, the company made up for the low prices in volume.

Toy Saw Continued Growth for C64

For the next segment, Stewart Cheifet interviewed Max Toy, the new president of Commodore Business Machines, Inc., the North American division of Commodore International. Cheifet asked Toy if he really saw the C64 as a game machine. Toy said it would be real easy to say that. But what Commodore had seen in the marketplace was that the C64 was continuing to be used in business. It was being used for broader applications such as desktop publishing. It was being used in the small, tiny business market. And it was seeing a resurgence in the educational marketplace. So the C64 was much more than a “toy.” Toy acknowledged there had been a growth in the entertainment marketplace due to some of the software. But he insisted there was still new business software being written for the C64 as well.

Cheifet asked if the C64 was still a “current” machine. Were people still buying them? Toy said yes, the market continued to expand. Worldwide, Commodore sold between 1 million and 1.5 million C64s every year. There had been a new wave of young, first-time customers coming into the marketplace. In fact, Commodore probably welcomed more first-time computer users than any other company in the world. He added that the C64 was not old technology to the first-time user. It was new technology as far as they were concerned, and software developers continued to use the C64’s high-performance capabilities for a very high-value dollar.

Cheifet asked Toy what he considered the main competition for the C64 right now. Was it the lower-cost Apple or the Atari 520ST? Or was Commodore going up against video game console companies like Nintendo and Sega? (For some reason, Cheifet pronounced it “See-ga” rather than “Say-ga.”) Toy said it was all of the above. At the low end Commodore was competing against the game machines. But what they saw was parents deciding they wanted their child to have more than just a game machine. Those parents wanted to take the entertainment software further with education. At the other end of the spectrum, Commodore saw the C64 being used in television production environments.

Ultimately, Toy said the C64 remained an important part of Commodore’s business now and for the future. It was continuing to grow. So Commodore continued to spend research and development dollars adding peripherals and support capabilities to the product. He added that the passion of the Commodore users and what they had been able to do with the machines was absolutely incredible.

No Need for a Drummer with the C64

Bill Morrow, a Commodore user and professional musician from California, joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the final segment. Morrow had a bank of synthesizers hooked up to a C64. Kildall asked Morrow what made the C64 a good machine for a musician like himself. Morrow said first, it was inexpensive. Second, there was the sound interface device (SID) chip, which had three voices that could play individual notes separately or simultaneously. So for example, you could have a synthesized flute, bass, and violin all playing at the same time. Morrow could then study the attack, delay, sustain, and release of each note on the computer.

Cheifet asked Morrow to demonstrate a music program he used with the C64 called Master Composer. Morrow ran a sample composition and played it back using just the C64’s SID chip. (The song was “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang.) Morrow then conducted a second demo using three external synthesizer keyboards hooked up to the C64 via MIDI. With a drum machine and sound generator, this gave Morrow a total of 16 different tracks to work with. He used a program called Keyboard Controlled Sequencer by Dr. T’s Music Software to control the entire setup. Morrow then had the C64 perform an original song co-written by himself and James Anderson.

Cheifet asked Morrow about the “pleasure” of working with a machine like the C64. Morrow said the pleasure was he didn’t need a lot of musicians to rehearse with. Most of the time, he wore out other musicians with his demands to rehearse. But working with the C64, he didn’t need a drummer; the drum machine could just play all day long.

A Brief History of Commodore International

Max Toy would end up being one of seven individuals who oversaw Commodore International’s North American operations between the departure of Jack Tramiel in January 1984 and the company’s collapse in May 1994. Toy’s tenure only lasted about 18 months. And despite his on-air optimism about the future of the C64, it was the successive failure of Commodore’s North American branch to move its customer base beyond the entry-level computer that helped seal the company’s fate.

The Atlantic Acceptance Scandal and Irving Gould’s Takeover

Commodore was ultimately controlled by its chairman, Irving Gould, who also took over the CEO’s position in 1987. So how did he gain control of the company in the first place? Commodore International’s roots go back to around 1954, when Jack Tramiel and Manfred Kapp started their first business selling used and refurbished typewriters on consignment in New York City. The two men earned enough money to buy a Bronx-based business, the Singer Typewriter Company, and they later acquired an adding machine dealership.

Tramiel’s wife, Helen, had family living in Toronto, Ontario, and while on a visit to Canada, Jack found there was interest from local dealers in selling the adding machines. So Tramiel convinced the manufacturer, Everest, to give him the exclusive dealership rights for Canada, and in 1956, the Tramiels relocated to Toronto and established Everest Office Machine Company Limited. Kapp joined him shortly thereafter, and the partners and their wives started another business, Wholesale Typewriter Company, to sell used typewriters to the Canadian market.

In October 1958, the Tramiels and Kapps started yet another business, Commodore Portable Typewriter Company Limited, to import and distribute portable typewriters from Czechoslovakia. While Commodore quickly found buyers for their typewriters in Toronto’s two largest department stores, financing was a constant problem. Tramiel and Kapp had to fund their operation through accounts receivable factoring–i.e., selling their unpaid invoices for cash advances. But Tramiel was unhappy with the terms of their initial lender and decided to go looking for a better deal. Through an intermediary, he met Campbell Powell (C.P.) Morgan, the president of Atlantic Acceptance Limited.

Atlantic Acceptance was a financing company established by Morgan in 1953. Morgan was interested in expanding his operations into receivables factoring, and formed a new company, Commodore Sales Acceptance Limited (CSA), which would take over financing Tramiel and Kapp’s Commodore Portable Typewriter Company. In 1961, with Morgan’s backing, Tramiel and Kapp converted their privately held company into the publicly traded Commodore Business Machines (Canada) Limited. The proceeds of Commodore’s initial public offering largely serviced the debts owed to CSA and other entities controlled by Morgan. Morgan and several other Atlantic directors later joined Commodore’s board, with Morgan becoming chairman.

In Commodore’s first fiscal year as a public company, which ended in June 1962, it reported about $3.6 million in revenues and net income of just over $150,000. At this point, Commodore’s business was still selling typewriters and adding machines. In addition, the company opened two new subsidiaries to develop copying machines.

Over the next three years, Commodore grew rapidly, primarily through acquisitions and establishing more subsidiaries. By 1964, the company had more than doubled its net sales. And Tramiel was eager to keep growing. To that end, on April 7, 1965, the Commodore board held a meeting to approve Tramiel’s proposed acquisition of Willson Stationers & Envelopes Limited, Canada’s largest office supplies retailer, for approximately $3 million. During the meeting, Morgan and another Atlantic-affiliated director told Tramiel that they would make sure he had the funding to complete the deal. Two other Atlantic-affiliated directors cautioned Tramiel not to proceed with the acquisition but he ignored them.

On April 22, Commodore made a $100,000 deposit as a down payment on the Willson deal. But Morgan couldn’t make good on his promise to secure the rest of the funding. On June 3, the Commodore board held an emergency meeting, at which Tramiel requested approval to secure the $3 million he needed from another lender. One of the directors who opposed the deal advised Tramiel to walk away and forfeit the $100,000 deposit. Again,Tramiel refused. Eight days later, on June 11, the board met again and gave Tramiel the go-ahead to secure a six-month loan for the $3 million at 11-percent interest.

That same day, in an unrelated transaction, a Montreal investment bank made the last in a series of three-day short-term loans to Atlantic Acceptance for $5 million at 4.625-percent interest. The loan had to be repaid on Monday, June 14, 1965. Atlantic Acceptance sent the check on time. It bounced.

Defaulting on a $5 million note immediately sent Atlantic Acceptance into receivership. Tramiel had to move quickly to try and distance himself and Commodore from the resulting scandal. On June 22, the Commodore board held another meeting, at which time Morgan and the three other Atlantic-affiliated directors resigned. Tramiel and Kapp also took advantage of the opportunity and had the remaining five-member board (which included them) approve new five-year employment contracts for themselves with additional stock options.

Meanwhile, Tramiel was still determined to close the Willson Stationers deal. He and Kapp pledged 75,000 of their own shares in Atlantic Acceptance as collateral to their lender, Traders Realty. With the $3 million loan in hand, Commodore finally closed the purchase on June 23, 1965, the day after Atlantic Acceptance’s default.

With access to Morgan and Atlantic Access’ short-term funding cut off, however, Commodore had no way to pay back the $3 million owed to Traders when that note became due in six months. On top of that, the trustee that assumed control of Atlantic Acceptance was now starting to scrutinize all of Morgan’s dealings, including those involving Tramiel and Commodore over the past several years. Backed into a corner, Tramiel realized he had to sell Willson Stationers, the company he just spent the past three months trying to buy.

On August 10, 1965, the board met and approved Tramiel’s plan to sell Willson Stationers. The board also granted Tramiel and Kapp another round of stock options as “consideration” for them personally guaranteeing the Traders loan. Three days later, Tramiel and Kapp granted a Bahamas-based company , Amber Holdings Limited, the exclusive right to find a buyer for Willson. The deal was simple: Amber Holdings would keep any sales price in excess of $3 million as a commission.

Amber Holdings was created and controlled by–you guessed it–Irving Gould. Gould also owned a financing company, Jaypen Holdings Limited. Gould later recalled that he first met Tramiel sometime in July or August 1965 to discuss Commodore’s financial situation. Gould and Jaypen Holdings soon assumed Morgan and Atlantic Acceptance’s role as Commodore’s principal short-term financiers.

Gould found a buyer for Willson Stationers in November 1965, selling the company to U.S.-based Boise Cascade for $3,345,444. Traders got its $3 million. Amber Holdings and Gould got a $340,000 commission. Tramiel and Kapp received $20,000 in exchange for surrendering their stock options. The only losers were Commodore shareholders, as the company ended up losing about $600,000 on the entire Wilson Stationers adventure after factoring in the additional costs of the sale.

Commodore still had other financial problems to address as it unwound itself from Atlantic Acceptance. On November 8, 1965, Tramiel sent Gould a letter asking for further assistance with re-financing Commodore’s debts and potentially selling off additional assets. Tramiel also requested Gould delay Commodore’s obligation to repay an outstanding $325,000 loan owed to Jaypen Holdings. Gould eagerly obliged.

Throughout the first half of 1966, Gould executed a series of transactions on Commodore’s behalf that effectively made him the company’s controlling shareholder. The takeover became official on October 28, 1966, when Gould and one of his associates assumed two of Commodore’s five board seats. Gould also became chairman and de facto CEO, with Tramiel remaining as president.

In September 1969, Ontario Supreme Court Justice Sam Hughes issued an exhaustive report on the collapse of Atlantic Acceptance, which forms the basis for much of the narrative presented above. The Ontario government appointed Hughes as a Royal commissioner to conduct a formal inquiry in August 1965. During his four-year investigation, Hughes took sworn testimony from Tramiel, Kapp, and dozens of other witnesses. (Hughes only received limited testimony from C.P. Morgan, who died of leukemia in 1966.)

Hughes was not kind to Tramiel. With regard to Commodore, Hughes wrote, “The affairs of this company are still in the hands deeply imbrued with the pitch which originally defiled them in 1962, and into which they have been plunged again and again in succeeding years.” Hughes also didn’t have much confidence that things would improve under Irving Gould’s watch. The judge noted that Gould pleaded guilty to perjury in January 1960 after he lied to the Ontario Securities Commission during an investigation of his brother.

The CBM Coaching Carousel

Commodore’s 1967 annual report, reflecting Irving Gould’s first year as chairman, noted that the company “discontinued its main manufacturing program in Germany, and established a new one in Japan.” This preceded the company’s shift from manufacturing adding machines to electronic calculators in the 1970s. It was the calculator business that first brought Commodore into direct conflict with Texas Instruments, which launched its first price war in 1975. That conflict nearly destroyed Commodore, which reported a loss of nearly $3.8 million for the 1975 fiscal year.

In response, Gould and Jack Tramiel undertook a massive reorganization of the company. Commodore Business Machines (Canada) Limited became Commodore International Limited. The new Commodore was legally based in Gould’s favored offshore tax haven, the Bahamas, with corporate offices in New York City. Commodore International then created a Bahamian subsidiary, Commodore Electronics Limited, which actually held a bevy of subsidiary companies, including Commodore Business Machines, Inc. (CBM), the North American division personally overseen by Tramiel, who remained president of the entire Commodore International organization.

Another key subsidiary was MOS Technology, a Pennsylvania-based semiconductor manufacturer, which Commodore acquired in late 1976. Gould and Tramiel saw MOS as the key to achieving vertical integration in Commodore’s manufacturing, which would help protect it against future battles with rivals like Texas Instruments. Indeed, it was MOS Technology’s engineers who pushed Commodore into the computer market and developed the Commodore 64.

The early success of the C64, driven in large part by Tramiel’s aggressive price cutting, spurred Commodore to record sales levels in North America during 1983 and 1984. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1983, Commodore reported just over $500 million in North American sales. The following year that figure climbed by more than 50 percent to $761.2 million. The 1984 fiscal year was also Commodore’s most profitable, with a reported net income of $143.8 million.

But following Tramiel’s departure in January 1984, Commodore’s U.S. sales took a steep nosedive and never recovered. The record profits of 1984 were soon followed by record losses in 1985 ($113.9 million) and 1986 ($127.9 million). This wasn’t just a matter of sales. Commodore was also seriously overleveraged. Irving Gould relied largely on issuing new debt to finance Commodore’s rapid expansion during the C64 boom. Don Greenbaum, Commodore’s corporate treasurer in this period, told friend of the blog Karl Kuras in a November 2021 interview that Gould refused to issue new stock for fear of diluting his own shares in the company. (Greenbaum added this was one of the main points of friction between Gould and Tramiel.) So even as Commodore managed to return to profitability at the end of its 1987 fiscal year, posting a net income of $28.6 million, it was still carrying about $370 million in debt.

The company might have collapsed by the time this Chronicles episode aired in 1988 had it not been for Commodore’s strong presence in Europe. Unlike the United States, where Commodore had become identified almost exclusively with the entry-level C64, the company remained a respected manufacturer of business computers throughout Europe, and in particular Germany. Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate the divide is with this chart, which shows the comparative North American (U.S. and Canada) and European sales of Commodore International between 1978 and 1989:

CHART

The sharp decline and leveling off of North American sales contributed to a vicious cycle of Gould hiring and firing multiple executives to oversee U.S. operations after Jack Tramiel’s departure. To use an American football analogy, Gould was the NFL owner whose team made an unexpected Super Bowl run. He then ran the popular head coach out of town and proceeded to hire and fire a series of lesser coaches who couldn’t replicate that one championship season.

The first rider on this coaching carousel was Marshall F. Smith, whom Gould appointed Commodore International’s new president and CEO immediately following Tramiel’s departure in January 1984. Smith was an experienced CEO, having spent the previous eight years running the U.S. division of Thyssen-Bornemisza, a Netherlands-based manufacturing conglomerate. He’d also done business with Gould before. In July 1978, Thyssen-Bornemisza purchased Interpool Ltd., a Bahamas-based shipping container company where Gould was chairman.

But Thyssen was not a fast-moving technology company. And Smith’s immediate priority was restructuring Commodore’s mounting debts and cutting expenses. In April 1985, Gould and Smith recruited another tech industry outsider, Thomas J. Rattigan, as president of Commodore Business Machines, putting him in charge of North American operations. Rattigan had been the president of PepsiCo Bottling International, where he built a reputation as a turnaround specialist in consumer products. Rattigan oversaw the launch of the Commodore 128 and the Amiga, two machines that were supposed to move Commodore beyond the C64.

At first, Gould seemed to be satisfied with his new management team’s progress. In November 1985, he elevated Smith to vice chairman and promoted Rattigan to president and chief operating officer of Commodore International. But then in March 1986, Gould decided to replace Smith as CEO with Rattigan. (Don Greenbaum told Karl Kuras that he’d prepared a report detailing how Smith had mismanaged Commodore’s inventory, which led to Gould firing Smith.) This move came shortly after Commodore reached a deal with its major lenders to extend their line of credit, which had been in default. Around this same time, Rattigan brought in a new general manager for North America, Nigel Shepherd, who had been successfully running Commodore’s Australia subsidiary.

Another year later, however, Gould decided that despite the fact Commodore had started turning a profit again, it was time to clean house. In April 1987, Gould abruptly fired Rattigan, Shepherd, and four other executives. Gould then assumed day-to-day control of Commodore International as CEO and named Alfred Duncan, the head of Commodore’s Canadian office, as general manager for U.S. operations.

The Rattigan firing proved costly. Contemporary news reports suggested that “personality conflicts” led to Gould’s rash decision and that he ordered security to personally escort Rattigan out of Commodore’s Pennsylvania offices without allowing him to retrieve his personal belongings. But Rattigan had signed a five-year employment contract, and Commodore still owed him $2 million in base salary plus additional benefits. Accordingly, Rattigan filed a $9 million breach of contract lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Commodore. Gould responded in kind, with Commodore counter-suing Rattigan for $24 million, accusing him of “gross disregard” of his duties and ignoring Gould’s orders.

Rattigan ultimately prevailed. In February 1991, a jury ruled in his favor on the breach of contract claim. Gould then agreed to settle the case for $5 million rather than risk an even higher damages award from the judge. (Incidentally, the judge was Michael Mukasey, who later served as U.S. attorney general.)

For his part, Gould denied in an August 1987 interview with Andrea Knox of the Philadelphia Inquirer that personality conflict led to Rattigan’s dismissal. As Knox described it, “Gould had had enough of sitting on the sidelines and watching other people mismanage his company and rob him of hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth.” Indeed, Commodore’s stock–which Gould owned about 6 million of–had plummeted from a high of over $60 per share at the height of the C64 boom in 1983 to just $5 by the end of 1986.

And while Knox noted that Rattigan had managed to stem Commodore’s losses and turn a small profit, Gould felt this was due mostly to overly aggressive cost-cutting rather than growing North American sales. He specifically pointed to Rattigan cutting Commodore’s advertising budget, which Gould said was “greater than the reported profits in at least one quarter.”

A couple of months after Gould gave this interview, in October 1987, he appointed Max Toy as the new president of Commodore Business Machines. (I’m not entirely clear if he replaced Alfred Duncan or merely assumed a position on the organization chart above him.) Toy had been a senior vice president overseeing sales for XTRA 0Business Systems, a PC clone manufacturer owned by ITT Corporation. He’d also previously worked at IBM and Compaq. So not surprisingly, one of his top priorities after assuming the helm at CBM was to try and market a Commodore-branded PC compatible to the North American market. That was the Commodore Colt, a re-branded version of the company’s European Commodore PC 10-III.

But like all of Commodore’s efforts to break into North American PC compatible market, the Colt proved lame. Buffalo News columnist Lonnie Hudkins summed it up by saying the Colt, “arrived TOO late, is TOO expensive in comparison with the competition and offers TOO little excitement.” Elaborating further, Hudkins said CBM introduced the Colt at $899.95 (without a monitor), which was more than many dealers were charging for other existing PC clones.

So North American sales remained stagnant, dropping to $255.9 million and then flat-lining at $223.3 million in FY 1988 and $224.4 million in FY 1989. As you can probably guess, Gould wasn’t happy, and since he wouldn’t fire himself as CEO, he got rid of Toy instead. In April 1989, roughly 18 months after Toy joined the company, Gould replaced him with a new CBM president, Harold D. Copperman.

Copperman was another outside hire. He came from Apple, where he’d been general manager for east coast operations two years following a 20-year career at IBM. Coppeman joined Commodore a few weeks after Gould appointed a longtime ally and board member, Mehdi Ali, as Commodore International’s new president, filling a post that had been vacant since Rattigan’s firing. Gould remained CEO, but he was largely an absentee owner at this point, as he divided his time living in Toronto, New York City, and the Bahamas for tax reasons.

Speaking of living situations, Copperman told the Inquirer’s Valerie Reitman that he had no immediate plans to relocate his family from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, where CBM was based, because he wanted his youngest son to finish high school. Instead, Copperman said he commuted each day by piloting his private plane. (Gary Kildall would approve.)

Still, Copperman may have also been hedging his bets given recent history. He admitted to Reitman that some of his new employees “were wagering on how long he would last and holding mock contests to name all of his predecessors.” But his focus was on the future–and that was definitely not the C64. Instead, his focus was squarely on the Amiga.

That focus lasted until January 1991, when Gould fired Copperman and appointed James Dionne, Commodore’s Canadian sales manager and an 11-year company veteran, as CBM’s new president. Dionne lasted until October 1993, when Gould replaced him with Geoff Stliley. He left six months later–as the Commodore ship be sinking–to become head of sales and marketing for a data storage company.

As a postscript, Max Toy joined Ashton-Tate after his brief Commodore tenure. He eventually became that company’s vice president of sales and worldwide marketing. After Borland International acquired Ashton-Tate in 1991, Toy started a consulting firm and has since served as an executive and director for a number of startups in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast in March 1988.

Paul Schindler’s software review for this episode was the Electronic Encyclopedia (Grolier Electronic Publishing, $300).

Lucy Morton never identified her C64 sweater design program by name. But I found a listing in a 1995 book, The Needlecrafter’s Computer Companion, for a program called Style & Chart 2.1 by Lucy Morton. This would appear to be a later revision of the original C64 program published by Cochenille Design Studio, which by then was also available for the Amiga and IBM PC for $90.

Lewis “Kelly” Flock died in 2020 at the age of 67. Friend of the blog Ethan Johnson published a remembrance at his website, The History of How We Play. Kelly started at EA working in the warehouse before moving up the ranks into a junior production role on Skate or Die. He ended up leaving EA shortly thereafter to join Mediagenic (Activision), where he designed and produced a number of games before moving to Lucasarts. After a few more stops, Flock joined Sony in 1995, where he oversaw game development for the original PlayStation. Flock served as president of Sony Online Entertainment from 2000 to 2002 and later as executive vice president of video game publisher THQ from 2005 to 2007.

Brian Dougherty’s tech career began at Mattel Electronics, where he designed games for the Mattel IntelliVision. In 1981, Dougherty left Mattel to co-found Imagic, a third-party developer of games for the IntelliVision and the Atari VCS (2600). When Atari’s parent company, Warner Communications, announced in December 1982 that its yearly earnings would be significantly lower than previously projected due to mounting losses at Atari, it derailed Imagic’s planned initial public offering scheduled for two days later. Not long thereafter, Imagic CEO Bill Grubb fired Dougherty after learning of his plans to start his own company, which became Berkeley Softworks. Dougherty took the company, later renamed GeoWorks Corporation, public in 1994. That same year, Dougherty launched Wink Communications, an interactive television company, which he sold to Liberty Media in 2002. Dougherty also co-founded GlobalPC, a company that marketed cheap Internet-ready computers based on GEOS. He sold that company to MyTurn.com, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001. After that, Dougherty started a new software development company, Airset, Inc., which closed in 2015.

Berkeley Softworks released the initial version of GEOS for the Commodore 64 in 1986. Later releases supported the Commodore 128 and the Apple II. In 1990, the now-GeoWorks Corporation released a 16-bit GEOS for MS-DOS computers called PC/GEOS. GeoWorks later created a form of PC/GEOS for personal digital assistants, PEN/GEOS. The subsequent fate of GEOS and its many incarnations is beyond the scope of this exceptionally long blog post, so for now I’ll recommend you read Ernie Smith’s account at Tedium.

Skate or Die is notable as the first game internally developed at Electronic Arts as opposed to by an outside programmer or developer working under contract. EA later published Skate or Die for the Apple IIgs, Amstrad CPC, and MS-DOS platforms. Konami also ported and released a version for the Nintendo Entertainment System under license from EA, which at this time refused to publish on video game consoles.

Like many computer products, the KoalaPad started out as a project developed at Xerox PARC that Xerox decided not to commercially develop. David Thornburg of PARC created the initial touchpad tablet prototype in the early 1970s. Thornburg left PARC in 1981 and Xerox let him take his invention with him. Shortly thereafter, Thornburg joined a former PARC colleague, George White, who started his own company–initially called Icontrol Inc., but later renamed Koala Technologies Corporation–to develop computer mice. In a 2017 interview with Kay Savetz for ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast, White said his venture capital backers were more interested in the touchpad technology than mice. (Savetz separately interviewed David Thornburg around the same time.) So the company released the first KoalaPad for the Apple II in May 1983, with subsequent versions made for the Commodore 64 and other platforms. In 1986, Pentron Corporation acquired Koala Technologies and assumed its name. But in 1989, the new Koala sold off most of its businesses except for a plastics molding company and subsequently adopted the name Rotonics Manufacturing.

Paul Kleinmeyer wrote Master Composer, which Utah-based Access Software published in 1983. According to Michael Quigely’s review of the program for the December 1984 issue of RUN, one of the included sample pieces was Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money.”

Emile Tobenfield is the “Dr. T” behind Dr. T’s Music Software, although his doctorate is in physics rather than music. Tobenfield started working with synthesizers in the late 1970s before developing his first MIDI sequencer for the Commodore 64 in 1984. He incorporated Dr. T’s Music Software, Inc., in Massachusetts in 1988. The Keyboard Controlled Sequencer later evolved into a multi-tasking music package for the Atari ST line called Omega II. Tobenfield left Dr. T’s Music Software in 1993, citing “a severe case of burn-out” and lack of interest in the company’s direction. As best I can tell, the company went out of business the following year.

This episode may have been the first national television appearance of Tetris in the United States. Obviously, the history of Tetris would require its own blog post. For now, go watch Norman Caruso’s 2019 documentary on “The Story of Tetris” at The Gaming Historian.

Chapter 6: Multitasking Operating Systems

How many applications is your computer running right now? If the answer is more than one, then you’re already well ahead of most personal computer of the 1980s. Early microcomputer operating systems like CP/M and MS-DOS could only run a single application at a time. There were certain hacks to try and get around this limit–such as RAM-resident software–but the typical 8- or 16-bit PC lacked the processing power to multitask even if the operating system could technically support it.

Indeed, Apple learned this lesson in 1983 when it released the ill-fated Lisa. The Lisa could technically run multiple applications simultaneously but, as Hansen Hsu noted in a 2023 retrospective for the Computer History Museum, the Lisa’s OS “was too powerful even for its [Motorola] 68000 processor, and thus ran sluggishly.” And when Apple released the first Macintosh, it was limited to running a single application at a time due to the lack of a hard drive and insufficient memory (just 128KB of RAM on the original model).

But by August 1987 there were more powerful Macs on the market such as the Macintosh II and the Macintosh SE, so Apple was ready to finally give the multitasking operating system another try. At the Boston Macworld Expo the company announced MuliFinder, which wasn’t a new operating system but rather an extension to the forthcoming Macintosh System Software 5, which added multitasking capabilities to the Mac. Apple’s announcement allowed it to claim that it had a functioning multitasking operating system out before IBM and its key software partner, Microsoft. Indeed, although IBM had launched its PS/2 line of computers in April 1987, the promised multitasking operating system to accompany the new machines–OS/2–wasn’t ready yet.

And for some industry observers, the wait didn’t seem worth it. Knight-Ridder columnist Jim Bartimo, writing in July 1987, proclaimed that OS/2 had “little or no bearing on computer users today, and it may never have any impact.” He noted there were already third-party programs that could run multiple applications at once on MS-DOS machines, such as Ashton-Tate’s Framework office suite, and they weren’t exactly lighting the world on fire. More to the point, when OS/2 finally shipped it would be expensive, buggy, and have little or no software that could actually take advantage of its multitasking capabilities.

On the other side of the debate, Chicago Tribune columnist Daniel Brogan wrote in October 1987 that multitasking “has plenty of sex appeal” and that he was “still amazed when I watch a telecomm session scrolling in one window while I’m writing letters in another.” He added that it took a traditional operating system like MS-DOS “at least 15 seconds” to switch between applications, while Apple’s Multinfinder made the transition nearly instantaneous.

Microsoft and IBM did finally launch OS/2 in December 1987. But one promised key feature–a graphical user interface called Presentation Manager–would have to wait another full year until the OS/2 1.1 release. Even when this next Computer Chronicles episode first aired in March 1988, Microsoft and IBM were still showing off pre-release versions of Presentation Manager to Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall. Meanwhile, Kildall’s own company, Digital Research, had its own competing multitasking operating system ready.

The episode began with Cheifet showing off Apple’s MultiFinder, running on a Macintosh SE, to Kildall. Cheifet said there were three applications running at the same time on the Mac: Ready, Set, Go!, MacWrite, and Microsoft Excel. Noting Digital Research’s own work, Cheifet recalled Kildall telling him how difficult it was from a software developer’s point of view to create a multitasking operating system. Why was that?

Kildall said the operating system was that layer in between the applications and the hardware. And a lot of existing software written for today’s single-tasking operating systems used little “go-arounds” to speed up the program or simulate multitasking (as was the case with terminate and stay resident programs). The difficulty with trying to run those same programs in a multitasking environment was that you had to detect those go-arounds and make sure you simulated the environment properly. Otherwise, there would be a conflict and the processes ended up destroying one another. Fortunately, many applications were now being written for multitasking so they didn’t have to use those go-arounds and could rely on the operating system itself.

Hiring Computers Instead of More People

Wendy Woods was on UNIX duty for this episode. Her first remote report was from Foothill Securities, Inc., a brokerage firm based in Los Altos, California, which relied on a Tandy 3000 running XENIX, a UNIX distribution published by the Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Woods noted the company was a small, family-run operation, with founder and president Rex Gardiner sharing a cozy two-room office with his son, two other employees, and the Intel 80286-based Tandy machine.

Gardiner told Woods that he wanted his small team to be able to access the same files at the same time. By using XENIX, they had such a multi-user, multitasking capability. The company had several different databases–e.g., lists of customers, products, mutual funds, et al.–and different people could access those databases at the same time. Woods added the Gardiners processed an impressive amount of information and money from their spartan office, about $36 million worth of orders in 1987 alone.

Woods noted that it did take longer to retrieve information from the system when everyone was online. Still, it was the multitasking system that gave the company its competitive edge. Gardiner said they were able to put in fewer man- and woman-hours to do the same job. Essentially, they hired computers instead of additional people.

Running Multiple DOS Applications Concurrently

Tony Harris joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Harris was director of graphics marketing for Digital Research, Inc. (DRI), where Kildall was chairman. Harris was there to demonstrate DRI’s multitasking operating system, Concurrent DOS 386.

Kildall said the interesting thing about the microcomputer business now was that processors and memory capacity were at the point where with a good multitasking, multi-user operating system, people could start to replace minicomputers with more cost-effective personal computers.

Cheifet asked Harris how Concurrent DOS 386 fit into the bigger picture considering OS/2. Harris said Concurrent DOS 386 was part of a whole family of Concurrent DOS operating systems. If you looked back to PC-DOS (i.e., MS-DOS), it was a single-task operating system that could only run one application at a time. OS/2, on the other hand, was a multitasking operating system designed to run OS/2-specific applications. Concurrent DOS 386, however, was meant as a multitasking operating system for traditional DOS applications. It could run multiple DOS applications across one or multiple user terminals.

Indeed, Harris setup a multi-terminal setup for his Concurrent DOS 386 demo. Under the table, Harris explained, there was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, which was an Intel 80386-based machine. On the table there were three monitors. The middle monitor was the “main console” connected to the Model 80. The other two monitors were standard terminals connected to the PS/2 through RS-232 ports. All three terminals were running Lotus 1-2-3.

But Harris said all was not as it appeared. The main console was actually running multiple processes in the background. And even the serial terminals had multiple tasks going, which he demonstrated by showing dBase III running on one of them. Harris said this showed the ability of a 386-based machine like the PS/2 Model 80 in conjunction with Concurrent PC DOS to run multiple DOS applications at once and allow shared access to them. In a real-world office deployment, a manager could be sitting at the main console working on a spreadsheet while secretaries used the two workstations to do word processing or even some spreadsheet work of their own.

Kildall asked Harris to show the processes running in the background on the main console. The console showed different processes running in separate windows that were stacked on top of one another. Harris showed how you could move one window to a full-screen display. He pulled up one such window, which contained a system status utility that displayed all of the different tasks and processes that were running. He then moved over to one of the terminals and showed how you could package a dBase database in the background while working with a Lotus spreadsheet.

Microsoft Offered Stopgap Solution for 386 Multitasking

Dave Jaworski, a regional general manager with Microsoft, joined Cheifet and Kildall for the next segment. Not surprisingly, Jaworski was there to demonstrate Microsoft’s latest multitasking operating system, Windows/386. Kildall noted that Microsoft was actually developing two multitasking operating systems: Windows and OS/2. How did Microsoft position each of them?

Jaworski explained that the user interface was the same across both OS/2–which called the interface the “Presentation Manager”–Windows/386, and Windows 2.0. Windows/386 followed IBM’s Common User Access (CUA) standard for its Systems Application Architecture (SAA). In the future, Jaworski said, all applications would have this interface. But for now, Windows/386 only ran on the Intel 80386 processor, while OS/2 was built for the 286 platform and beyond. So OS/2 was really the operating system for the future, while Windows/386 was meant as a short-term product specific to the 386 platform.

Kildall asked for a demonstration of Windows/386. Jaworski pulled up a Windows screen, which displayed the contents of the MS-DOS Executive folder. He noted the interface included pull-down menus, which would eventually be standard across all applications. Jaworski then opened the on-screen clock to show it running at the same time as the other window. He also explained the icons in the top-right corner of the window, which could reduce the active window down to a desktop icon.

Microsoft Excel was also running on the demo machine. Jaworski said that not only could you work with standard spreadsheets, you could also load up an application to “talk” to other Windows applications through a feature called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). In this example, Excel generated a pop-up message indicating the active spreadsheet was missing data from another program. The dialog asked whether or not it should “re-establish remote links.” Jaworski clicked “yes.” The program then asked whether it should start the necessary application server. Again, Jaworski clicked “yes.” For this demo, Jaworski said Excel pulled in data from a stimulated stock exchange feed and made “real-time” updates to the open spreadsheet. Jaworski then instructed Excel to make a graph of the newly imported information, which it did.

Next, Jaworski reduced the Excel window down to a desktop icon and opened Microsoft Word. He noted this was a standard DOS application and it was important for users to know they could run their existing applications in the new Windows environment. Jaworski also showed how you could run Word in its own window while the Excel spreadsheet continued to update its “live” feed.

The Best of Both Worlds?

Back in the UNIX world, Wendy Woods presented her second and final remote report from Abacus Concepts in Berkeley, California. Abacus was one of the first software developers to write applications for A/UX, a “hybrid” operating system from Apple that combined UNIX with the Macintosh’s graphical user interface. Specifically, Abacus adapted its StatView II statistical analysis package, originally designed for the Mac, to run as a UNIX program.

Woods said the Abacus team found A/UX exciting because it gave them tools they never had before. Jim Gagnon of Abacus told Woods that some of those tools included true multitasking and inter-process communication as well as virtual memory. The latter was especially useful in that it allowed very large applications like StatView II to access more memory than physically resided inside of the machine.

Woods added that the the multitasking capabilities of A/UX would be much more evident in the next version of StatView II. Gagnon said they envisioned most StatView users would work on A/UX-based systems when they had large analyses to perform. Abacus planned to break StatView up in such a way that users could initiate those analyses and have them compute in the background while they can ran other calculations or applications in the foreground.

Abacus and other developers were banking on the belief that A/UX will expand the UNIX market, Woods said, to people of all walks of life who wanted the power of UNIX and the ease of use of a Mac.

Do You Prefer Your OS/2 Standard or Expanded?

In a rare in-studio appearance from an IBM representative, Lee Reiswig, director of Big Blue’s lab in Austin, Texas, joined Cheifet and Kildall for the final segment. Reiswig sat in front of an impressive hardware setup, which Kildall commented looked more like a computer room than a personal computer. Reiswig quipped that he’d brought “part of the Austin lab” with him to show off OS/2. Reiswig explained there were two PS/2 Model 60 units running OS/2 in the studio, each with their own monitor, and several communication control units behind him that connected the local machines to the Austin lab.

To begin his demo, Reiswig showed the OS/2 main menu, a text-based interface divided into two sections. On the left-hand side, there was a list of programs the user could start. Meanwhile, the right-hand menu showed the programs that were already running. Reiswig selected the first item on the right-hand menu, which brought up the traditional DOS “C” prompt. This was the “DOS compatibility window” that allowed OS/2 to run PC-DOS programs without modification. Reiswig demonstrated this by running the DOS version of Falcon: The F-16 Fighter Simulation. He then returned to the main menu and pointed out some of the other programs that were running, such as a terminal emulator connected to an IBM System/370 mainframe back in the Austin lab and an IBM-developed word processing program called DisplayWrite.

Reiswig switched to the OS/2 communications manager and showed there were multiple sessions transferring files between the two PS/2 Model 60 units in the studio. He emphasized there were two separate file transfers going on in parallel while still connected to the remote mainframe in Austin. A window displayed the data cycling through the network. Reiswig then switched to the same window in the other PS/2 to the show the simultaneous data transfer. He then showed other windows containing IBM’s PROFS (email) system and relational database manager.

Reiswig next spent a few moments demonstrating the database manager, which was based on the Structured Query Language (SQL). Kildall said he heard that SQL was part of the planned OS/2 Extended Edition. Reiswig said that was correct. He clarified this demonstration was using the Extended Edition. (Essentially, this was the “server” version of OS/2, as opposed to the standard “desktop” version.) The Extended Edition contained both the database manager and the previously described communications manager. Reiswig then continued his database manager demonstration.

Kildall asked if IBM saw SQL as something that would be carried up into its mainframe line. Reiswig said the Extended Edition’s interface, as well as all of the programming interfaces, were SAA compliant (as Dave Jaworski explained in the previous segment). OS/2 was the system’s application architecture implementation for IBM. So it would be consistent across IBM’s System/370 mainframes, mid-range systems, and the PS/2 line.

Having waited long enough to get to the fireworks factory, Cheifet asked Reiswig to demonstrate the still-in-progress graphical user interface for OS/2, Presentation Manager. Reiswig emphasized this was a very early version of the software. IBM planned to ship Presentation Manager with the Standard Edition of OS/2 in October 1988. (Spoiler: It shipped in November, so pretty close.) It was a joint development project between IBM and Microsoft, and Reiswig admitted as he pulled up the demo that the window layout and overall presentation was “very analogous” to Windows/386 and Windows 2.0.

Reiswig then executed a program with Presentation Manager that produced a data graph. By using the pull-down menu in the graphing application’s window, you could change the type of graph (bar, line, Gantt chart, et al.) He noted that since Presentation Manager was a windowing system, you could see what was going on in different applications simultaneously. To demonstrate, he showed a scrolling application in one window while looking at two other open windows.

Kildall asked if OS/2 represented a move by IBM into making the operating system proprietary software, as opposed to the more open MS-DOS standard. Reiswig said no. It was important for IBM to have the OS/2 capabilities available across all of the systems in the industry. That was why they worked with Microsoft to provide the Standard Edition of OS/2. But IBM also wanted to provide certain “enhancements” to OS/2, such as the communications and SAA standard, which was why there was also an Extended Edition. But there was nothing preventing other vendors from adding their own features to either versionof OS/2.

Digital Research’s Twilight Years

There will be plenty more to say about Windows and OS/2 in future posts, so I thought I’d focus here on Digital Research. Sadly, we’re in the final years of Gary Kildall’s company, which he’ll sell to Novell, Inc., just over three years after this episode first aired. Obviously, DRI never regained the status it had within the software market prior to the formation of the IBM-Microsoft alliance back in 1981. But as we saw with Concurrent DOS 386, it wasn’t as if DRI simply disappeared after the IBM PC came out. DRI survived another decade and continued to try and innovate within the Intel 8086-based OS market.

Now, CP/M, the operating system that made DRI a success in the first place, was no longer a significant player in the market. Keep in mind, CP/M was designed for computers running on the 8-bit Zilog Z80 microprocessor, which was a backwards-compatible enhancement of the Intel 8080 CPU. But the IBM PC was based on the 16-bit Intel 8086. So DRI actually rewrote CP/M for the Intel 8086. This operating system was dubbed CP/M-86, while the original CP/M was retroactively re-designated CP/M-80.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to explaining the barrage of DRI operating systems released in the 1980s and early 1990s. Below is a chart I created that tries to make sense of just the operating systems released for Intel x86-based machines:

Chart of Digital Research Intel x86 operating system history

If you look at the top left of the chart, you’ll see a reference to MP/M-86. This was DRI’s first multi-user operating system. Like the single-user CP/M, there were separate “-86” and “-80” versions of MP/M. In early 1982, shortly after the IBM PC debuted

, DRI released Concurrent CP/M, which was something of a hybrid of CP/M-86 1.1 and MP/M-86 2.1. (There was no 8-bit or “-80” version of Concurrent CP/M.)

DRI described Concurrent CP/M as “a multi- or single-user, multitasking operating system that allows you to do two or more jobs at the same time on one or more terminals.” So this wasn’t multitasking in the graphical sense. It was more akin to running multiple terminals at the same time on a UNIX system. Indeed, some sources claimed that the final release of Concurrent CP/M could run up to 64 concurrent terminal sessions at a time.

Of course, by 1983 it was becoming clear that Microsoft’s MS-DOS/PC-DOS was the new standard for single-tasking operating systems on the Intel 8086 platform. So DRI started working on an optional DOS module (known as PC-MODE) as an add-on to Concurrent CP/M 3.1. This would eventually split into a separate product called Concurrent DOS 3.1, which released in 1984. Concurrent DOS then begat Concurrent DOS XM, which took advantage of the DOS expanded memory specification to run programs that required more than 640KB of RAM.

Concurrent DOS XM marked an important transition point for DRI in that operating system development moved from the company’s home base in Monterey, California, to a new European Development Center based in the United Kingdom. (Tony Harris’ English accent should have been a clue.) From this point, Monterey focused primarily on developing the GEM desktop environment and related applications. Meanwhile, the UK office rewrote Concurrent DOS for the Intel 80386, leading to the February 1987 release of Concurrent DOS 386, which supported up to 20 users running MS-DOS applications simultaneously.

To make things more complicated, DRI released another new operating system in August 1987 called FlexOS. Like Concurrent DOS, this was an Intel x86 multi-user, multitasking operating system. DRI described this as a “re-engineered version” of Concurrent DOS 286 targeted at computers used in manufacturing (or what we would now call an “embedded system.”) DRI would also release a separate version of FlexOS for the Intel 80386.

At one point, DRI had considered FlexOS as a potential replacement for Concurrent DOS 386. Instead, the company maintained separate product lines. DRI continued to release Concurrent DOS name up until version 3.0. In March 1991, DRI officially replaced Concurrent DOS 386 with Multiuser DOS 5.0. Why did they skip 4.0? Because Microsoft had released MS-DOS 5.0 and DRI wanted to match the version numbering.

Multiuser DOS was also known as DR Multiuser DOS. This was in keeping with Digital Research’s decision in 1988 to rebrand its single-user operating system, replacing Concurrent DOS XM with DR DOS, which was fully compatible with MS-DOS 3.3. (Despite the compatibility, DR DOS was still derived from Concurrent DOS, and thus CP/M, so it did not infringe on any Microsoft copyrights.)

As previously noted, Novell, Inc., purchased Digital Research in July 1991. The deal was a stock swap valued at around $80 million. At the time, reports estimated DRI’s operating systems–DR DOS, DR Multiuser DOS, and FlexOS–still held between a 10 to 15 percent share of the overall DOS market.

After the Novell purchase closed, Digital Research ceased to exist as an independent company. It became the Novell Desktop Systems Group. Novell released final versions of both DR DOS (as Novell DOS 7) and Multiuser DOS (as Novell Multiuser DOS 5.0). But Novell quickly realized there was no longer room for a niche competitor to Microsoft in the DOS market, so it ended up selling the former Digital Research DOS assets to Caldera, Inc., in 1996. The deal did not include FlexOS, which Novell previously sold off in 1994 to Integrated Systems, Inc. 

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast in March 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun that likely aired in August 1988.

Paul Schindler’s software review for this episode was Suitcase (Software Supply, $60), an accessories manager for the Macintosh.

Tony Harris left Digital Research in 1989 to co-found Software 2000. Later renamed Software Imaging, the company focused on developing OEM software for inkjet printers and digital copiers. Harris remained with Software Imaging until 2007. He went on to earn a PhD from Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge.

Dave Jaworski’s first stint at Microsoft started in 1985, where he was the third employee hired at the company’s Canadian office. He eventually became Microsoft’s national sales manager in Canada and later general manager of U.S. sales operations, the position he held when he appeared in this episode. Jaworski left Microsoft in 1993, first joining Arabesque Software and then founding his own company, Provident Ventures, Inc., which developed high-end custom presentation software. Jaworski sold Provident Ventures to Centris Inc. in 1999. He then had short stints with Gaylord Entertainment and Starwire Corporation before co-founding another startup, PassAlong Networks, a digital music service. PassAlong shut down in 2009. After a few more stops, Jaworski returned to Microsoft in 2019, where he currently serves as a principal product manager for Microsoft Teams.

Lee Reiswig joined IBM in 1966 and eventually rose to become general manager of the Personal Software Products Division, where he continued to oversee the development of OS/2 and its successor, OS/2 Warp, until 1995.

Rex Gardiner passed away in August 2015 at the age of 93. According to a biography prepared by his daughter, Gardiner grew up in northern California and spent most of his life in Los Altos and the town of Los Altos Hills, which he helped to establish as a separate municipality in the 1950s. After serving in the United States Army during World War II, Gardiner earned his bachelor’s degree from San Jose State University and went to work for Pacific Gas & Electric. He started Foothill Securities in 1962. In 1996, Gardiner began the process of selling Foothill, which culminated with his retirement in 2006. In July 2009, Foothill merged with Phoenix-based Cue Financial Group, Inc. 

Jim Gagnon and Dan Feldman co-founded Abacus Concepts in 1984 to develop StatView, which quickly became the go-to statistical analysis software for the Macintosh. According to Gannon’s personal website, as Macintosh sales declined in the mid-1990s, he sold off Abacus’ assets to its primary competitor, SAS Institute, in 1998. Gagnon then spent the next seven years traveling and performing volunteer work. He returned to the tech industry in the mid-2000s, primarily working as a programmer.

Apple announced its A/UX operating system in February 1998 at UniFourm, then a popular convention for the UNIX community, which was held that year in Dallas, Texas. According to Wendy Woods, Apple hoped that having a UNIX-based OS would help sell Macintoshes to government agencies. A Macintosh II with A/UX preinstalled on an 80MB hard disk initially cost between $8,600 and $10,745 depending on the configuration. Existing Macintosh II users could also purchase an A/UX “upgrade” bundle with the hard drive and an additional 4MB of RAM for just $5,000.

Chapter 7: Business Graphics (Macintosh)

In early 1987, Apple planned to publish a database management program called Silver Surfer, which was developed by Acius. This prompted blowback from a number of third-party Macintosh developers, who felt that Apple should “stick to hardware” and leave the software to them. Unlike the Apple of today, then-CEO John Sculley’s company in 1987 could only go so far to antagonize the third-party developers necessary to keep the Macintosh platform viable. So Apple abandoned plans to publish Silver Surfer under its own label and returned the rights to Acius, who released the database under the name 4th Dimension.

The Silver Surfer affair prompted Sculley and his executives to spin off its “private label” software business into a new company, which they named Claris. In December 1987, Claris moved out of Apple’s Cupertino, California, offices to nearby Mountain View, and on January 11, 1988, the new company officially opened for business.

Aside from appeasing third-party developers, Apple hoped that Claris’ independence would help revive the sagging fortunes of what had once been the Macintosh’s signature applications, including MacDraw. Back in June 1985, then-Apple product manager Merein Cremer appeared on Computer Chronicles to demonstrate the original version of MacDraw, a vector graphics package commonly used to create business charts and presentations. In the three years since, however, a number of third-party developers had entered the booming market for business graphics on the Mac, prompting Claris to release a complete rewrite of the program, MacDraw II, as one of its first products in early 1988.

No More Need for “Manual” Tools?

MacDraw II was one of several programs demonstrated in this next Computer Chronicles episode from April 1988. This was the first in a two-part look at business graphics. As had become standard practice by now, Chronicles devoted one episode to applications for the Macintosh, and another for IBM PC-compatible software.

Stewart Cheifet recorded his cold open at an unidentified commercial graphics shop, where he noted you wouldn’t find many traditional design tools like a T-square or pens and pencils. What you found instead were computers and graphics software. Increasingly, Cheifet said, commercial artists were trading in their “manual” tools for mice and keyboards.

In the studio, Cheifet showed Gary Kildall a number of these supposedly outdated manual tools, including the aforementioned T-square, which Cheifet said the graphics house he visited used to pull printer cables from behind their desks.

Cheifet asked Kildall how to compare business graphics to other applications like desktop publishing, computer-aided design, drawing programs, and so forth. Kildall noted that in business, you primarily dealt in numbers, which represented objects, such as how many bags of flour you sold. Today, with high-resolution graphics on PCs, you could now represent those objects and concepts more clearly when it came to presentations.

Illustrator Streamlines Clothing Design Process

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from Esprit, a San Francisco-based clothing company, which used Adobe Illustrator. Woods said that in the fiercely competitive fashion business, the need to bring new products out quickly was often at odds with the need to make continuing changes to a design, often until the last minute.

That’s why designers at Esprit adopted the Macintosh II and Adobe Illustrator to help streamline their work. Jim Charles, a designer with Esprit, told Woods that when the company first brought the Mac into the design room, he didn’t know what he was going to do with the machine. He was frustrated that a lot of the fashion business had to do with quick changes, many of which were simple and subtle, such as changing a color.

Woods said using software like Illustrator, which can manipulate free-form shapes, a designer could experiment with different patterns, forms, and colors before committing them to cloth. That kind of flexibility brought changes to a workplace like Esprit, where much of the product still depended on a paintbrush and a sewing machine. Charles said the biggest changes were in how the designers thought and looked at what they did. The software helped to suggest a more logical way of developing a design–or at least thinking about design concepts.

But the regularity of a computer-generated design, Woods said, was not always an advantage. Sometimes designers wanted patterns that lacked the computer’s mathematical perfection, i.e., which have a “hand touch.” Still, the Macintosh demonstrated the computer’s special talents in more ways than one. As an example, Charles said that if he had a meeting tonight for artwork going out tomorrow, and all that needed to be changed was the color, he could simply bring up the design in Illustrator and make the change instantly. This was much simpler than having an artist come back in and repaint the entire item over again.

Business Charts…Now in Color!

Merein Cermer and Pradeep Singh joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Cremer had moved from Apple to Claris, where she remained the product manager for what was now MacDraw II. Singh was a product manager at Microsoft for the company’s latest Macintosh spreadsheet program, Microsoft Excel 2.0.

Kildall noted that both companies were demonstrating second-generation software. What have the customers asked for in these latest business graphics programs? Singh said that in the most immediate sense, support for the latest hardware, such as the full-color Macintosh II, as well as Apple’s new multitasking operating system, MultiFinder. Singh felt the underlying Excel product was already a strong business graphics product, so there didn’t need to be much basic change to the underlying functionality. Of course, the 2.0 version did do a lot other stuff, but the focus of his demonstration today was business graphics.

Kildall asked Singh for that demo. Singh pulled up a simple spreadsheet, a table containing an insurance premium analysis over a 20-year period. Singh noted that a table with numbers did not make a strong impact. So he made a chart out of it. He selected the data and had Excel produce a column chart. Singh noted that the program made a number of “intelligent decisions,” such as the axes of the chart. The user could also customize the chart through additional options, such as adding a legend.

Singh noted that Excel had a selection of pre-built chart types, including options to overlay one chart on top of another. Using his demonstration spreadsheet, he overlaid a column chart on top of an area chart. He then showed off some of the cosmetic options the user could configure, such as changing the font size of the chart’s text and adding shadows to the graphical bars. Finally, Singh showed a completed chart, including text boxes and a background.

Kildall asked about options when it came to making a hard copy of an Excel chart. How could you make something like transparencies or slides? Singh said Excel supported a number of output devices, such as a Tektronix thermal printer. He showed Kildall some sample printouts. You could also use a dot-matrix printer, which was a cheaper option than thermal printing but did not produce the same quality level.

Kildall added you could use a laser printer to make transparencies. Singh said that was true, but the laser printer’s output was only in black and white. Color laser printing was coming, but it wasn’t here yet.

As Cremer set up her own demo, Cheifet asked Singh if you could run Excel 2.0 on a Macintosh SE, or did you need the more powerful Macintosh II to take advantage of the advanced graphics? Singh said the program worked just as well on the SE. The main advantage of the Macintosh II was that it had color graphics, while the SE was restricted to black and white.

Cheifet then turned to Cremer and asked about the changes to MacDraw II versus the original product. Cremer said the key changes involved enhancements to speed, precision, and flexibility. But Claris tried not to sacrifice the ease of use that made MacDraw a success in the first place.

Cremer then began her demo by showing a color image of a train scrolling from left to right on the Macintosh II display. She noted this showed off the improvements to speed in MacDraw II. The screen did not have to redraw itself every time you moved the image around.

Next, to demonstrate improvements to ease of use, Cremer pulled up an outline of a world map that was missing Australia. She opened a library of existing images, selected one of Australia, and copied and pasted it on top of the world map image.

MacDraw II also had a layering feature. This allowed the user to place transparency overlays on top of an image. Cremer demonstrated this by adding a transparency layer with text and lines on top of the world map image. By doing this, Cremer said the user did not destroy the underlying image, which could be used over and over again.

In terms of improvements to precision, Cremer said the user could now zoom into part of an image with up to 3,200-percent magnification of its original size. This allowed for making precise adjustments of the individual vector lines used to create MacDraw II images. Cremer then demonstrated improvements made to the handling of text in MacDraw II, such as the ability to rotate a text box to any angle, as well as the addition of color.

Kildall noted that one of the advantages of a drawing program as opposed to a paint program was the ability to perform these types of vector-based changes. Did Cremer actually see drawing programs replacing paint programs? Cremer said no, as drawing programs focused on making bitmap graphics. But MacDraw II did allow a user to bring in scanned bitmap images of any resolution into a vector drawing file.

Reiterating his earlier question to Singh, Chefeft asked Cremer about users with a Macintosh SE or older model, which still represented the majority of Mac users. Were there still advantages for them in using MacDraw II? Cremer said definitely, all of the features demonstrated translated back to the Macintosh Plus and the Macintosh SE. You could even do color patterns on a Macintosh Plus, which were represented by letter patterns on the black-and-white display.

Kildall asked Cremer about the typical customer for MacDraw II. Cremer said it was used for everything from presentation graphics to desktop publishing, as well as low-level computer-aided design.

Cheifet asked about the minimum memory requirements for MacDraw II. Cremer said you needed at least 1 MB. Cheifet followed up, asking if there was any way for an existing MacDraw user to upgrade to MacDraw II. Cremer said yes, Claris offered a $100 upgrade, while purchasing the program brand new cost $395. (MacDraw originally retailed for $195.)

Make Your Own Slides for the Low Cost of $5,000

Wendy Woods returned for her second and final remote segment. This time, she was at LifeScan, a San Francisco-based company that made a hand-held blood sugar tester for diabetics. Woods noted the company’s product, known as One Touch, had been so successful that LifeScan had doubled in size in just a few years.

Woods said much of the credit for the company’s growth was due to the management and sales teams, which designed the presentations that impressed their customers. For this purpose, LifeScan product manager Eric Meyer used ImageMaker from Sunnyvale, California-based Presentation Technologies.

ImageMaker was a desktop slide-making system that could put color graphics created on a Macintosh directly onto 35mm film. This in-house slide product offered LifeScan two big advantages. First, Meyer told Woods, he could control the entire process. You could go right from having something in your head to something on the screen and get exactly what you had in mind on the slide. You weren’t working through an intermediary. Second, Meyer said there was a substantial cost savings. It cost about $20 to $30 per slide to use an outside company. With the ImageMaker, after accounting for the fixed costs, that per-slide cost went down to about 50 cents.

Woods said that unlike other slide-making systems on the market, the $5,000 ImageMaker used a special photo-optical technology with font cartridges that created crisp, 8,000-resolution line images. Woods added that Presentation Technologies said it was shipping about 2,000 ImageMakers per month, which was pretty good for a product this new and this expensive. It was an indication that desktop slide-making was a concept that corporate America was quickly embracing.

Cricket Presents the Future of Business Presentations

For the final segment, Darragh Muldoon and Barry Schuler joined Cheift and Kildall in the studio. Muldoon was the co-founder and president of Pennsylvania-based Cricket Software, which published the business graphics package Cricket Presents. Schuler was Cricket’s chief executive officer.

Kildall asked Muldoon if you had to be an artist to use a business graphics program. Muldoon said if you wanted to do incredible sophisticated stuff it would be helpful, but in general you didn’t need artistic skill to use software like Cricket Presents, which came with templates and drawing tools.

Kildall followed up, asking if Cricket had a particular customer profile. Muldoon said no, their goal was to grab the whole market. She added that Cricket Presents worked for everyone from someone who wanted to create simple black-and-white transparencies with an Apple LaserWriter printer to more sophisticated users working in corporate art departments to create color transparencies and 35mm slides.

Schuler then conducted a demonstration of Cricket Presents. He said a typical user would begin creating a presentation using the software’s built-in outline processor. Schuler already had a sample outline started. The next step was to begin building individual “frames” or slides. Cricket Presents had a built-in template library. The templates included formats for the frames, such as placing a headline, bullet points, and a space to insert graphics. Users could also design and save their own templates.

Schuler explained how a user could copy items directly from their outlines into a frame, such as pasting them into bullet points. Cheifet asked if there were defaults for the fonts. Schuler said yes, the template pre-selected the fonts, colors, and other formatting elements, but the user could always go in and change them.

Cricket Presents also had a built-in graphing tool. Schuler explained this also relied on the program’s templates. For example, a user could select a pre-made bar graph and insert it into a frame. Double clicking on the inserted graph then opened a separate data worksheet window, where the user could input data specific to their presentation. Cheifet described it as a built-in spreadsheet. Schuler clarified it didn’t have the mathematical functions of a spreadsheet, but it would allow you to input and format data. He then showed how you could use color drawing tools in Cricket Presents to add an arrow to the frame.

Kildall asked if it was possible to import graphics and text from other programs into Cricket Presents. Schuler said there were “very powerful” importing features. The software supported a number of popular file formats, such as PICT, PICT2, and MacPaint. To demonstrate, he imported a black-and-white PICT file created with another program and used a feature in Cricket Presents to colorize the image by assigning individual colors to the patterns that appeared. Cheifet quipped it was the equivalent of colorizing old black-and-white movies. (Schuler jokingly replied Ted Turner would love this.)

Beyond creating individual frames, Schuler said Cricket Presents also had a “note view” that opened a text editor for the person giving the presentation to write their accompanying speech or store presenter notes.

Wrapping things up, Cheifet asked Muldoon if there was a boom in presentation graphics software like Cricket Presents similar to what had been seen in desktop publishing. Muldoon said definitely, but the market could still be larger. She noted business executives were more likely to give a presentation than publish a newsletter.

Why Cricket Wasn’t the Future of Business Presentations

If the demonstration of Cricket Presents sounded a lot like Microsoft PowerPoint, well, in an alternate universe Cricket Presents might have been Microsoft PowerPoint–or maybe Microsoft Presents. In fact, Bill Gates actually tried to acquire Cricket Software before purchasing PowerPoint’s original developer instead.

But let’s back up a bit. In 1983, Darragh Muldoon quit her accounting job to join Heyden & Son Inc., a Philadelphia-based distributor of scientific and technical books, as its new business manager. It was at Heyden that Muldoon met Jim Rafferty, a Ph.D student in chemistry at the University of Maryland, who would become her partner in co-founding Cricket Software.

Rafferty told MacWorld in a 1988 interview that he developed his interest in computers during graduate school. In particular, he was enamored with the pre-release hype surrounding the Apple Macintosh. When the Mac finally launched in January 1984, Rafferty said he was “in line before my local Apple dealer opened, waiting with a check for $2,498 in my hand.”

Rafferty decided the best use for his new Mac was to develop a graphics program for data analysis, something that previously required a mainframe computer. Rafferty dropped out of Maryland and spent the next 15 months developing his program in Pascal. The finished application, which he called StatWorks, was then distributed by Heyden & Son.

Shortly thereafter, Rafferty and Muldoon decided to go into business together, forming Cricket Software in May 1985. (Rafferty said people had called him “Jiminy Cricket” since he was a child, hence the company’s name.) Muldoon, the new company’s president, took out a second mortgage on her home to fund the startup. Rafferty, who took the title of chairman, contributed an additional $20,000 in equipment, and the pair borrowed another $50,000 from the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation.

The company’s first product, Cricket Graph, debuted in January 1986, to positive reviews and sales. A second product, Cricket Draw, soon followed. After just two months, Cricket Software was profitable, and by early 1987 the company reported $6 million in annual sales. By the time Muldoon appeared on Computer Chronicles in April 1988, the company had 60 employees and had recently relocated to a 30,000 square-foot facility in the Philadelphia suburb of Malvern.

Cricket Software’s meteoric rise sparked attention from across the country. In 1986, the aforementioned Bill Gates asked Muldoon and Rafferty if they were interested in selling their nascent company to Microsoft. They said no. Six months later, Gates asked a second time. Again, they said no.

Rafferty later claimed another bidder, whom he declined to identify, offered $18 million to buy out Muldoon and himself. Once again, the answer was “no.” Media reports speculated the would-be buyer might have been Lotus Development Corporation or Adobe Systems, the latter of whom published Illustrator.

Entering 1988, however, Muldoon and Rafferty realized they might be in over their heads running a rapidly growing software company with no prior experience. So that’s when they brought in Barry Schuler. He was already well-known to the Cricket founders, as Schuler ran the firm that handled the company’s advertising.

Originally from New Jersey, Schuler studied psychology at Rutgers University, which he then weaponized into a career in advertising and marketing. After graduating from Rutgers in 1976, he started his first company, CMP Communications, which initially produced industrial and commercial films. After reading an article in Popular Mechanics on how to build your own microcomputer, however, Schuler pivoted CMP’s business to providing marketing and advertising services for startup tech companies, including Cricket Software.

Schuler left CMP in March 1988 to join Cricket as its new president and chief executive officer, with Muldoon assuming the title of vice chairman. This was not long–maybe a couple of weeks–before Schuler and Muldoon appeared on Computer Chronicles to demonstrate Cricket Presents. That was no coincidence. Presents had been in development for some time under the code name DOM, which stood for “deadline-oriented moron,” a reference to the product’s target market of “procrastinating middle manager[s] up against a deadline to prepare a presentation,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Cricket started shipping Presents to retailers in April 1988, and Schuler mounted a full-court press to sell what was now the company’s flagship product.

Indeed, Schuler spared no expense marketing Presents, spending millions on advertising and trade shows and more than doubling the company’s sales and marketing staff in just eight months. Initially, the campaign seemed to work. Cricket reported shipping 10,000 units of Presents to retailers in each of its first two months on the market. Unfortunately, many of those copies then languished on store shelves as those procrastinating middle managers procrastinated over shelling out $495 for yet another business graphics program.

But the real problem was how much Cricket spent marketing Presents. Barry Borden, a consultant for Cricket at the time, told MacWEEK that the company booked about $4 million in revenue on Presents during April and May 1988, but by June the marketing costs exceeded $1 million per month as new sales slowed to a trickle. By the end of 1988, Cricket reported a $2 million loss on just $10 million in sales.

To add insult to injury, Schuler brought in venture capital to help fund his marketing push. In the summer of 1988, he convinced Muldoon and Rafferty to sell roughly one-third of Cricket Software to a Boston venture capital firm, the Summit Group, for $4 million. The company also put itself up for sale at an asking price of $30 million.

According to a June 1989 postmortem by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Valerie Reitman, Rafferty believed that bringing in the venture capitalists was a mistake, as “the company got into a financial bind which it could escape with more money from a second sale of stock to the venture capitalists,” which only further reduced his stake in the company. (Rafferty did pocket a share of that $4 million, so it’s not like he was left with nothing.)

Of course, it turned out that Summit had purchased a proverbial lemon. Fundamentally, Schuler’s strategy was to spend big and acquire market share in what was still the emerging field of presentation graphics software. The problem was that a number of other, more established companies entered the field around the same time. This included Microsoft, which acquired PowerPoint when it purchased the program’s developer, Forethought, Inc., in July 1987.

PowerPoint beat Cricket Presents to market by nearly a year. Other presentation software programs on the market by the end of 1988 included Aldus Persuasion, Symantec’s MORE II, and Letraset’s StandOut! In a March 1989 comparison of the five programs, MacWEEK said that among the customers it surveyed, those who preferred graphics-oriented programs favored Persuasion first, followed by PowerPoint. While Cricket Presents received high marks for its “gradated backgrounds,” the Aldus and Microsoft programs “were essential and provided the finished look associated with custom slide production.” Meanwhile, MORE II was considered a superior text-based presentation package, particularly with respect to its handling of outlines.

Given the strong competition, perhaps there wasn’t much Cricket Software could do to keep up. Barry Schuler apparently saw the writing on the wall. He resigned as Cricket’s CEO in January 1989, just nine months after taking the job. Barry Borden, who was previously the CEO of New Jersey-based Franklin Computer Corporation, took over as president and chief executive.

Borden walked into what he described to MacWEEK as a “company out of control.” He cut the staff by nearly half and leased out much of the company’s Malvern office space. This led to delays in updating Cricket’s aging product lines, Cricket Graph and Cricket Draw, further eroding consumer confidence.

In May 1989, Rafferty and Muldoon both resigned from the company. Summit Group, now the company’s major shareholder, went looking for a buyer, and found one in Computer Associates, which acquired all of Cricket Software’s business and assets in June 1989.

Computer Associates would actually keep Cricket Presents alive for several more years on both the Mac and PC platforms. While Cricket Software was a Macintosh-focused developer, it had licensed the rights to create a PC version to Xerox, which released it as Xerox Presents. When Xerox decided to close its desktop software division in February 1990, however, Computer Associates exercised its option to acquire the PC rights back and subsequently re-released the presentation software as CA-Cricket Presents on both platforms.

As for the former Cricket Software principals, Darragh Muldoon at least managed to get a third husband out of the company. She married Jan Deruiter, one of Cricket’s first hires, and they went on to start a web development company in the 1990s. Jim Rafferty continues to enjoy a long career as a software engineer. After Cricket’s demise, he co-founded C-Cube Microsystems, which developed the first real-time codec for the JPEG image standard. More recently, Rafferty started Maui Software, which is developing Maui Chart, which he describes as something of a spiritual successor to original Cricket Graph.

Barry Schuler, meanwhile, followed up his brief stint at Cricket Software with an equally short stop at Jasmine Technologies, Inc., a San Francisco-based manufacturer of Macintosh disk drives, where he served as executive vice president. He left that position in January 1990 to start his own company, Medior Incorporated.

Medior quickly found success developing interactive CD-ROM software, such as Rock, Rap ’N Roll (1993), a music-making program for the Macintosh. But it was Medior’s work helping early Internet giant America Online redesign its user interface that led Schuler to the dot-com promised land. In May 1995, AOL acquired Medior outright in a stock swap valued at $28 million.

Schuler then joined AOL’s executive team, eventually rising to become president of the company’s Interactive Services Group. Following the 2001 merger of AOL with Time Warner, the new AOL Time Warner named Schuler chairman and CEO of what was now the company’s America Online unit.

That position didn’t last long, however, as AOL’s dial-up Internet business started to dry up in the early 2000s and the parent company’s stock fell by nearly half in the year following the merger. In April 2002, AOL Time Warner “reassigned” Schuler to a new make-work position that only lasted a short time before he left the company for good.

After leaving AOL Time Warner, Schuler founded Meteor Vineyard in Napa Valley, which he still owns today. He also got into venture capital, serving as a founder and partner at DFJ Growth.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast around April 16, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun from around August 1988.

Paul Schindler’s review for this episode was for Datadesk International’s Mac 101 keyboard, a $170 third-party keyboard for the Macintosh that included 15 function keys, a full set of cursor keys, and a numeric keypad. (The original Macintosh keyboard lacked all three.) There was also a built-in keyboard macro editor.

Born in India, Pradeep Singh graduated with an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi before relocating to the United States and earning an MBA from Harvard University. Singh served as a manager at Microsoft from 1986 to 1994, when he left to start his own company, Aditi, Inc., which provided remote customer support for Microsoft products. Singh served as Aiditi’s CEO from 1994 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2009. He also spun off two other companies from Aditi: Talisma and Aditi Consulting. He continues to serve as chairman of the latter.

Marein Cremer, now known as Marein Cermer-Orre, left Claris later in 1988 and moved to Apple Computer Europe as a marketing and business development support manager. She subsequently relocated to Munich, Germany, where she’s worked as a business consultant since 1992.

Established in 1981, LifeScan, Inc., is still in business today. Johnson & Johnson, Inc., acquired LifeScan from its venture capital owners in September 1986. More than 30 years later, in 2018, Johnson & Johnson sold what was now its Pennsylvania-based LifeScan unit to a private equity firm for $2.1 billion.

Eric Meyer, the LifeScan product manager featured in this episode, went on to have a long career in the health technology field. After leaving LifeScan in 1992, Meyer joined Sonicare, the electric toothbrush manufacturer, as a senior vice president. Following Sonicare’s 2001 sale to Philips Electronics, Meyer became CEO of a startup company, TrafficGauge, Inc., which developed the first real-time mobile traffic map in the United States. Since leaving the CEO’s role at TrafficGauge in 2006, Meyer has served as a board member, advisor, and consultant to a number of other companies.

Microsoft Excel and Adobe Illustrator are obviously both still around, although today they are sold primarily through the bundled Internet-based subscription services Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, respectively. Adobe Systems first released Illustrator in March 1987. As for MacDraw II, it eventually morphed into ClarisDraw by 1994, as by then the application ran on both the Mac and PC platforms.

Robert T. Wall founded Presentation Technologies, Inc., in 1985. Jandel Corporation acquired the company in 1990. The photo-optical technology mentioned in Wendy Woods’ report referred to the fact that unlike most slide-making devices of the time, the ImageMaker did not rely on a built-in cathode ray tube (CRT) for imaging. According to a June 1987 InfoWorld report, the ImageMaker worked by projecting a beam of light “through characters and symbols contained in changeable font cartridges located within the recorder, which are typeset directly onto film.”

Esprit started out as Plain Jane, a company founded by San Francisco residents Susie Tompkins and Jane Tise, who made and sold dresses to local boutiques out of the back of a Volkswagen Bus. Tompkins’s husband, Doug, ran the business operations. By 1970, the company reported annual sales of $2 million and changed its name to Esprit de Corp. Under Doug Tompkins’ leadership, Esprit became infamous in the 1970s for enforcing brutal sweatshop conditions that would make even Jeff Bezos wince. Tompkins eventually ousted co-founder Tise and several other executives to consolidate his power, in the process shortening the name to Esprit. In the 1980s, Esprit started opening retail stores, primarily in shopping malls. By the early 1990s, the now-divorced Susie Tompkins wrested control of Esprit from her ex-husband, although she was subsequently ousted by the new CEO in 1996. Today, Esprit Holdings Limited is a Hong Kong-based company that’s a shell of its former self. In November 2024, Esprit Holdings announced it was closing its remaining stores in the United States, with its American subsidiaries liquidating in Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Chapter 8: Business Graphics (PC)

Perhaps IBM’s most important contribution to the development of the personal computer was pushing graphics standards forward. Early microcomputers tended to output only text characters. And those machines that did implement some form of bitmap graphics, such as Steve Wozniak’s Apple II, did so without any eye towards establishing an industry-wide standard.

That changed with the introduction of the Intel 8088-based IBM Personal Computer in 1981. IBM developed two graphics cards–the Monochrome Display Adapter and the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA)–for use with its PC. The CGA card could output 16-color bitmap graphics with a resolution of 160-by-100 pixels, although in practice most programs used a higher-resolution 320-by-200 mode that only displayed 4 colors.

Three years later, in 1984, IBM introduced the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) to go with its Intel 20286-based PC/AT models. EGA offered a resolution of 640-by-350 and the ability to display up to 16 colors at once (out of a palette of 64). Three years after that, in 1987, IBM replaced EGA with the Video Graphics Array (VGA) standard, which was a key component of the company’s new 80386-based PS/2 line and increased the maximum possible resolution to 640-by-480, as well as a 256-color mode at 320-by-200.

As IBM continued to up the ante with its graphics cards–and the PC clone-makers followed suit–demand for business graphics software increased accordingly. By April 1988, when this next Computer Chronicles episode aired, the Macintosh’s early advantage in high-resolution graphics had evaporated, and the PC was now more than capable of producing the bar graphs and pie charts demanded by middle managers throughout the Fortune 500.

This was the second in a two-part series on computer graphics, with the previous episode focusing on Macintosh applications. For this episode, Stewart Cheifet opened by showing Gary Kildall two binders. Each binder contained identical sales reports, except that one featured business graphics produced with software from Kildall’s company, Digital Research, Inc., and the other did not.

Cheifet noted that when you thought about business graphics, you typically thought about the Macintosh. But from the perspective of a new user looking to get into business graphics, did it matter if they used a Mac or an MS-DOS machine? Kildall said it really didn’t matter. The Macintosh offered a standard environment–any Mac you bought would have the same high-resolution graphics. (Of course, only the Macintosh II offered color.) On the IBM PC, in contrast, you would have to configure the system, either by yourself or through a dealer, when it came to having an EGA or VGA graphics card at the resolution you wanted. But once you got there, you’d then have access to a number of software options.

Digital Research Powers Defense Contractor’s Manuals

Speaking of Digital Research’s graphics software, that was the subject of Wendy Woods’ first remote segment. Woods reported from the Sunnyvale, California, offices of ESL Incorporated, a subsidiary of the defense contractor TRW Inc., which specialized in producing communications and reconnaissance equipment for the military. The production of technical and maintenance manuals for that equipment used to require the cooperation of a group of departments, Woods said, as well as an outside print shop. But today, most of that work was now done by one person working on a single PC, from drawing the illustrations to writing the text and designing the layout.

Henry V. Walker, a logistics engineer with ESL, explained to Woods that when it came to something like producing a single book, the person assigned to manage that project traditionally had to keep track of the illustration department, technical writers, and other external groups. With an all-in-one software package, however, they didn’t need to keep track of all of those people. The project manager could now sit, decide on any changes that were needed, and make them right away with the software.

Woods said ESL’s manuals were now designed using Digital Research’s GEM Presentation Package. This included GEM Draw, which handled the technical illustrations; GEM Graph, which produced the charts and graphs; and GEM Desktop Publisher, which combined the graphics and illustrations with text.

Assembling all of the elements of a manual was still not completely solved, Woods said, due to the mixture of Macintosh and IBM PC hardware at ESL’s offices. This limited the types of files that could be transferred over a local area network. And the actual printing of the manuals was still handled out of house. But Walker said he was still pleased with the progress so far. He told Woods that the computer still couldn’t do the drawing for you, but it could sure help. He reiterated that the main benefit of the computer was that it gave you an immediate end result.

Ashton-Tate vs. Enertronics Research

Richard Dym and Randy Andes joined Cheifet and Kildall for the first studio segment. Dym was a senior product manager with Ashton-Tate. Andes was vice president of marketing with Enertronics Research.

Kildall opened by noting that when the first IBM PC came out in 1981, it still primarily relied on a text character-based display. Was there now a movement towards IBM PC users demanding more when it came to graphics? Dym said yes. He credited the success of the Macintosh’s graphical user interface–and more recently, IBM’s adoption of Presentation Manager for the PS/2–as providing a more optimum and easy-to-use interface for business users.

Moving into the demo, Kildall quipped that Ashton-Tate, a database software publisher, wasn’t exactly known as a business graphics company. Yet the on-set demo of Ashton-Tate’s newest product showed a background image of a beach. Dym said the product, Draw Applause, released in January 1988, combined a powerful drawing board with a strong business graphics capability.

Draw Applause relied on a series of menus along the top of the drawing board together with a set of drawing tools accessible on the right side of the screen. Dym explained that a user could directly import data into Draw Applause from Ashton-Tate’s dBase III. He demonstrated by retrieving a file, which the program then used to automatically produce a bar graph on the screen. The user could easily change the type of chart, which Dym did by changing the bar graph to a pie chart. Dym then showed off the various options you could set within the chart, such as making a bar graph 3D.

Dym added that while he was using a mouse and keyboard for this demo, Draw Applause also supported the use of a graphics tablet.

Next, Dym imported that image of the beach Kildall referenced as a background. This was one of 125 background images that came with Draw Applause. Dym then placed his previously created chart on top of the beach background. After making some final adjustments and adding text, Dym showed off his finished slide (see below).

A screenshot of Ashton-Tate’s “Draw Applause.” There is a stacked bar graph set against a background of a tropical beach. There is a menubar at the top of the screen and a selection of drawing tools on the right side.

Kildall noted that this demo ran on a Tandy 4000–a 386 PC–which was why the program ran so fast. Dym clarified that Draw Applause would run on an older 8088- or 8086-based PC. Of course, it moved along much quicker on a 386.

Reviving his favorite follow-up question from the prior episode, Kildall asked Dym about the options for producing hard copy with Draw Applause. Dym said the software supported a full range of black-and-white devices, such as dot-matrix and laser printers, as well as flatbed plotters. Ashton-Tate had also launched the Ashton-Tate Graphics Service. With this service, someone could send an image to Ashton-Tate using Draw Applause’s built-in communications software and receive a finished slide back the next day in the mail.

Cheifet asked Dym if a user could import files into Draw Applause from programs other than dBase III? Dym said yes, it accepted worksheets from Lotus 1-2-3 as well as files using the open Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) standard.

Turning to Andes, Cheifet asked for an explanation of what his company’s product, EnerGraphics, did. Andes said that in addition to the type of drawing board you saw with a program like Draw Applause, EnerGraphics also had a full charting capability. It could do 2D charts in about 35 or 40 formats, as well as 3D charts and analytics.

Cheifet asked for a demo. Andes showed off what he called an add-on product for his company’s EnerGraphics package, which specifically accentuated its 3D graphics capabilities. Andes noted a user can import chart data from a Lotus spreadsheet using a built-in macro.

The demo itself featured an image of a raised 3D pie chart in color. Andes showed how you could change a chart’s settings, such as rotating the image, in a “draft” mode. He added the program could also handle mapping. For example, you could take a 3D map of the United States and select regional areas or individual states.

Kildall asked if EnerGraphics was an upmarket product that required sophisticated artistic abilities to use. Andes said EnerGraphics was a powerful and flexible program, but they tried not to ignore the new person looking to get into the graphics world. Through prompts and menus, novice users could create nice-looking charts, and they could grow with the program. But he acknowledged that EnerGraphics was focused on the power user, similar to WordPerfect for word processing.

San Francisco Fed Pivots to Video

For her second and final remote segment, Wendy Woods reported from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which used the PictureMaker system from Cubicomp Corporation to produce an educational video, How Banks Create Money, designed to teach high school students.

Woods noted the animated video wasn’t made at a high-tech production house in Los Angeles, but rather at the Fed itself. The San Francisco office maintained roughly $100,000 in sophisticated computer graphics design gear, along with a full-time team assigned to produce animation. And why did the Fed need animation? As part of the federal government, the Fed saw these videos as part of its role in educating students about finance.

Bill Rosenthal, a graphics designer with the San Francisco office, told Woods that the “MTV generation” was used to this type of communication, and old-fashioned videotapes were not as interesting to today’s students.

Woods added that the Fed’s in-house graphics team also produced thousands of slides for the Bank’s business meetings. But it was only a matter of time before computer animation was as in-demand as the slides. Indeed, over the past year the computer graphics team’s work had quadrupled, a trend being echoed throughout the big business community.

Lotus vs. Software Publishing

For the final studio segment, Tim Davneport and Tess Reynolds joined Cheifet and Kildall in the San Mateo studio. Davenport was the director of the graphics products division at Lotus Development Corporation. Reynolds was a group product manager with Software Publishing Corporation.

Kildall noted that Lotus 1-2-3 was a very popular program, but its graphics feature was widely considered difficult to use. Did Lotus’ new business graphics package, Freelance Plus, correct that? Davenport pushed back on the notion that 1-2-3’s graphics were difficult to use, but he said customers wanted to do more when it came to charts. Freelance Plus was therefore introduced to either enhance the charts created in 1-2-3 or to create such graphics from scratch.

Davenport then launched into his Freelance Plus demo. He created a bar chart directly in the program, which he then formatted into a slide. On the right side of the screen was a status panel. The user could also use a second “page” as a scratch pad. Davenport pulled up this second page, which he used to display a map of the United States, one of 500 built-in images that came with the program. He selected California and copied it to the slide on the first page. To complete the demo, Davenport added some additional lines and shapes (see below).

A screenshot of Lotus’ “Freelance Plus.” There is an image of the State of California in a box with an arrow pointing to a multi-color bar chart on the right. There is a program menu along the top of the screen, and an information box along the right side. At the bottom is a “Lotus” corporate logo.

Kildall noted that Davenport used the keyboard for his demo, but Freelance Plus also supported a mouse. And yet again, Kildall asked about the types of output devices supported by the program. Davenport said Freelance Plus supported a range of pen plotters and color inkjet printers.

Turning to Reynolds, Cheifet noted that Software Publishing took a different approach with its program, Harvard Graphics. Reynolds said unlike Freelance, Harvard Graphics focused on the charting and text generation features of creating a presentation. Her demo started with a simple bar chart (see below), which the program generated automatically after the user entered their data. This output could be sent directly to a plotter or other output device. But if the user wanted to change any of the defaults, such as the colors of the bars, they could press F8 and pull up a detailed options screen.

A sample comparison bar graph produced using “Harvard Graphics.” The title of the graph is, “Shipments: First & Second Quarter.”

Reynolds continued, explaining that pressing F4 brought up a data editor with 18 built-in formulas. Hitting F2 then redrew the graph.

Cheifet noted that Harvard Graphics made it possible to use the computer itself to run a demonstration, as opposed to converting the images into physical slides. Reynolds showed how that worked. There was a “slide show” option in the program’s main menu, which enabled a large-screen monitor or other EGA-capable display to present a slide show that included transition effects. The user could then control the pace of the slide show using either a keyboard or mouse.

Finally, Cheifet asked if it was possible to import data from other programs into Harvard Graphics. Reynolds said yes, the program supported 1-2-3 spreadsheets and other leading programs. She also showed sample hardcopy output from Harvard Graphics to a color thermal printer.

The Graphics Software “Gold Rush”

Among three of the companies featured in this episode–Ashton-Tate, Lotus, and Software Publishing Corporation–there was something of a gold rush to enter the business graphics market in the mid-1980s. Although unlike the mid-19th century, when the California gold rush saw prospectors travel westward to seek their fortunes, here we had three West Coast companies looking eastward to acquire smaller firms that claimed to strike gold with their business presentation applications.

Indeed, the three products demonstrated by these companies in this episode all came about through acquisitions. The first such deal involved Software Publishing, which acquired Massachusetts-based Harvard Software–makers of what was originally called Harvard Business Graphics–in August 1985. (Harvard had no affiliation with the famous university; the company ’s first office was in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts.) The following year, in June 1986, Lotus acquired another Massachusetts company, Graphic Communications Incorporated, which published the original Freelance. Two months later, Ashton-Tate purchased Connecticut-based Decision Resources for $13 million in cash.

Unlike Lotus, which immediately closed Graphic Communications and absorbed its graphics software development into the company’s California headquarters, Ashton-Tate initially kept Decision Resources in New England as a subsidiary. Decision’s original business graphics packages, published under “Master” name (e.g., Chart-Master, Map-Master, etc.), eventually morphed into Draw Applause, which Ashton-Tate announced in January 1988.

Draw Applause, Freelance Plus, and Harvard Graphics all launched at a suggested retail price of $495. A September 1988 issue of PC Magazine had a roundup of the three programs along with several other competitors. Reviewer Craig Ellison noted that Draw Applause was “one of the two most-talked-about programs” at that year’s National Computer Graphics Association conference, finishing behind Zenographics’ Pixie–the bargain option at $195–by one vote for the crowd’s favorite business graphics application. Ellison himself said Draw Applause’s initial release delivered “an impressive performance” that far surpassed Decision Resources’ aging Chart-Master.

As for Lotus’ offering, PC Magazine’s Robin Raskin–a former Computer Chronicles guest–said, “If you had to pick one tool and use it for all of your graphics needs, Freelance Plus might be the ticket.” Raskin praised its integration with 1-2-3, the ability to easily edit objects, and the wide range of supported output devices. But she also critiqued the lack of any 3D graphing features as well as the fact that colors and fonts were “not displayed in true WYSIWYG fashion,” meaning the text you saw on the screen was only a “stick-figure approximation of the font’s height and width.”

Meanwhile, PC Magazine reviewer Robbin Juris heaped mostly praise on Harvard Graphics, concluding that Software Publisher’s successor to the original Harvard Presentation Graphics was “one of the most intelligently designed packages available” and made “creating charts and graphs an almost effortless enterprise.” Juris’ main criticism was the relative lack of clip art, with the included library featuring only about 300 images. (Of course, Software Publishing offered an additional clip art library for an extra $99.)

In terms of which of these programs was the most popular, PC Magazine surveyed 1,267 readers in May 1988 about their usage of business graphics software. Among those who responded, about 24 percent said they most often used Harvard Graphics at their company, with 14 percent saying Freelance Plus. Draw Applause had not been on the market long enough when PC Magazine conducted the survey, but about 7 percent of respondents said they most often used the earlier Ashton-Tate/Decision Resources graphics programs.

For its part, Software Publishing saw Freelance Plus as its main competitor. In a January 1988 business plan prepared by Tess Reynolds and her Harvard Graphics product team, they believed that Lotus had a 27 percent share of the business graphics market, followed by Ashton-Tate’s pre-Applause offerings at a combined 25 percent, and Harvard Graphics trailing at a distant 11 percent.

The Saga of Software Publishing Corporation

At this point, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the history of Software Publishing Corporation (SPC), which was one of the more enigmatic business software companies of this time period. Indeed, while graphics software proved to be mere accessories to Ashton-Tate and Lotus’ respective core businesses, Harvard Graphics would eventually subsume SPC and become its main product.

SPC traces its roots back to Silicon Valley’s most venerable company, Hewlett-Packard. In the late 1970s, a young marketing executive in HP’s minicomputer division, Fred Gibbons, was considered a rising star in the company. So much so that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs tried to recruit Gibbons, offering him a job as marketing manager for the ill-fated Apple III computer.

Gibbons wisely turned Jobs down, citing his satisfaction at HP. But it got him interested in microcomputers, which were starting to take hold beyond the hobbyist community. Gibbons conducted his own market research and decided personal computers were going to be a much bigger deal in the years ahead. But HP management was not yet ready to get into that area.

So Gibbons decided to start his own company. He recruited an HP colleague, John Page, to write an easy-to-use database management system for Apple II users. Gibbons and Page pitched their idea to a former HP executive, Jack Melchor, who had become a venture capitalist. Melchor agreed to fund their new company.

As Gibbons was a marketer, he needed someone to handle operations, so he brought in yet another HP colleague, Jenelle Bedke, an engineering manager in the company’s terminals division. The trio of Gibbons, Page, and Bedke formally incorporated Software Publishing Corporation in April 1980.

Five months later, in September 1980, SPC started shipping Page’s finished database program, which was dubbed pfs:File. (The pfs stood for “personal filing system.”) A back page ad in the second issue of Softalk (see below), an Apple II-focused computer magazine, served as the unofficial public launch for the new company and pfs:File. Bedke later recalled that shortly after the magazine came out, she heard the phone ring while she was in her swimming pool. She rushed out to answer the call, which came from a computer store owner who had seen the ad and wanted to place what was SPC’s first order.

A full-page ad in SofTalk Magazine for Software Publishing Corporation’s “pfs:File.” The ad’s tagline reads, “pfs:Software - Who needs it? You do.”

By June 1981, SPC launched a second product–pfs:Report–and the company had moved operations out of Badke’s house and into a proper office. That June also represented the company’s first $100,000 sales month. At the end of SPC’s first full fiscal year in September 1981, the company reported a profit of $96,000 on sales of $732,000.

Sales and profits rose substantially over the next three years, with revenues and net income reaching $23.4 million and $3.6 million, respectively, for the 1984 fiscal year. A key factor in this growth was Gibbons’ decision to sign a deal with IBM in May 1983 to create “private label” versions of SPC’s pfs software for the IBM PC, which Big Blue released under the “Assistant” brand name. For example, IBM’s version of pfs:File was called IBM Filing Assistant.

Now armed with a stable of seven products that had shipped a combined 750,000 units, Fred Gibbons decided to take SPC public in November 1984, raising approximately $10 million in additional capital.

Initially, the post-IPO period continued to be profitable for SPC. And now that he had some additional funds, Gibbons looked to expand the company, as he did with the purchase of Harvard Software in August 1985. Of course, this was also right around the time we saw a general slowdown in the personal computer industry. And SPC was not immune.

In particular, 1986 represented the company’s first real period of struggle. That January, Gibbons suffered a serious accident while skiing, which kept him out of commission for several weeks. In June, SPC reported its first-ever quarterly loss of $1.6 million. Meanwhile, sales of the original pfs product line for the Apple II started to crater, due in no small part to Apple’s decision to launch a competing office suite, AppleWorks, in 1984.

That said, the decline of the Apple II as a viable platform helped SPC to refocus. Co-founder John Page noted in a 2017 oral history interview that SPC had been trying to support too many platforms:

[W]e’d rapidly realized that the consumer model [for software] was more like [the] CD player and CDs. You know, the computer is the player…And so Fred was like, “We’ve got to be able to run on all of the popular players.” And I was like, “You don’t know what you’re saying when you say that!” But he insisted. He was the President. “Yes, sir, we’re going to make it run on those.” So we made a tremendous effort to produce CP/M versions and Apple II and Apple III [versions], and all this stuff.

Gibbons himself acknowledged in a 1986 interview with LOTUS magazine’s Paul Freiberger that he erred in trying to support every platform long after it became clear that “the world was going to go totally PC compatible.”

More to the point, Gibbons decided that SPC’s future was in targeting the more lucrative high-end business market as opposed to novice home users. The main appeal of the pfs series had been its pricing. At a time when a professional database manager like Ashton-Tate’s overly complicated dBase III would cost you $700 at retail, you could buy the easy-to-use pfs:File for around $140. SPC also relied heavily on discounts and trade-in promotions to drive sales. For instance, in the summer of 1985, a customer could trade-in their Lotus 1-2-3 disk to SPC and receive a copy of the spreadsheet pfs:Plan for just $20.

A year later, however, Gibbons decided to launch the PFS: Professional Series, which targeted advanced users and carried a higher price tag than the original pfs offerings. That was soon followed by Harvard Graphics, which retailed for $495, matching Lotus and Ashton-Tate’s pricing for its business graphics packages.

Ultimately, Harvard Graphics proved to be a winner. Paul Zucker, reviewing the program in 1989 for Wendy Woods’ NewsBytes, proclaimed that Harvard Gaphics was “justifiably THE graphics package against which all others are judged.” By 1991, sales of Harvard Graphics were so strong that Fred Gibbons decided to divest the company’s original product line, selling off the pfs series to Boston-based Spinnaker Software, which was in the midst of its own transition from publishing educational software to selling low-cost home productivity programs.

At this point, SPC was the Harvard Graphics company. Roughly 80 percent of SPC’s sales in the 1991 fiscal year came from Harvard Graphics–which had now been ported to Windows–and related presentation products. Still, the company reported a loss for the year of $18.1 million on $143.1 million in sales. And with the irreversible decline of the MS-DOS software market, Harvard Graphics started to rapidly lose market share, as Microsoft consolidated its hold on the business software market, including presentation graphics.

Notably, in November 1991, Microsoft offered a low-cost “upgrade” program to entice users of Harvard Graphics and other competing graphics packages to switch to PowerPoint. Taking a page out of Fred Gibbons’ old playbook, a Harvard Graphics user could turn in their original disk to Microsoft and receive PowerPoint for just $129. (The suggested retail price was $309.)

As the 1990s progressed, it became clear that the mass market for business graphics had shifted to PowerPoint. Consequently, SPC never managed to regain profitability. In the 1996 fiscal year, the company reported another loss on sales of just $31 million, a 78-percent decline in five years. In October 1996, SPC agreed to merge with Allegro New Media Inc., a Connecticut-based publisher of CD-ROM software. Under the all-stock transaction, SPC’s shareholders took 45 percent of the combined company. Allegro subsequently renamed itself Vizacom.

The Harvard Graphics line continued under the new regime, albeit largely as a legacy product. In 2001, VIzacom licensed the exclusive marketing rights to Serif Incorporated. Serif was another company that previously merged with Allegro, but Serif’s management ended up buying itself back from Vizacom. As part of that deal, Serif continued marketing Harvard Graphics 98, the last version of the original program for Windows, and several other graphics programs still using the Harvard Graphics branding until 2017, at which point Serif shifted its focus to developing its “Affinity” line of graphics software products.

No Applause for Ashton-Tate; Lotus No Longer Freelance

I’ll briefly wrap up the stories of Ashton-Tate and Lotus’ business graphics products, neither of which enjoyed the same level of success as Harvard Graphics.

Ashton-Tate’s Draw Applause was largely marketed as a front-end for the company’s slides-by-mail Graphics Service, which was actually provided by a third-party company. Ashton-Tate did release a 2.0 version–Applause II–in February 1990. The following year, Borland International purchased Ashton-Tate in what turned out to be a disastrous deal. Development of Applause II, which remained a DOS-only application, effectively stopped at that point, although I found ads continuing to sell the program under the Borland label as late as 1994.

Lotus’ Freelance Plus fared somewhat better, eventually receiving separate releases for both IBM’s OS/2 and Microsoft Windows under the name Lotus Freelance Graphics. In 1992, Lotus incorporated Freelance Graphics for Windows and OS/2 into its integrated software package SmartSuite. IBM acquired Lotus Development Corporation in 1995, and continued to publish Freelance Graphics as part of SmartSuite. Active development of Freelance Graphics apparently ended in 2002, although IBM continued to support SmartSuite itself until 2013.

Notes from the Random Access File

This program is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast around April 17, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun from August 1988.

Paul Schindler’s software review for this episode was Focal Point (Activision, $100), a HyperCard-based personal information organizer for the Macintosh. I previously covered the history of Focal Point on the blog and the podcast.

Gary Kildall’s persistent questions about the hardcopy produced by his competitors’ graphics packages may have been a subtle boast about his own company’s GEM Presentation Pack. In his review, PC Magazine’s Robert Kendall noted, “In most cases, you can rest assured that the high quality of the graphics you create on-screen with the Presentation Pack will be matched in your hard-copy output.” One exception was 3D graphs, which had to be converted to 2D before being output to a plotter.

Tess Reynolds remained with Software Publishing Corporation until 1992, when she left to start her own tech consulting firm. In 2003, Reynolds shifted to the nonprofit sector for what she described as personal reasons–her 8-year-old son died from cancer in 2000–and she became CEO of New Door Ventures, a San Francisco-based charity that provides employment and educational opportunities for at-risk teenagers and young adults. In 2020, Reynolds left New Door Ventures after nearly 17 years as CEO and returned to consulting, this time focusing on nonprofits and philanthropy.

Richard Dym left Ashton-Tate in 1991 for a two-year stint at AutoDesk as general manager of its multimedia business unit. He went on to hold senior marketing roles for a number of tech companies through the 2010s, in more recent years focused on cloud software services.

Tim Davenport joined Decision Resources as its general manager in 1981. After Lotus acquired Decision Resources, Davenport remained with Lotus as general manager of its graphics division until 1995. Since leaving Lotus, Davenport has been the CEO of more than a half dozen companies, mostly in the health care technology field. Since 2014, he’s worked as a consultant for cloud computing companies.

F. Stephen Andes III and Douglas W. Wang founded Enertronics Research in 1981. (Randy Andes, the vice president of marketing who appeared in this episode, is Stephen’s twin brother.) Andes and Wang previously worked together at a St. Louis-based energy company, where Wang designed a portable energy cost calculator for home appliances. This became Enertronics’ first product. By 1984, however, the company shifted focus to its business graphics program EnerGraphics. Enertronics Research itself shut down in late 1994.

Randy Andes left his brother’s company in 1989 to join Dell as a senior marketing manager. He remained at Dell for the next 14 years. Since 2007, Andes has worked in the long-term care insurance business.

During the EnerGraphics demonstration, Stewart Cheifet and Randy Andes both referred to the add-on module as KaleidaChart. I could find no record of such a program. They may have been referring to KaleidaGraph, a program that has been published since 1988 by Synergy Software.

Cubicomp Corporation’s PictureMaker system, which included software and a specially configured AT-compatible PC, cost $50,000, according to a 1986 article in InfoWorld. So it wasn’t exactly a mass market product. Indeed, the company boasted in a 1987 ad in Computer Graphics World that it had installed about 500 systems worldwide. Cubicomp itself proved to be a short-lived company. It started business in 1984 and filed for bankruptcy sometime in 1989 or 1990.

Joe Armstrong and William J. Perry founded Electronmagnetic Systems Laboratory–later known as ESL Incorporated–in 1964. Perry, who later served as secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, was the company’s president until 1977, when he left to take a position in President Jimmy Carter’s defense department. Shortly after Perry’s departure, TRW, Inc., acquired ESL in a stock swap. ESL continued to operate as a subsidiary of TRW until 2002, when Northrop Grumman acquired TRW. Northrop Grumman subsequently absorbed ESL into its space systems division in 2005.

About two months before this episode first aired, there was a mass shooting at the ESL Incorporated offices in Sunnyvale, California. A former employee, fired three years earlier for stalking and threatening a female co-worker, armed himself with four guns and stormed the facility on the afternoon of February 17, 1988. The man proceeded to kill 7 people and injure 5 others, including the woman he stalked. He later surrendered to local police after a six-hour standoff. A California jury sentenced the killer to death in 1991. He remains on death row as of this writing, however, due to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 executive order imposing a moratorium on executions. In August 2024, the Santa Clara district attorney filed a motion in California Superior Court to officially change the killer’s sentence to life in prison. A hearing on that motion is scheduled for March 2025.

Chapter 9: Input Devices

Gregg Williams, writing about the introduction of the Apple Lisa for the February 1983 issue of Byte Magazine, noted that when it came to a choice of an input device to use with the new computer’s graphical interface, the designers “passed over such devices as light pens and touch-sensitive video panels in favor of the mouse, a pointing device used in several Xerox PARC machines.”

Apple’s main refinement–not necessarily an improvement–to the PARC mouse design was only providing a single button. According to Williams, “Apple broke with the conventional wisdom of two- and three-button mice after user tests indicated the people aren’t always sure which button to push on a multi-button mouse.”

While it’s true that the legacy of Steve Jobs-directed product design was to assume your customers were all two-year-olds, in practice there were many users of the Macintosh–the more successful follow-up to the failed Lisa–who sought greater functionality than a one-button mouse could provide. And by the spring of 1988, when this next Computer Chronicles episode on input devices first aired, there were now also millions of users on the IBM PC platform interested in mice, as well as light pens, trackballs, and other alternatives, to get more done with their machines.

Stewart Cheifet opened this episode by asking Gary Kildall if there was any one type of computer input device that was better than the others. Kildall said that general purpose computers had long relied on a general purpose input device–the keyboard–as a standard that anybody could use. But now we were seeing more and more specialization, such as a computer that could run a kiosk to buy shoes using a touch panel. So as we continued to see more specialization in computers, we would also see more specialization with their input devices.

Postal Service Runs on Bar Codes

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment, narrating B-roll footage of the main facility of the United States Postal Service’s San Francisco division. Woods said that most people probably didn’t think about what happened to a letter once it’s been posted, except to hope that it arrived at its destination. At the San Francisco division, that letter would join about 8.5 million others posted the same day.

Faced with about 162 billion envelopes and boxes mailed each year, Woods said the Postal Service was eager to expand its automated mail sorting system. Tony Mendicino, the San Francisco division’s acting director, told Woods that the volume was getting so large, if the Postal Service had done nothing to modernize its facilities, it would have run out of space for manual cases to process the mail.

Woods said the newest computerized input tools of the Postal Service’s system were optical character readers and bar code sorters. Working in tandem, they read the last line and ZIP code of an address and transformed that information into binary bar code data, which was sprayed onto the envelope to expedite sorting. The equipment could process close to 30,000 pieces of mail per hour, which was about 50 times faster than hand sorting–and about one-tenth of the cost.

Mendicino noted there were discounts available to major mailers who presorted their mail and complied with readability procedures, such as preprinting the bar code. That provided the most efficient means for the Postal Service to use its automated system.

Who Needs a Mouse When You Have a Pen?

Dan Mertens and Victor Kley joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Mertens was the corporate marketing manager with Washington-based Key Tronic Corporation. Kley was chairman of California-based Lightgate.

Kildall said the mouse was popularized by the Macintosh and now seen as a standard input device. He noted that both Mertens and Kley’s companies had products that effectively redesigned the mouse. So what were the shortcomings of the traditional mouse?

Mertens said the mouse required a free area on the user’s desktop to operate. Additionally, the user normally performed some sort of operation on the keyboard first before reaching for the mouse, which led to a lot of lost time. So if you could bring that all into one package, it made for a more efficient input process.

Kley agreed that the mouse took up a lot of space on the desk. He added that there was no relationship between the mouse and the screen. The mouse also had serious maintenance problems, such as having to clean the lint out of the part with the ball.

This led Kley into the demonstration of his company’s input device, Felix, which was a “mini-mouse,” or rather a miniature optical-data tablet (see below). There was a one-for-one relationship between the motion of Felix and the screen. Felix used the index finger, thumb, and forefinger–the same muscle set that a person used to draw or write–rather than the wrist and upper arm.

A pair of hands holding Felix, a hybrid joystick-mouse device. There is a square control stick in the middle of a square-shaped device.

Kley said you held the Felix control the same way you would a pencil. He demonstrated this by using Felix to move a cursor in a drawing program running on a Macintosh II. Kley explained that when the user moved Felix to a corner and clicked, the cursor would automatically move to the corresponding corner of the active window on screen. This meant the user didn’t need to accurately position the cursor as with a mouse. Instead, the user could “feel” the corner with their hand.

Cheifet asked how much Felix cost. Kley said the product was available for the Macintosh II and Macintosh SE for $149.

Moving to the IBM side of things, Cheifet and Kildall joined Mertens on the other side of the studio, which had an IBM PS/2 set up with Key Tronic’s KB5153 Touch Pad Keyboard and running Aldus’ PageMaker on Microsoft Windows. Unlike a modern laptop touchpad, the Key Tronic touchpad was designed to be used with a stylus (see below), and an overlay, which divided the touchpad into a “mouse area” and a set of controls tailored to the specific application running. For this demo, Mertens showed how you could select and resize a text box in PageMaker. The overlay included a number of specific commands the user could select with the stylus, such as opening or saving a file.

The Key-Tronic KB5153 keyboard, which has a built-in trackpad on the right side. There’s a hand holding a stylus and tapping the trackpad.

Mertens then exited PageMaker and loaded Lotus 1-2-3 on MS-DOS. He changed the overlay on the touchpad to one specifically designed for 1-2-3. Mertens noted that 1-2-3 was not designed to work with a traditional mouse. The overlay therefore did not include a mouse area, but was instead divided into a grid, with each square representing a specific 1-2-3 command or macro. For example, Mertens touched one square, which automatically brought up a graph created from the loaded spreadsheet.

Mertens then switched back to the spreadsheet and used the touchpad as a “fast cursor” to move through the rows and columns. And as the touchpad was touch-sensitive, you didn’t even need to use the stylus for this function. You could just use your finger.

Cheifet asked how much the Key Tronic keyboard cost. Mertens said $249 was the suggested retail price.

F**k Everything, We’re Doing Three Buttons and a Wheel

A trio of guests–Billy Lewis, Tim Barry, and Charlie Kennedy–joined Cheifet and Kildall at the desk for the next segment. Lewis was president of The Lite-Pen Company. Barry was president of MicroSpeed, Inc. Kennedy was a product manager with Pennsylvania-based Numonics Corporation

Kildall opened by noting that light pens had been around as an input device for the IBM PC since its debut in 1981, although he hadn’t seen them used much. What kind of applications were light pens used for? Lewis, whose company made the L-PC Lite-Pen, said they were used in niche areas. For example, in hospitals doctors and nurse used light pens with software designed to track patient care. Cheifet asked what the advantage was of using a light pen over a keyboard in such a setting. Lewis said the hospital didn’t have to teach everyone how to use the keyboard or a specific program. The software was menu-driven, so as fast as the staff member could think, they could select an option with the light pen.

Lewis then demonstrated the L-PC Lite-Pen on a drawing program running on an IBM PC. He showed how you could draw directly on the screen or make a menu selection with the Lite-Pen. He said this made the Lite-Pen the most “natural” of computer input devices.

Kildall asked for an explanation of how the Lite-Pen actually worked. Lewis said the Lite-Pen detected the movement of the electron beam running across the cathode-ray tube monitor, which happened 60 times per second. At the point of contact, the display sent a pulse back to the computer, which then registered the coordinate information.

Turning to Barry, Cheifet asked why his company, MicroSpeed, offered a trackball instead of a mouse. Barry said users preferred the trackball due to the lack of space on their desks for a mouse. And since the trackball was stationary, a person could use it without looking down at their hand and having to reposition it before the mouse moved off the table.

Barry then demonstrated his company’s trackball, sold as the MicroSpeed FastTrap. This was a trackball that not only featured three buttons–take that, Mr. Jobs–but also included a separate trackwheel. To demonstrate, Barry used the FastTrap to navigate a spreadsheet. The trackwheel provided page up/page down functionality.

Cheifet asked what the three buttons did. Barry said for this template, the buttons were used to pull up a menu and select items. MicroSpeed said FastTrap came with several built-in templates for major business application programs, including Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and SuperCalc.

Cheifet asked how the FastTrap would be used in a 3D application such as computer-aided design (CAD). Barry said the trackwheel controlled the third axis, which could rotate an image or zoom in and out. It depended on how the CAD program’s interface was developed.

Finally, Cheifet asked about the price of the FastTrap. Barry said it retailed for $149.

Turning to the third guest at the table, Cheifet asked Kennedy about his company’s product, the Manager Mouse, which was a cordless mouse. Specifically, Cheifet wanted to know what was the benefit a cordless mouse. Kennedy said software that relied on windowing features, such as CAD and desktop publishing applications, typically supported a mouse. But a mouse cable generally limited the locations where it could be used. Going cordless provided the user with a larger work area, while still providing precise control.

Cheifet added, however, that the Manager Mouse still required the user to maintain a “line of sight” between the mouse and the computer. Kennedy said that was correct. The Manager Mouse relied on infrared light, so there needed to be a clear path from the mouse to the receiver. Cheifet asked about the range. Kenney said if the Manager Mouse was directly in front of the receiver, it would work at a distance of up to 4 feet. There was a 90-degree cone of reception, however, so at the 4-foot limit the width of the work area was only about 5 feet.

Cheifet said that aside from the infrared receiver, this was otherwise a regular mouse. Kennedy added that the Manager Mouse did not rely on a traditional roller ball as a tacking mechanism. Instead, a pair of wheels on the bottom of the device tracked the user’s movements. This eliminated the need for periodic cleaning and maintenance.

Kennedy then demonstrated the Manager Mouse with Dr. Halo III, which sadly was just a PC graphics editing program and not a Commodore 64 game where Master Chief destroys futuristic viruses using colorful medicine capsules. Kennedy used the Manager Mouse to create a simple picture of the Manager Mouse. Cheifet asked if the Manager Mouse used a 9-volt battery for power. Kennedy said no, there was a rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery. The back of the Manager Mouse’s receiver was fitted with a power jack, which could be used to recharge the mouse overnight. He added the battery has an estimated life of 10 hours between charges.

College Orientation on Video Disc

Wendy Woods returned for her second remote segment, this time reporting from De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Woods said that when new students arrived at the school this fall, part of the orientation process would take place at a computer running an interactive video disc. Students would learn the kind of courses available, how to plan out their program, and how to get around the campus.

Students used the video disc by touching the screen. College officials chose this touchscreen interface because it was easy to use. Don Perata, De Anza’s vice president of student services, told Woods that the touchscreen was the most critical component of the orientation program. When you considered the number of students enrolled at De Anza, and their varying degrees of sophistication when it came to using computers, Perata said they wanted to keep the interface simple, so they didn’t have to teach students how to use the program.

Woods said De Anza was pioneering the use of this technology to take the place of timely and repetitive sessions for student orientation. So far, the experiment seemed to be working well. So well that after recently completing a test run with several hundred students, De Anza now planned to use it with 1,000 incoming freshmen in the fall 1988 semester.

Even in 1988, Companies Used “Artificial Intelligence” to Peddle Their Wares

For the final segment, Michael Buffa joined Cheifet and Kildall back in the studio. Buffa was the president and chief operating officer of Rhode Island-based Nestor, Inc. 

Kildall said that Nestor offered a program, NestorWriter, that claimed to recognize handwritten characters. Buffa said that was correct. Kildall followed up, asking why anyone would do that instead of just using a keyboard. Buffa said there were some applications where a user could not–or would not–use a keyboard, such as lenders underwriting mortgage applications. There was also many cases on Wall Street where brokers have been wanting to use an alternative to keyboard input.

Kildall clarified that NestorWriter was therefore not intended to be a consumer or end-user product. Buffa said that was right, Nestor had no plans to mass market the software. It was oriented towards specific niches.

Kildall asked if NestorWriter could recognize anyone’s handwriting or if there was a training process. Buffa said the unique thing about NestorWriter was that it was based on a neural network-artificial intelligence concept that closely emulated the way the human brain functioned. So anyone could train the system to recognize their unique way of handwriting. He added that NestorWriter worked with English, French, and Japanese Kanji character sets.

Cheifet asked how long the training process took. Buffa said it took between 30 minutes and an hour depending on your handwriting.

Buffa then conducted a demonstration of NestorWriter. He showed how you could enter data from a form into a computer. He placed a paper form on a large digitizing tablet, and then used a pen to navigate the user interface on the NestorWriter software. Buffa noted that the software could store handwriting profiles for a number of different users.

Continuing the demo, Buffa calibrated the paper form to the digitizing tablet. He then entered data by using the pen to write on the paper form. As Buffa entered the information, it was immediately stored in the computer’s database. He reiterated the form was on a standard digitizing tablet, which was made by a number of different manufacturers.

Buffa also demonstrated how you could easily make corrections. He intentionally misspelled some words on his form. But he was able to go back, write over the previous letters, and the software made the corresponding changes on the screen. Kildall asked about the controls on the side panel of the digitizing tablet. Buffa said that if the system could not recognize a certain character–say because the user’s handwriting changed throughout the day–the side panel called up a training function to re-train the software.

Next, Buffa demonstrated what he called a prototype of a “paperless office” product that used an electronic display to show a data entry form. The form was overlaid on a screen that the user can write to directly. Cheifet clarified that the display was mirroring that of a Toshiba laptop sitting next to Buffa. Buffa continued, noting this prototype was built for a securities brokerage firm for traders to enter their tickets.

Kildall asked for clarification on Buffa’s claim that NestorWriter used “artificial intelligence,” pointing out this appeared to just be existing optical character recognition technology. Buffa said the AI component came from research done by two Brown University professors, Leon Cooper and Charles Elbaum, who spent the past 15 years trying to build a computer that emulated how the human brain worked in terms of recognizing and classifying patterns. This led to the development of a form of AI called “neural network,” which was the technology used in NestorWriter. Buffa said this same technology could also be used to recognize how mortgage underwriters made loans or decisions on how traders made market decisions.

Key Tronic’s Long Road Away from Keyboards

Of the numerous companies with products featured in this episode, Key Tronic Corporation is probably the most notable, both in terms of its longevity and its historical success in manufacturing input devices for computers. Key Tronic is actually still active as an independent company today nearly 60 years after its founding, although it is no longer in the keyboard business.

The Key Tronic story begins with the company’s founder, Lewis G. Zirkle, who had a six-decade career in manufacturing. Zirkle graduated from The Ohio State University in 1936 with a degree in industrial engineering. He joined General Electric out of college and spent the next 24 years at the company, eventually becoming the manager of a GE plant in Shelbyville, Indiana.

Zirkle left GE in 1961 and moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, where he joined Poly-Scientific Corporation as its executive vice president and general manager. Four years later, Zirkle moved to Providence, Rhode Island to take over as director of manufacturing for Liviton Manufacturing.

In 1966, Zirkle moved yet again, this time to Couer d’Alene, Idaho, where he was named vice president and general manager of Clare-Pendar Co., a manufacturer of illuminated push keys for the data processing and aerospace industries.

After three years at Clare-Pendar, Zirkle decided to strike out on his own, founding Key Tronic Corporation in Spokane, Washington, just across the Idaho-Washington border from Couer d’Alene. The new company formally opened for business in October 1969 with four employees and a 20,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in the Spokane Industrial Park.

Key Tronic’s main business during its early years was producing electronic keyboards for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). As this was the early 1970s, these were primarily keyboards integrated into data processing and industrial control systems. According to a 1972 profile in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, the first Key Tronic keyboards sold for between $100 and $500 “depending on the size and complexity.” At that time, there were only about a dozen companies in the keyboard industry.

Key Tronic enjoyed early success and grew rapidly in the 1970s. By 1978, Key Tronic had more than 1,000 employees and its operations now filled 170,000 square feet at its original location at the Spokane Industrial Park, as well as two satellite manufacturing plants in the region. The company’s operations had also diversified from focusing solely on OEM keyboards to producing optical character recognition (OCR) systems for corporate customers. One of Lewis Zirkle’s sons, Alfred “Fred” Zirkle, headed up the company’s OCR division before leaving to start his own company in 1981.

It was the emergence of the personal computer, however, that helped pushed Key Tronic to the next level. In the early 1980s, the company started producing OEM keyboards for a number of microcomputers–including the Apple Lisa–as well as after-market boards sold directly to consumers. Indeed, Key Tronic competed against Apple, offering a replacement board for the Apple II, which added a numeric keypad and function keys.

Bolstered by the robust personal computer market, Lewis Zirkle decided to take Key Tronic public in June 1983, selling a roughly 25-percent stake in the company to raise $41.3 million in new capital. The company ended its 1983 fiscal year posting record sales of $80.6 million. The company now manufactured about 1.5 million keyboards per year, accounting for about 25 percent of the worldwide keyboard market. This led Key Tronic to declare itself “the leading independent manufacturer of keyboards in for computers and word processors in the United States,” although some industry analysts noted that IBM likely produced more keyboards overall for its own computers.

Of course, by this point, there was enormous pressure on Key Tronic to start moving at least some of its manufacturing operations outside of the United States. In October 1982, Zirkle announced the company would open three new manufacturing plants in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, causing a loss of 500 jobs in the Spokane area. Zirkle told the press this was necessary to keep Key Tronic competitive and profitable, and in the long run protect more local jobs in Spokane.

Lawsuits, Increased Competition Chipped Away at Key Tronic’s Lead

Despite the successful IPO and continued growth, there were also signs of mounting problems at Key Tronic. While the company enjoyed strong 1983 sales, there was also a $4.8 million write-off to account for failed investments that Zirkle made in other companies. And in March 1983, a Washington civil jury ruled against Key Tronic in an environmental lawsuit brought by five Spokane County property owners. During the 1970s, Key Tronic regularly dumped a cleaning byproduct containing the hazardous chemical 1-1-1 trichloroethane in a local landfill. This chemical was later contaminated the water wells of the five property owners, making the water unsuitable for drinking.

Now to be fair, several other organizations, including the United States Air Force, also dumped hazardous chemicals at the Spokane landfill. Nevertheless, the jury ordered Key Tronic and Spokane County to pay the affected landowners approximately $383,000 in damages. On top of that, Key Tronic agreed to pay an additional $4.2 million to settle hazardous waste disposal claims brought by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington Department of Ecology. Key Tronic subsequently sued the federal government, seeking recovery of $1.2 million from the Air Force for the legal costs that Key Tronic incurred in connection with the EPA settlement. That case eventually made its way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled against Key Tronic in a 1994 decision.

Despite these setbacks, Key Tronic enjoyed another record year in 1984, reporting $11 million in profits on $131.4 million in sales. The company’s chief financial officer cautioned the press, however, that there had been a slowdown in orders due to the overall downturn in the personal computer market. Increased foreign competition had also led to an “erosion” of keyboard prices.

As the industry slowdown continued into 1985, Key Tronic laid off about 37 percent of its staff and imposed salary and wage freezes on those workers who remained. Twelve of the company’s 30 largest customers went out of business or significantly cut back on their keyboard purchases. Not surprisingly, the balance sheet also went into the red, with Key Tronic reporting two consecutive quarterly losses totaling $2.5 million before sales start to inch up again and Key Tronic posted a quarterly profit of $1.3 million in December 1985.

Heading into 1986, Lewis Zirkle told the Spokesman-Review that he expected Key Tronic to make a comeback. His plan included developing new product lines–such as the KB5153 that we saw in this episode–that could be sold directly at retail to customers. Zirkle believed that this would help to reduce Key Tronic’s dependence on both traditional keyboards and OEM customers.

Zirkle also continued to look for ways to cut Key Tronic’s manufacturing costs. In January 1986, Key Tronic announced it was discussing a possible joint venture with Tokyo-based Minebea Co., Ltd., under which Minebea’s factory in Thailand would serve as a contract manufacturer for Key Tronic keyboards. A few weeks later, the two companies reached a tentative agreement, which included Minebea’s commitment to purchase 30 percent of Key Tronic. This may have been a prelude to an outright sale of Key Tronic. But in August 1986, the parties called the deal off.

A Botched Succession

Soon after the Minebea deal fell apart, Key Tronic announced a new round of layoffs. This included closing one of the company’s three Spokane-area plants and firing a number of senior executives, including the company’s general counsel, Gary Haight. He didn’t go quietly. Haight told the Spokesman-Review the layoffs “may backfire” as the company had now “dismantled its research and development department” and placed “former junior executives” in charge of sales and marketing.

In response to Haight’s comments, Key Tronic senior vice president Charles Reilly said the “reorganization” of the company’s management was necessary “to pull costs down any way we can.”

Meanwhile, Zirkle continued his push for product diversification. In 1988, the company announced its first mouse. There was also a new low-cost membrane keyboard called the “Quicksilver.” But the layoffs continued, with another “reorganization” costing 125 employees their jobs in March 1988, just a few weeks before this Chronicles episode aired. Among those laid off was now-former senior vice president Charles Reilly.

Two months later, in June 1988, Zirkle decided to add Key Tronic president Donald J. Meyers to the list of “reorganized” employees, dismissing him after just two years with the company. One Seattle-area analyst told the Spokesman-Review that he was a “little bit puzzled” by this move, as it created “considerable uncertainty” during a “difficult time in the company’s history.”

Zirkle, the company’s chairman and CEO since its founding, also took back the president’s title following Meyers’ dismissal. But now in his mid-70s, Zirkle knew it was time to start considering a succession plan. It turned out that involved the return of his prodigal son. In July 1989, Fred Zirkle rejoined Key Tronic after an eight-year absence, during which time he’d been founder and president of Alpnet, a successful international translation software company.

Initially appointed as Key Tronic’s executive vice president, Fred Zirkle was now his father’s heir apparent. This prompted dissent from one of Lewis Zirkle’s oldest allies. Shortly after the Key Tronic board approved the younger Zirkle’s re-hiring, company director Robert Simpson abruptly resigned. Simpson had been an outside director on the Key Tronic board since Lewis Zirkle founded the company in 1969.

Simpson told the Spokane Chronicle that Fred Zirkle was the least qualified of the five candidates that the board interviewed for the executive vice president’s position. The other four candidates, all outsiders identified by a recruiting firm, were more experienced. But Fred Zirkle had, in Simpson’s words, “just asked his dad if he could come to work at Key Tronic,” and that was that.

For his part, Lewis Zirkle said he respected Simpson’s position, but he also felt that his son’s previous 12 years working at Key Tronic and experience in international business at Alpnet made him a good fit to take over the company.

The father didn’t wait long to make his son’s succession official. After just four months back at Key Tronic, Fred Zirkle took the president and CEO titles in December 1989 and assumed day-to-day control from his father, who remained chairman. The younger Zirkle said his focus would be on “increasing margins and adding new products.”

To that end, Key Tronic signed a deal in November 1989 to acquire Utah-based Axonix Corporation, a manufacturer of laptop computer peripherals. This was the first step in Fred Zirkle’s plan to make Key Tronic a major player in manufacturing laptops for OEMs. In March 1990, Key Tronic licensed a 386-based laptop computer design from Colorado-based Selsys Corporation. At the Spring COMDEX show that June, Key Tronic showed off a prototype of the machine, which weighed just 5 pounds, ran on AA batteries, and featured a “j-key mouse” that took up the space of a single keyboard key.

The laptop strategy proved to be a costly failure for both the company and the Zirkle family. On August 1, 1991, Fred Zirkle suddenly resigned as president and CEO of Key Tronic, citing “one powerful board member and shareholder who was not satisfied with my performance, and had other priorities.” That powerful board member may have been his father, who reportedly disagreed with his son’s decision to enter the laptop business.

One of the remaining directors, Wendell J. Satre, took over as interim chief executive. Satre, a retired energy company CEO, initially said that he didn’t foresee any “major change” in Fred Zirkle’s plan to manufacture the laptop, which by this point had been in development for two years. But less than a month into the job, on August 29, 1991, Satre decided to pull the plug on the project. Key Tronic wrote off $4.5 million in development costs–more than twice what industry analysts had expected–and Satre proceeded to impose a new round of layoffs and executive reorganization, demoting 8 of the company’s 14 vice presidents.

The Market Helps The Turnaround CEO Who Helps Himself

After reporting total losses of $7.7 million for its 1991 fiscal year, Key Tronic decided it had to double down on its diminishing keyboard business. Unfortunately, that business wasn’t as strong as it had been during the company’s heyday in the early 1980s. As the Spokesman-Review noted, Key Tronic boards than once sold for $50 now commanded $15 or less, and the analysts were skeptical that there was any long-term future for any American keyboard manufacturer.

Nevertheless, the Key Tronic board decided to throw a Hail Mary and hired Stanley Hiller as the company’s new CEO in early 1992. Hiller was something of a living legend in the business community. The son of a wealthy industrialist, Hiller used his family money to establish his first business building gasoline-powered model cars in 1937, when he was just 15. A few years later, he dropped out of college to develop and build a helicopter that he designed. With backing from the United States Navy and another wealthy industrialist, Henry J. Kaiser, Hiller proceeded to start a new company called United Helicopters. Later renamed Hiller Aircraft, Hiller spent the next 25 years building his company into an aerospace giant.

After selling Hiller Aircraft in the mid-1960s, Hiller decided to reinvent himself as a corporate turnaround specialist. He founded The Hiller Group and set about “rescuing” distressed companies. A few years before taking over Key Tronic, Hiller ran York International, a Pennsylvania air conditioner manufacturer, which had fallen on hard times. He reportedly increased that company’s stock price by nearly 500 percent during his two-year tenure.

Hiller’s plan for Key Tronic involved less diversification and more keyboards and keyboard accessories. He shut down most of the company’s internal development and vertical integration, preferring to rely more on outside vendors for parts like printed circuit boards. He also wasted little time shutting down what remained of Key Tronic’s manufacturing base in Spokane. Because the thought of continuing to pay Americans $6 per hour to assemble keyboards was an affront to the stock market Gods, Hiller moved those jobs to a factory in Juarez, Mexico, which Key Tronic acquired from Honeywell Inc.

In the short term, Hiller’s strategy produced the desired results. Among the new products spearheaded by Hiller’s team was a line of “ergonomic” keyboards, which Key Tronic announced at the fall 1993 COMDEX show. This led to what was perhaps Key Tronic’s most famous product: the Microsoft Natural keyboard. Designed for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system, the split, angled ergonomic keyboard became the fastest-selling product in Key Tronic’s history and helped propel the company to $4.4 million in profits on $208 million in sales for the 1994 fiscal year.

After a second profitable year in 1995, Hiller decided his work was done. He stepped down as Key Tronic’s CEO in October 1995, turning the reins over to Fred Wenninger, a veteran technology industry executive. Of course, Hiller didn’t walk away empty handed. As part of his deal to take over Key Tronic, he received significant stock options, which he exercised in May 1995, earning a profit of $3.25 million.

Diversification Returns Key Tronic to Stability

Unfortunately, Hiller’s short-term profitability focus didn’t produce lasting results, and the company quickly found itself back in the red following his departure. It was Hiller’s successor, Wenninger, who was then left to shoulder the blame. The board fired Wenninger in June 1997, replacing him with chief operating officer Jack Oehlke, a longtime Honeywell executive who joined the company when it acquired the Juarez facility.

Although Oehlke initially said his plan was to “grow our keyboard business and increase our market share,” the reality was that there wasn’t much room left to grow for a keyboard-only manufacturer. To his credit, Oehlke quickly recognized this and effectively embraced the diversification strategy that Fred Zirkle had tried to implement nearly a decade earlier.

As the 20th century came to a close, the Oehlke-led Key Tronic started aggressively moving away from keyboards and into contract manufacturing for a wide range of products, such as printer components, multimedia touch panels, global-tracking systems, and medical devices. According to a September 1999 report from Dow Jones, Key Tronic’s strategy was now to “focus on products that don’t have complex electronics but that need sophisticated plastic molding and low-cost assembly.”

In August 2000, Oehlke proclaimed that Key Tronic had “turned the corner” and its primary business was now contract design and manufacturing rather than keyboards.

Oehlke remained CEO of Key Tronic until April 2009, when he stepped down due to illness. (He died in December 2011.) Craig Gates, the company’s executive vice president, took over as president and CEO. Gates led the company for the next 15 years, until his retirement this past June, when the company’s chief financial officer, Brett Larsen, took over as president and CEO.

Under Gates and Larsen, Key Tronic actually revived the company’s manufacturing operations in the United States. While the Juarez facility remains Key Tronic’s main production facility, Key Tronic currently has additional manufacturing plants in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Minnesota. as well as the company’s traditional headquarters in Washington. Altogether, the company today employs about 4,100 people.

Gates told the Spokesman-Review in 2023 that the company started expanding its domestic production capacity about 5 years earlier due to concerns over rising Chinese labor costs and the long lead times required for overseas contract manufacturing. This proved to be an especially prescient move when the COVID-19 pandemic largely ground global supply chains to a halt. Combined with the deteriorating political relationship between the governments of the United States and China, Key Tronic reported a ten-field increase in its contract work, ranging from face masks and high-end respirators to wireless security devices and electric vehicle charging equipment.

In its most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Key Tronic reported $2.78 million in losses on $566.9 million in sales for the 2024 fiscal year. This represented a 6.3 percent decrease in sales from 2023, which management attributed to “softer demand from Mexico-based programs” and a “cybersecurity incident” that temporarily shut down production during the fourth quarter.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast during the week of April 24, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun from sometime in late 1989.

Gary Kildall’s reference during the introduction to a kiosk that allowed you to buy shoes using a touchscreen interface was a real thing. In 1987, Florsheim Shoes debuted the kiosks, which it called “electronic sales assistants,” with about 375 units operating around the country by August 1988. California-based ByVideo, a company started by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, manufactured the kiosks for Florsheim, which cost between $8,000 and $10,000 each.

Tony Mendicino spent 28 years with the United States Postal Service, rising to chief operating officer for the western states before retiring in 2003. An industrial engineer by training, Mendicino has worked as a hospitality and wine industry consultant since leaving the Postal Service.

In 1989, Key Tronic’s Dan Mertens jumped to one of the other companies featured in this episode, joining Tim Barry at MicroSpeed as vice president of marketing. Barry founded MicroSpeed in October 1985. The company continued manufacturing trackballs into the mid-1990s, and it seems operations ceased sometime around 2002.

Victor Kley died in November 2023 at the age of 77. Born in Washington, DC, in 1946, Kley started a number of tech companies, including General Nanotechnology, Rave LLC, Attoscopy, and Kley Associates Design Group, which he later renamed Lightgate. According to an obituary in Berkleyside, Kley even developed a miniature touchscreen in the late 1970s, which he unsuccessfully tried to sell to Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Kley was also a noted anti-war and environmental activist and helped organize the first Earth Day celebration in April 1970.

Lightgate dissolved in February 1988, just a few weeks before this episode first aired. Victor Kley subsequently sold the rights to Felix to Wyoming-based Altra Corporation, which continued marketing the Macintosh-only input device into the early 1990s, at one point introducing a Windows-compatible version.

Despite my headline snark and Gary Kildall’s skepticism, Nestor actually was involved in artificial intelligence research. The two Brown professors that Michael Buffa referenced, Leon Cooper and Charles Elbaum, were actually Nestor’s co-founders. Cooper, who died this past October at the age of 94, shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with two of his colleagues “for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory.” (Don’t ask me what that means.) Cooper’s interests then turned to neuroscience, which led him to start Nestor with his colleague Elbaum, in an attempt to develop commercial application sfor so-called neural networks. While NestorWriter, which sold for $1,595 at launch, was never meant to be a bestseller, Nestor continued to market and license the handwriting recognition software well into the early 1990s. Nestor itself became more well known for a subsidiary, Nestor Traffic Systems Inc., which developed and sold speeding cameras to municipal governments and police departments. In September 2009, Verra Mobility acquired Nestor Traffic Systems, and the Nestor parent company closed shortly thereafter.

An electrical engineer by training, Michael Buffa held management positions with General Electric and Honeywell in the 1970s. In 1981, he joined Florida-based Computer Products Inc., to start a factory automation division. In 1984, Buffa moved to Michigan to start an artificial intelligence unit for Machine Vision International Inc. After that company went public–and made Buffa a milliionaire–he took over as president and chief operating officer of Providence, Rhode Island-based Nestor, in 1986. Buffa later told the Orlando Sentinel that his job at Nestor “was to clean up a mess” and that he “would never go into that situation again.” Buffa only remained at Nestor for three years, leaving in 1989 and moving to Europe for several years. Buffa ultimately returned to the United States, and Florida, and in 1998 became chairman and CEO of Milcom Technologies, a company that created startups to develop civilian applications for military technologies. Buffa retired from Milcom in 2005.

Founded in 1968, Pennsylvania-based Numonics Corporation first became known in the 1970s for its digitizer technology. Later, the company was a major manufacturer of computer-aided design systems. In the 1990s, Numonics expanded its product lines to include X-ray imaging and interactive whiteboards. Numonics went out of business sometime around 2019.

The Lite-Pen Company was founded in Los Angeles in October 1983 and, as best I can tell, ceased operations around 1990. In its review of the L-PC Lite-Pen featured in this episode, PC Magazine praised the device’s cord as a “stroke of genius compared with other light pen cords,” as it contained a “straight section” that helped reduce the strain of holding the pen for extended periods. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much software usable with the Lite-Pen, and if you wanted to take advantage of a higher-resolution adapter board, you needed to write your own software drivers.

In his cold open, Stewart Cheifet appeared at a computer store where he showed off the Maxx control yoke, a vertical joystick used with flight simulator games (see below). Alturas Corporation, a short-lived company based in Cour d’Alene, Idaho, manufactured the Maxx between 1987 and 1989. Another Idaho-based company, Maxximum Co, then assumed the rights to the Maxx and continued to provide service through the mid-1990s. Incidentally, Cour d’Alene is just across the Idaho-Washington border from Spokane. That suggests there could be some connection between Alturas/Maxximum and Key Tronic, although my research turned up no direct link.

The front box cover of the Maxx control-yoke. There is a picture of a man dressed in a flight suit using the controller to play a flight simulator running on an IBM Personal Computer. The slogan at the bottom of the box reads, “New Heights in Realism.”

Chapter 10: Laptop Peripherals

In May 1988, the United States Senate’s Rules Committee faced a dilemma. Wendy Woods reported that the Committee recently received bids for a contract to provide laptop computers for “workaholic” Senate employees seeking to replace their portable typewriters. It turned out there was only one bidder that met all of the Committee’s requirements–Toshiba. Unfortunately, Woods said, it was “politically impossible for the Senate to buy Toshiba laptops,” and an unidentified source said the members would “have to fudge the criteria a bit, to make sure someone else qualifies.”

The reason Toshiba’s laptops were a political non-starter for the Senate dated back to a scandal that sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. Starting in the late 1960s, a United States Navy warrant officer named John A. Walker, Jr., started working as a spy for the Soviet Union. Among other things, Walker passed along secret information regarding the U.S. Navy’s ability to track Soviet submarines. In response, Moscow started looking for a way to manufacture quieter propeller blades for their submarines.

In 1980, this led a Soviet trade organization to contact a counterpart in Japan. The Japanese company arranged to acquire restricted computer equipment for the Soviets to use in creating their new propeller designs. The company that provided that equipment was Toshiba Machine Corporation, which was a subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Toshiba Corporation. Toshiba Machine officials shipped the computers through a Norwegian intermediary in order to get around a series of export restrictions imposed by the Japanese and United States governments to keep sensitive technology away from the Soviet Union.

In late 1986, the American and Japanese governments learned of what happened from an informant at the Japanese export company. The Reagan administration publicly disclosed the sales in April 1987. Toshiba immediately faced significant political backlash at both home and in the United States. The Japanese government forced the resignation of Toshiba Machine’s top two executives, who also faced criminal prosecution. Meanwhile, the always thoughtful and deliberative United States Congress saw the affair as an opportunity to take a sledgehammer to the country’s trade policy.

And I don’t mean a metaphorical sledgehammer. In July 1987, nine members of Congress staged a photo-op outside the United States Capitol where they used actual sledgehammers to smash a trash can filled with Toshiba-branded radio-cassette recorders. The Senate quickly followed up by passing a bill to ban all imports of Toshiba-made goods into the United States.

The House of Representatives rejected a total ban, however, and eventually forced the Senate to accept lesser sanctions that merely limited Toshiba to no more than $200 million in annual sales to the United States government.

As you might expect, lobbying played a key role in helping Toshiba escape an outright ban. The Los Angeles Times reported in May 1988 that Toshiba America, the company’s American subsidiary, spent around $3 million lobbying members of Congress. The company’s argument focused on the potential harm to U.S. businesses and consumers if Toshiba’s exports were banned. This included the harm to the U.S government itself and many of its defense contractors, who depended on Toshiba electronics in manufacturing their own products.

This included laptops. Now the laptop market in mid-1988 was not especially large. At an industry conference held that June, organizers estimated there would be 630,000 laptops sold that year. For comparison, in 2020 there were an estimated 218 million laptops sold.

Not only was the 1988 laptop market therefore still quite small, but it was largely focused on serving government customers, in particular the military. In January 1988, Newsbytes reported that the U.S. Department of Defense ordered more than 225,000 laptops from Zenith Data Systems, the leading American manufacturer of portable PCs. (Ironically, one of the main uses for military laptops was on submarines.) Zenith, Toshiba, and Tokyo-based NEC Corporation were widely considered the three market leaders, with Toshiba accounting for about 25 percent of all U.S. laptop sales that year.

Why Were All These Peripherals Necessary?

Given Toshiba’s prominence in this nascent market, it should come as no surprise that many companies were eager to offer laptop add-ons, accessories, and peripherals for the Japanese manufacturer’s laptops, which was the subject of this next Computer Chronicles episode from May 1988.

Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing Gary Kildall two Toshiba T1000 laptops. The only difference between the two machines is that one came with an after-market backlight and the other did not. Cheifet said the backlight provided better screen visibility in low-light conditions. He added that the existence of such accessories raised the question of why the manufacturer couldn’t built a laptop that came with everything in the first place.

Kildall said that laptop designers had to consider various trade-offs, such as the cost of parts and construction, as well as size, weight, and power consumption. If you added more memory or a modem as standard features, you needed to consider how that would draw more battery power. It was therefore largely left to the consumer to decide whether to add those parts later in customizing their laptop.

ER Doc Relies on Vital LapLink

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment, which profiled Dr. Ricardo Martinez, the clinical director of emergency services at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California. Over B-roll footage of Martinez returning to his home, Woods noted that he was the author of numerous articles for medical journals and books. In that role, Martinez found that a portable computer–in his case, a Sharp PC-4500–and a couple of key accessories made his life a lot easier.

Martinez told Woods that he could use the modem on his laptop to access the National Library of Medicine database and conduct research. He could then save his search results to the laptop’s data diskettes, take the laptop to the Stanford library, and retrieve the full text of the articles he needed.

Woods explained that Martinez used a simple cable and software package called LapLink to download segments of larger files from his PC to his laptop. The portable then became his principal writing tool and reference liability, which he could use at home, at the hospital, or even at a distant medical conference. Martinez added that the portability was nice because he could take the laptop on an airplane or when meeting with another physician.

Woods said that Martinez even saw a time when the portable computer might play a role in diagnosis and treatment, especially in remote areas. But for now, Martinez was satisfied that by helping him speed up his research, it improved the quality of his work.

Don’t Tell Apple Users It’s “Trivial” to Upgrade Laptop RAM

Mark Eppley and Keith Comer joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Eppley was the president of Traveling Software, the company that developed and sold the aforementioned LapLink. Comer was an assistant product manager with Toshiba America.

Kildall said that given the recent improvements to laptop displays and storage–many now came with hard drives–should desktop PCs now be considered “dinosaurs” like the old room-sized mainframes. Eppley said no, there was simply an evolution going on in the marketplace. Laptops were becoming the “personal personal computer,” i.e., a small form factor desktop alternative. It was complementary rather than a replacement.

Kildall then asked Eppley to discuss his company’s latest product, Battery Watch, a software program that monitored a laptop’s battery usage. Eppley explained that in developing the software, Eppley and his team dismantled 18 different laptop computers and tested them with current-monitoring equipment to measure the power usage. This enabled them to come up with accurate real-time calculations of battery usage. The program itself ran in the background in just 15 kilobytes of code.

Eppley demonstrated Battery Watch on a Toshiba T1200 laptop. He compared it to a fuel gauge in a car, in that the program showed the amount of time left until the laptop battery was “empty.” Cheifet clarified that Battery Watch was specific to a particular machine and use. Eppley said yes, and the program also constantly changed in response to the user’s actions. For example, if you turned the laptop’s hard disk off–yes, you could actually do that–the Battery Watch display updated to add time until the battery emptied completely.

Kidall sought additional clarification with respect to the batteries. For instance, if you bought two batteries and swapped between them, would they each have the same discharge characteristics? Eppley said no, every battery had its own characteristics, but you could adjust Battery Watch to account for that, such as by inputting the different amp-hour ratings.

On that note, Cheifet turned to Comer, who demonstrated Toshiba’s removable and interchangeable battery packs. He turned off a Toshiba T1200 on the desk, pulled the battery out of the bottom of the computer, and inserted a new battery that he pulled out of an offline external charger, which could hold and charge up to three batteries at once.

Cheifet pointed out there was also an expansion slot on the back of the T1200. What types of expansion boards could you plug into that slot? Comer said it was similar to an IBM PC expansion slot, although Toshiba used a different form factor. Comer showed off a memory card that was compatible the slot and added an additional 768 KB of RAM. There was also a third-party speech synthesis card. You could also add a variety of modems, either internally or using the expansion slot.

Kildall asked if there was a way to install standard IBM expansion boards. Comer said there was an expansion chassis available that plugged into the Toshiba’s expansion slot. You could then plug up to five IBM-compatible boards into that expansion chassis. Comer noted the standard T1200 configuration, which included a number of ports, was perfectly fine for travel. But if you wanted to take the machine to the office and use it more like a desktop PC, the expansion chassis was an option.

Cheifet asked for more information on using the RAM card with the T1000. Comer showed how you installed the card internally on that machine by opening up the unit from the top and dropping the card right into a slot just above the right side of the keyboard. He emphasized how “trivial” it was for the user to install this RAM upgrade. The upgrade increased the total available memory on the T1000 from the standard 512 KB to 1.2 MB. Comer added this additional RAM could also be used as a virtual hard disk that could retain data even after the laptop was powered off. This provided additional storage on top of the T1000’s single floppy disk drive and the ROM, which contained MS-DOS and functioned as the "C:" drive.

Using Your Laptop as a Fax Machine

Chuck Weston, the editor of Portable Computer Review magazine, joined Cheifet and Kildall for the next segment, along with the returning Mark Eppley.

Kildall asked Weston about Won Under, a device that made it possible to attach an IBM-compatible expansion board underneath a laptop that did not normally accept such boards. Weston demonstrated by showing the Won Under board itself, which plugged into the external slot on the Toshiba T1200. The user could then attach a single IBM-compatible board to the Won Under using a cable, with the board itself contained in separate plastic housing attached to the underside of the laptop using screws and Velcro strips.

Kildall said you could also use the Won Under to attach an external 20 MB hard disk. Weston added that laptop’s internal battery would also power that hard disk. Cheifet clarified this would make more sense on a Toshiba T1000, which did not come with a hard disk, as opposed to the T1200, which included an internal 20 MB hard drive.

Cheifet then shifted the discussion to portable printers. He asked Weston to discuss one such printer, the Axonix ThinWrite. Weston said it was a portable dot-matrix printer that came in two varieties, one with a built-in battery and the other requiring an external power connection. He noted it was compact enough to fit in a briefcase and sold for about $500.

Eppley then showed off another printer, the Diconix 150, which Traveling Software sold through its catalog. He emphasized the printer’s lightness, which only weighed 3.75 pounds (about 1.7 kg) with its battery. The Diconix used standard Hewlett-Packard inkjet cartridges, which were readily available. Cheifet asked for clarification on the power source. Eppley said the Diconix used rechargeable, C-cell batteries that provided about 50 printed pages per charge. (Kildall joked you could use it to print on an airplane.)

Eppley next showed off a portable fax machine that weighed less than one pound (0.45 kg) and connected to a laptop via a serial cable. It followed the worldwide fax standard, so a user could sit with their laptop in a hotel room and transmit an image of their letterhead that they previously scanned into the computer. Eppley said he had done just that. He scanned his letterhead and signature into his laptop from his desktop PC. He could then write a letter on the laptop using WordStar, add the digitized letterhead and signature, and transmit the finished letter from his hotel room using the fax add-on.

Kildall asked if this setup could be used to receive faxes as well. Eppley said yes, it would receive a digitized image that could be displayed on the laptop screen. You would still need an external printer to produce a hard copy.

IBM Invents the Blackberry Without Realizing It

Wendy Woods returned for her final remote segment, which focused on IBM’s DCS Portable Terminal, a hand-held computer that included a portable modem with its own tiny cellular phone. This was not a commercial product, but rather a device used internally by IBM’s customer support staff. Woods said that whether a customer had a problem with a typewriter or a mainframe, the distress call came to an IBM regional service center like the one in San Francisco, which provided our B-roll for this report.

Woods said IBM had a sophisticated dispatch network maintained on powerful mainframes. The service center’s computers kept track of a customer’s history, the available parts inventory, and more importantly, it could locate the closest, most qualified engineer to answer the call.

That engineer carried what Woods described as perhaps the world’s most sophisticated pager, i.e., the DCS Portable Terminal. The terminal displayed the details of the assignment and allowed the engineer to carry on a two-way dialogue seeking additional information. These transmissions were sent back-and-forth across high-frequency radio waves. This meant the engineer could “virtually” access all of the information on the mainframe using their Portable Terminal.

An unidentified IBM representative told Woods that the Portable Terminal was the most universally well-accepted tool that the company ever gave its customer engineers. If you stopped one of them in the street and asked them, “What was the one tool you could not do without?”, they would reply their DCS Portable Terminal.

Woods reiterated that you should not expect to see these terminals sold to members of the public anytime soon. IBM had no plans to sell the technology. The bottom line was that the system was just too valuable to share.

Using Your Laptop as a Slide Projector

The final studio segment saw the return of Mark Eppley and Chuck Weston. George Morrow also joined the group. Morrow, of course, was previously the principal owner and chairman of Morrow Designs, which developed the Morrow Pivot laptop.

Cheifet opened by issuing a correction to the previous studio segment. The Won Under did not work with the Toshiba T1000 laptop. It required a T1100 Plus or T1200.

Kildall then asked Eppley to discuss some of the add-on modems that his company, Traveling Software, sold through its catalog. Eppley showed the WorldPort, which he described as the world’s smallest Hayes-compatible modem and ran off a 9-volt battery. It plugged directly into the back of a laptop and came in both 1200- and 2400-baud models.

Eppley said the WorldPort modems supported an acoustic coupler adapter, which could be placed over the mouthpiece of the telephone. Alternatively, Traveling Software sold a device called the Blackjack, a portable modular telephone jack that clamped onto the telephone’s mouthpiece, allowing a modem to make a direct connection to the telephone system. Eppley also showed off a third product, which was a replacement mouthpiece that could be used either to talk through or plug in a modem.

Cheifet and Kildall then asked Eppley about another device, the Migent MM1200 pocket modem, which looked like a bright-red race car. Eppley said Traveling Software didn’t carry this product in its catalog. Unlike the WorldPort devices, the Migent did not have LCD indicator lights to show when the modem was connected and at what speed. Nor did the Migent support an acoustic coupler or communications protocols used outside of the United States.

Cheifet then asked Morrow about LapLink, a product made by Eppley’s company. Morrow explained that one of the problem with using laptops was that most software still came on 5.25-inch diskettes while almost all laptops had 3.5-inch disk drives. This created a problem when it came to transferring files. It wasn’t as simple as buying an external 5.25-inch drive, as the connectors were non-standard among different laptop models.

As a result, Morrow said, he’d become almost completely dependent on LapLink, which came with a data-transfer cable that plugged into a standard serial port and made it possible to transfer data between machines using the included software. Kildall asked about the data transfer rate. Morrow said it was about 115 kilobaud. Big files therefore took quite awhile, but most files transferred quickly.

For our final laptop accessory, Weston demonstrated the Dukane MagniView, which was set up on the other side of the studio. The MagniView made it possible to display the output of a laptop screen on an overhead projector. The MagniView itself was a large tablet with a built-in LCD screen. Weston noted the screen was the same as those used on laptops, except it was transparent. He placed the MagniView on top of an overhead projector.

Weston then transferred a graph from his attached laptop to the MagniView, which effectively functioned as an external monitor. The overhead projector projected the graph from the MagniView onto a standard projection screen. Morrow noted that he’d used a device similar to the MagniView when giving talks. This enabled him to keep all of his presentation “slides” on his laptop. It was a far more efficient way to give presentations when traveling.

Kildall asked about the resolution on the MagniView. Morrow said it was as good as the laptop’s CGA card. He added the great thing was that you could also change a slide right before giving a presentation. Cheifet noted you also avoided the logistics of having to create hardcopy slides.

Cheifet closed the program by asking how much the MagniView cost. Morrow said these type of devices ran between $1,000 and $1,500. Weston noted that Dukane was working on a new version designed to womacrk with EGA cards. Morrow added that other companies, such as Kodak, also made similar products.

LapLink Climbed a Mountain Before Nearly Sinking in Dot-Com Bust

Traveling Software was clearly the featured company of this episode. Mark Eppley founded the company in 1982. By that point he’d already developed a fairly unusual background for a software company founder, having worked as a certified public accountant, a fraud investigator for the IRS, and an aide to Washington Sen. Henry Jackson.

It was while working as an accountant for Peat Marwick Mitchell that Eppley decided to start a company focusing on laptop software and accessories. Eppley used an Osborne-1 in his accounting job. While not a laptop, the Osborne-1 was a transportable machine that Eppley outfitted with what he later described to a reporter as a “car battery,” which provided about 20 minutes of power. Inspired by the potential for more truly portable machines–and backed by a venture capitalist–Eppley launched Traveling Software in the Seattle suburb of Bothell, Washington.

Eppley’s new company initially focused on designing software packages specifically for laptops, such as a word processor called The Traveling Writer. Later, the company expanded its catalog to offer a wide range of third-party laptop peripherals, including several items demonstrated in this episode. Eppley also negotiated deals to bundle his company’s software, such as Battery Watch, with new laptops.

But it was the release of LapLink in 1986 that really put Traveling Software on the map. Making it easy to transfer files between a laptop and a desktop PC was a game changer for both Traveling Software and the portable computer market as a whole. The company subsequently released a Macintosh version of LapLink that even made it easy to move files between a Mac and an IBM PC.

By the early 1990s, Traveling Software was the go-to company for file transfer and data migration software. Eppley himself developed a reputation as one of the tech industry’s biggest party guys. Writing for ZDNET in 1999, Michael Fitzgerald described Eppley as “computing’s clown prince,” pointing to his epic “burnout parties” at the annual COMDEX show, as well as his summer “SPAM Jam,” an annual rock concert held at Eppley’s farm in Washington. (SPAM in this context stood for “Summer Party at Mark’s.”)

Eppley’s showmanship extended to promoting his company’s key product. When “beta testing” a wireless version of LapLink for Windows 95, Eppley scaled the 14,400-foot summit of Washington’s Mount Rainier with his laptop to conduct file transfers. He conducted similar “tests” using LapLink to transfer files while riding a motorcycle and from the bottom of a swimming pool in Las Vegas.

But in January 1997, Eppley decided he’d had enough fun and stepped down from day-to-day operations at Traveling Software. While remaining chairman, Eppley turned over the chief executive officer’s role to Kevin Bohren, a former vice president at Compaq Computer Corporation. Bohren assumed the reins just as the Internet and demand for remote-access tools exploded.

Unfortunately, Traveling Software struggled to make significant inroads with remote access software, where the dominant player was Symantec. Just 21 months into his retirement, Eppley decided to reclaim the CEO position at Traveling Software in late 1998. By now, the dot-com boom was in full swing, and Eppley hoped to capitalize on that by refocusing product development on the web and finally taking the company pubic after nearly 20 years. To that end, Eppley changed the company’s name from Traveling Software to LapLink.com and made plans to conduct an initial public offering in 2001.

Of course, by that point the dot-com boom had gone bust. The IPO never happened. In March 2003, LapLink Inc.–Eppley dropped the “.com” from the name–filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, which had about 140 employees during its early 1990s peak, was now down to just 19 people.

Fortunately, this was a case where bankruptcy helped a company survive. Thomas Koll, a former Microsoft vice president, purchased LapLink’s assets out of bankruptcy and reconstituted the business under a new company, LapLink Software, Inc., which remains in business as of this writing in December 2024. The modern LapLink continues to focus on file transfer and data migration software, primarily through its PCmover line of products.

As for Eppley, he remained with LapLink for a brief period during the transition to Koll’s ownership. He left the company for good in 2004. Since then, he’s worked as a consultant.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast during the week of May 8, 1988. The studio portions of the program were recorded on April 30, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun from September 1988.

Paul Schindler’s software review was for Chest Top Publishing (Unison World Software, $60), a Macintosh program that used MacPaint files to create iron-on clip art for T-shirts using an included printer ribbon.

Dr. Ricardo Martinez is a native of New Orleans. After earning his medical degree from Louisiana State University, he worked in the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Officer before joining Stanford University hospital in 1985. In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Martinez to serve as the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The Senate delayed Martinez’s confirmation until August 1994. Martinez then served as NHTSA administrator until 1999, when he returned to the private sector, joining WebMD as its vice president for health affairs. In the 21st century, Martinez had stints as chief medical officer for Adeptus Health in Texas and the North Highland Company in Georgia. Since 2005, he’s been an assistant professor in emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University. Through his company, Medical Sports Group, he’s also served as the NFL’s medical consultant for Super Bowl planning since 1988.

Keith Comer remained with Toshiba America until 2001, when he left to join Cisco as a marketing manager. His final position was with Fugoo, a manufacturer of Bluetooth wireless speakers, where he worked as a senior product manager until his retirement in 2014.

Chuck Weston died in October 2023 at the age of 86. A Navy veteran who served on submarines, Weston had a long career as a tech writer and editor, including stints as editor-in-chief of longtime Computer Chronicles sponsor Byte and PC Games.

Dukane, the company that manufactured the MagniView, has been in business for over 100 years. Founded in 1922 as the Operadio Manufacturing Company in St. Charles, Illinois, the company’s original business was producing loudspeakers for the radio industry. In 1951, the company changed is name to Dukane. Today, Dukane’s main business is manufacturing plastic welding equipment for business customers.

When recapping Wendy Woods’ report on the IBM DCS Portable Terminal, I said she interviewed an “unidentified IBM representative.” There actually was an on-screen chyron identifying the man as John Heilborn. But this appears to be an error made by the production team. Heilborn was a well-known computer columnist of the time, and in fact will appear in several future Computer Chronicles episodes. He was not, however, the IBM employee that Woods interviewed.

Minnesota-based Connect Computer Co. developed the Won Under, which initially sold at retail for $349. Founded by Thomas Kieffer in 1986, Connect Computer was primarily a consulting firm. Kieffer sold the company to another Minnesota consulting firm, Nortsan, Inc., in 1996.

The September 29, 1987, issue of PC Magazine reviewed several of the laptop accessories featured in this episode, including the Kodak Diconix 150 portable printer and the Migent Pocket Modem MM1200. PC Magazine columnist Jim Seymour noted that he personally owned a Diconix, which he called a “wonderful little printer,” although he added that he rarely carried it with him while on the road. After all, if he needed a hard copy while traveling, he could “almost always find someone who’ll be kind enough to let me use his printer for a few minutes.”

Chapter 11: Add-On Boards

Mel Brooks famously observed in his 1987 film Spaceballs that merchandising was “where the real money from the movie was made.” A similar credo might be applied to the tech industry of the time. Add-on boards and peripherals were where the real money from the PC industry was made. Not that selling the actual computers was unprofitable, mind you, but even the major players like IBM and Apple understood that the success of their hardware was largely due to the ability of third parties to provide a wide range of (relatively) easy-to-install expansions.

Both the original IBM PC and the Apple II contained multiple expansion slots to accommodate such add-on boards. Of course, both companies then tried to retreat from this “open” architecture approach with their subsequent machines. Apple’s original Macintosh provided zero expansion slots–a decision reversed with the Macintosh II–while most of IBM’s PS/2 line used a proprietary architecture that was incompatible older IBM PC expansion cards.

But as this next Computer Chronicles episode from May 1988 demonstrates, the add-on board industry was mature enough at this point to adjust to these architectural changes. Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing Gary Kildall a ChargeCard II, a small add-on board made ALL Computer Inc., which made it possible to access extended memory in an Intel 286-based PC.

Cheifet noted there were basically two strategies when it came to marketing add-on boards. The first was the IBM approach where you had open machines that easily accepted such boards. The second was the closed-box approach of the original Macintosh, where the user couldn’t make changes to the system. Was either of these strategies better in the long run?

Kildall said both approaches worked. In Apple’s case, the tightly controlled environment allowed an application writer to assume a standard configuration with respect to options like high-resolution graphics and a mouse. In the IBM PC’s case, software might have to account for 4 different display adapters and 4 or 5 different mouse types–or no mouse at all–which made it more difficult for the writer. But for the consumer, the advantage of the PC approach was that they could build their own computer system out of add-on boards and customize it to their needs.

Jameco’s Board Business Booming

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from Jameco Electronics, a Belmont, California-based company that sold add-on boards through its mail order catalog. Woods noted that Jameco was a mature company in Silicon Valley terms. It was founded in a garage in 1974 and grew up with the computer industry, providing components, boards, and parts for what was then a very different market.

Ray Avanzino, Jameco’s marketing manager, told Woods that before about 1984, people would simply buy PC systems and stick with the stock configurations. But as their needs grew–and the computer craze grew–they saw a need for expansions, such as additional memory, multi-function cards, or a hard disk drive controller card.

Woods said that add-on boards were among the most popular items in Jameco’s catalog, with sales sometimes increasing ten-fold in a year. This was especially true when it came to color graphics cards. Overall, the seemingly insatiable desire for more memory and speed made board sales an important part of Jameco’s income.

As for the introduction of new technology such as the IBM PS/2, that was not as much of a concern to Jameco, at least for now. Avanzino said in the short term, it was actually helping their business. The more expensive PS/2 machines came with a lot more features standard. This, in turn, led to increased demand for add-on boards to upgrade the abilities of less expensive earlier models such as the IBM PC/XT.

Indeed, Woods added that at least part of the reason for the success of add-on cards were the drops in price. She noted that one of Jameco’s first products was an add-on board that made it possible to display up to 80 columns of text on an Apple II monitor. Originally priced at $395, Jameco now sold that same board for just $40.

Expanded Memory and Graphics for Your PC

Richard Rohlf and Buz Roberts joined Cheifet and Kildall back in the studio for the next segment. Rohlf was a product marketing manager with AST Research, Inc. Roberts was a product manager with Paradise Systems, Inc. 

Kildall opened by noting that AST had been in the add-on board business for a number of years. What were customers asking for in terms of add-ons? Rohlf said memory expansion and multifunction boards, such as AST’s SixPak Plus, were among the most popular types of add-ons they sold. Lately, there had been more requests for things like communication boards. AST was also now moving beyond expansion boards to build fully assembled PC-compatible computers such as the AST Premium/286, which was in the studio for today’s demonstration.

Specifically, Rohlf was there to demonstrate AST’s expanded memory board. Cheifet interjected, asking Rohlf to explain the difference between “extended” and “expanded” memory in a PC. Rohlf said extended memory was a type of memory available in a 286- or 386-based PC, which had a larger address space than the original Intel 8088-based PC. This extended memory was only addressable in a special “protected” mode on the 286 or 386. Expanded memory, in contrast, was additional memory that could be swapped into the conventional memory space of the computer–including 8088, 286, and 386 machines–to get around the normal 640 KB memory limit. Expanded memory effectively “fooled” the computer into accepting additional memory.

Rohlf then showed off AST’s line of Rampage/2 expanded memory boards. He noted that AST sold boards that supported a full range of processors and bus types. For example, the Rampage/2 supported 8088-based machines, the Rampage/286 supported 286-based PCs and compatibles, and the Rampage/2-286 supported the IBM PS/2 Model 50 and Model 60. All three boards provided an additional 2 MB of memory.

Next, Rohlf conducted a “before and after” demonstration using the AST Premium/286 equipped with a Rampage/2-286 board. He loaded Lotus’ Sidekick Plus, a popular personal information manager application. Without any expanded memory available, Sidekick Plus used 258 KB of hard disk space as “virtual” memory. This meant that when Rohlf then opened a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, he received an error message, as there was only 14 bytes of actual memory left.

Rohlf then rebooted the computer using the expanded memory board. This effectively replaced the virtual memory on the hard disk with actual memory. So now when Rohlf booted Sidekick Plus, the program used 800 KB of expanded memory. And not only was there no error message, but th computer still had 315 KB of conventional memory and 276 KB of expanded memory available. This provided a very rudimentary form of multi-tasking, as Sidekick Plus continued to run in memory even when another program, such as 1-2-3, was active on the screen.

Cheifet asked about compatibility problems with respect to software. Rohlf said there really weren’t any such issues. AST’s boards were designed to run under most DOS systems and there were very few programs that caused any problems when it came to expanded memory. He noted the industry was moving towards a new Expanded Memory Specification (EMS) to address that issue.

Rohlf got a bit technical here, so to briefly summarize: Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft developed the first widely adopted expanded memory standard, EMS 3.2. Meanwhile, AST, Quadram, and Ashton-Tate came up with a competing standard called EEMS. The two standards eventually converged into a unified EMS 4.0 standard, which released in 1987. When this episode was recorded in April 1988, hardware supporting EMS 4.0 was just starting to come out. Rohlf noted that some vendors had made 4.0-compatible drivers available for older EMS 3.2 and EEMS boards, but they still couldn’t handle all of the functions of native EMS 4.0 hardware, so a customer had to keep that in mind when purchasing an expanded memory board.

Switching from memory expansion to graphics cards, Cheifet asked Roberts to discuss his company’s latest product, the Paradise VGA Plus. Roberts said this card was designed to be compatible with the new video standard introduced on the IBM PS/2 line–i.e., the Video Graphics Array (VGA) standard. He noted the VGA standard offered higher resolution and more colors on-screen than the previous EGA standard.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the Paradise VGA Plus, Roberts opened Microsoft Windows/286 on the AST Premium/286. Several windows opened to illustrate the 800-by-600 graphics resolution. This was actually higher than the standard 640-by-480 resolution available with the IBM PS/2’s native VGA card.

Switching from Windows to MS-DOS, Roberts ran AutoCAD, a popular computer-aided design application, and pulled up a 3D color image of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 800-by-600 resolution. Next, Roberts opened WordStar Professional, a word processing application, to show that the VGA Plus card displayed 132 columns of text on screen at a time. He added the VGA display made the application font more readable. Finally, Roberts ran Venutra Publisher, a desktop publishing application built on top of Digital Research’s GEM desktop, which displayed both text and graphics on the screen.

Cheifet asked for some demonstrations of “pretty pictures” using the VGA Plus. Roberts showed a few slides, including an image of two birds sitting on a tree limb, a bridge, and a man standing in front of a bridge. Roberts noted that these images were lower-resolution–just 320-by-200 pixels–but this allowed for displaying up to 256 colors on-screen at a time (out of a possible 256,000).

Mac Add-On Helping to Design Safer Airplanes

Wendy Woods’ second and final remote segment focused on an add-on board for the Macintosh II. She reported from Radar Data Systems (RDS), a company based in San Mateo, California, which used Macintosh computers to develop a new collision avoidance system for aircraft. Woods explained that the United States Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration recently adopted new safety rules requiring most commercial aircraft to have such systems installed within the next five years.

But collision avoidance systems were expensive, Woods noted, costing up to $200,000 per plane, so there was a need for a cheaper alternative. That is where an add-on board for the Macintosh II called TV Producer came into play. RDS used TV Producer to design a visual system that displayed current air traffic around an airplane along with an aeronautical chart of the ground. TV Producer, which was manufactured by Portland, Oregon-based Computer Friends, allowed the two displays to be superimposed. (The ground map actually came from a video cassette.)

The actual RDS technology was proprietary and would not involve the use of TV Producer, Woods clarified, but the add-on card made it possible to create a demonstration of the ultimate product. It also enabled the programmers to choose colors and an on-screen design before committing the final version to silicon. Art Shulenberger, the president of RDS, told Woods that TV Producer helped them to get a good feel for these elements early on in the project, as opposed to after doing extensive programming and finding there was a problem.

Woods added that Shulenberger hoped to have RDS’ first low-cost collision avoidance system on the market within the next two years.

Intel Offers 386 Power for Under $1,000

Rich Bader, the general manager of Intel’s Oregon-based PC Enhancement Operation, joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Kildall opened by noting the recent success of Intel’s 386 processor. Bader was there to demonstrate the Intel Inboard 386/PC, a $995 add-on board that effectively turned an Intel 8088-based IBM PC XT into a 386 machine. (Intel also made an Inboard 386/AT to upgrade 286-based PC AT machines.)

Bader briefly explained the Inboard’s specs. The add-on board came with a 16 MHz 80386 microprocessor, a socket for a separate 80387 math co-processor, and 1 MB of 32-bit dynamic RAM (DRAM), with an option to add up to an additional 2 MB, thus allowing the user to add up to 3 MB of RAM to a PC XT. (For reference, a base XT came with 128 KB of RAM, expandable up to 640 KB under its original 8088-based configuration.) Additionally, Bader said the Inboard came with several software utilities to handle functions like EGA caching, disk caching, and provide EMS capability.

Kildall asked if there were any hardware or software compatibilities with the Inboard that people should watch out for. Bader said Intel did a tremendous amount of compatibility testing with known DOS software and everything ran great.

This led Bader into his demonstration of the Inboard running on an upgraded PC XT. He began by running a standard DOS DIR command, which displayed the contents of the disk drive’s directory. First, Bader ran the command under standard XT speed, then he pressed a key to activate the Inboard, which made the directory display significantly faster.

Next, Bader ran the same AutoCAD demo that Buz Roberts did in the prior segment. (I assume that Bader used the same AST Premium/286 as well, although this was not stated on-air.) Again, the program drew the 3D image of the Space Shuttle faster when it ran with the Inboard, in particular one equipped the 80387 math co-processor to handle the additional calculations.

Bader then opened a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet that contained about 2,000 random numbers. Running in the slower XT mode, it took about 10 seconds for Lotus to regenerate all of those numbers. In the high-speed 386 mode, however, it only took about 2 seconds. Finally, Bader ran Microsoft Word 4.0 to show how 386 mode allowed for faster scrolling within a long document.

Kildall asked about new add-on boards being developed at Intel. Bader said there would be some new products in the PC communications area introduced in the not-too-distant future.

Your Computer Is Now Your Fax Machine!

For the final segment, Jan L. Ozer joined Cheifet and Killdall. Ozer was the general manager of Georgia-based Quadram Corporation’s fax division. As you can probably guess, he was there to demonstrate his company’s add-on fax board, which was called JT Fax.

Kildall asked Ozer how using a PC with the a fax board like the JT Fax differed from simply using a dedicated fax machine. Ozer said the fax board saved you a lot of time. Most documents were created on a PC before they were faxed. So rather than printing out a document and walking it down to the fax machine, a user could just send the document directly from their PC. This not only saved time but provided a clearer result at the other end.

Ozer then demonstrated the JT Fax by–wait for it–sending a fax from the on-set PC to a fax machine on the other side of the studio. Kildall noted this was a terminate and stay resident program, which meant it could remain active in memory while another application ran on the machine. Ozer emphasized the fax software was easy to use and compatible with most word processing programs. The software could actually transform word processing files into fax files automatically. All the user had to do was select a filename and the fax number.

Kildall noted that JT Fax used the Group 3 protocol, which was a common standard for facsimile transmissions. Kildall asked about the baud rate on the transmission. Ozer said for this version of JT Fax, the rate was 4800 baud. This was a $395 fax board, which was cheaper than most 9600 baud fax boards on the market that cost around $600. Kildall asked about the average transmission time using a 4800 baud fax board. Ozer said for a page of text it took about one minute.

Cheifet interjected, noting that the fax machine at the other end of the studio had now received the fax. Ozer explained the sample fax was a letter confirming a purchase order. Computer Chronicles producer Sara O’Brien, sitting at the fax machine, then signed the confirmation and used the fax machine to send it back to Ozer’s computer.

Ozer explained that even though WordPerfect was running on his machine, the JT Fax software in memory would automatically store the image of the return fax and save it to disk. He emphasized, however, that you could not actually use WordPerfect while the fax was being received. You could view the file from WordPerfect once the transmission completed. Kildlal asked if you could print out the received fax. Ozer said you could print to any laser printer and most dot-matrix printers.

Kildall noted there was no scanner that came with JT Fax. Ozer said the fax board was compatible with a number of third-party scanners, such as those made by Hewlett-Packard. But for most transmissions you wouldn’t need a scanner. You would send files directly from your word processing software.

As the conversation continued, the PC received the return fax. Kildall asked if you could do any work on the computer while the fax was being received. Ozer said no, the computer was currently locked up while handling the fax. Quadram did have a 9600 baud fax board with a separate microprocessor, which allowed the fax process to run completely in the background. That product would be on the market shortly.

With the return fax finally completed, Ozer opened the file on the computer. Cheifet noted the file appeared as a bitmap graphic rather than text. You could see the digitized signatures of both Ozer and O’Brien on the screen.

Paradise, Quadram Early Acquisitions That Faded Away

The story of AST Research is fairly comprehensive, especially as the company evolved from a simple add-on board maker to one of the largest PC clone makers, so I’ll reserve that discussion for a future post. Here, I’ll look at two of the other add-on board companies featured in this episode, Paradise Systems and Quadram Corporation, both of which were already subsidiaries of other companies by mid-1988.

Paradise Passed to Philips

Paul Jain founded Universal Electronics, Inc., in 1982, later changing the name to Pacific Universal Research, Inc., and finally to Paradise Systems, Inc. The company’s first major product was the Paradise MultiDisplay Card (MDC), which basically combined the two display modes available on the IBM PC XT–monochrome text and color graphics–into a single add-on card. This eliminated the need to install separate cards for each mode.

Paradise continued to focus on graphics cards with its 1986 release of an add-on board that emulated IBM’s Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA). That same year, disk drive manufacturer Western Digital Corporation acquired Paradise Systems in a stock swap initially valued at $35.4 million. Western Digital continued to operate Paradise as a wholly owned subsidiary.

The next year, 1987, IBM introduced its PS/2 line with the new VGA graphics card. Paradise quickly managed to create its own VGA chip and add-on board–the Paradise VGA Plus seen in this episode–which solidified the company’s position as “one of the biggest players in the graphics adapter market,” according to an October 1988 report in Wendy Woods’ NewsBytes. Woods added that there was a “rush to fill in the graphics voids created when IBM kept its VGA card prices high.”

Indeed, demand was so strong that in August 1989, Western Digital discovered that between 500,000 and 1 million Paradise VGA chips and boards that had been rejected and scheduled for scrapping were stolen and sold on the “gray market” in Taiwan. Western Digital later filed a civil lawsuit against three former employees accused being the ringleaders in the theft.

It was also in 1989 that Paradise Systems ceased operating as an independent subsidiary. That June, Western Digital merged Paradise into another subsidiary, Western Digital Imaging, which continued to release graphics boards under the “Paradise” label. In 1991, Western Digital merged Western Digital Imaging back into the parent company, which now operated as its multimedia unit. Western Digital subsequently sold the multimedia unit to Philips Electronics in September 1995.

Philips restored the “Paradise” name to its newly acquired unit. But that only lasted a short time. In August 1996, Philips quietly shut down the Paradise unit and laid off its remaining employees.

Quadram Parent Becomes Major Tech Incubator

Timothy Farris and J. Leland Strange founded Quadram Corporation in August 1981. Based in Norcross, Georgia, Quadram’s earliest products were add-on boards for the IBM PC and compatibles, including the Quadlink, which enabled PC users to run Apple II software. Quadram only existed for a brief period as an independent company, however, as it was purchased by another Norcross-based company, Intelligent Systems Corporation (ISC), in December 1982.

Charles Muench and Terrance Hughey founded ISC nine years earlier, in September 1973. ISC’s initial focus was manufacturing color computer readout terminals. The company later put out its own line of early microcomputers, known as CompuColor.

After the Quadram acquisition, Farris and Strange both remained with their new parent company ISC. In April 1983, ISC chairman Charles Muench promoted Strange to president and chief operating officer. (ISC co-founder Terrance Hughey left in 1976 to start another company.) Strange later became chairman and CEO.

Under Strange’s leadership, ISC acquired several other tech companies, including Princeton Graphic Systems, Intercolor Corporation, Peachtree Software, Video Seven, and Asher Technologies. It was Asher that originally developed the JT Fax board. (The name was reportedly a play on “just the facts,” the catchphrase of fictional Los Angeles police detective Joe Friday from Dragnet.) But as ISC’s stock price languished, Strange started looking to sell off parts of the company. In 1988, ISC sold its controlling stake in Video Seven, which ironically was founded by Paul Jain after he sold Paradise Systems. That same year, ISC also sold Princeton Graphics, which produced monitors as a subsidiary of Quadram. Strange also sold ISC’s original color terminals division back to company founder Charles Muench.

Strange also attempted to sell Asher Technologies in 1986, but the buyer backed out at the last minute, prompting ISC to pursue a successful breach of contract lawsuit. It appears that ISC ended up closing Asher Technologies in 1991.

Even Leland Strange’s original company was shown no mercy. In May 1989, ISC announced the breakup and sale of Quadram Corporation. Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc., a leading manufacturer of modems, acquired the JT Fax line. National Semiconductor purchased the remaining Quadram assets, including the company’s name and associated intellectual property.

In November 1988, ISC’s director of planning, Bonnie Herron, told NewsBytes that this mass subsidiary sell-off was part of Strange’s vision for the company moving forward. ISC would now be a “computer industry venture fund with teeth,” focusing on making investments in promising technology companies.

To that end, ISC created the Shared Resource Technology Center (SRTC), which Strange appointed Herron to run. Over the next decade, the SRTC’s “technology incubator” supported up to two dozen companies at a time, according to a 1998 report in the Atlanta Jounal-Constitution, most of which were based near ISC’s home base of Gwinnett County, Georgia.

Perhaps ISC’s most important investment, however, was CoreCard Software, a credit card processing software company spun off from PaySys International in 2001. By 2005, ISC had acquired 85 percent of CoreCard and Strange assumed day-to-day control of the company while retaining his position as ISC’s CEO.

Over the next two decades, CoreCard grew to become ISC’s principal business. In 2021, ISC officially changed its name to CoreCard Corporation. Leland Strange remains chairman and CEO as of this writing in December 2024. According to CoreCard’s most recent annual report, the company had what Strange called a “blah” year in 2023, largely due to uncertainty surrounding CoreCard’s largest customer, Goldman Sachs, and its money-losing partnership with Apple to market the Apple Card.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was likely first broadcast during the week of May 15, 1988. The studio portions were recorded on April 30, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun from September 1988.

Jameco Electronics is still in business today. Dennis Farrey started the company in 1974, which he launched with an advertisement in Radio-Electronics magazine. Since 2010 Farrey’s son, James Farrey, has run the privately held Jameco as its CEO.

Ray Avanzino spent 15 years at Jameco Electronics, leaving the company in 2000 to join NetObjects, an IBM-owned web design software company that was sold the following year due to the dot-com bust. Avanzino subsequently moved into the home mortgage business, holding executive and consulting positions with several lending companies over the past two decades. Since 2023, he’s worked as a senior loan officer with Polaris Capital Partners, which is based in San Mateo, California, the original home of Computer Chronicles.

Rich Bader joined Intel in 1978. In 1995, he left to start EasyStreet Online Services, a regional dial-up Internet service provider based in Oregon. Bader sold EasyStreet to a private equity firm in 2014 and retired. EasyStreet’s new owners subsequently renamed the company Atmosera, which remains in business today as a Microsoft Azure cloud computing provider.

Jan Ozer went from selling PC fax boards to helping people become better streamers. Since 2009, he’s run the Streaming Learning Center, a website and consulting business that advises clients on Internet video streaming technologies. Ozer is also a longtime contributing editor at Streaming Media.

Mers Kutt founded ALL Computers Inc. in 1975. At his previous company, Micro Computer Machines, Kutt led a team that created the MCM/70, one of the first fully assembled and commercially sold microcomputers. At ALL Computers, Kutt focused on developing upgrades for IBM PCs. The ALL Chargecard II displayed by Stewart Cheifet during the introduction to this episode was a $550 add-on board that expanded the capabilities of an existing 286 CPU, as opposed to replacing it with a new CPU like the Intel Inboard 386. A 2017 video published by the YouTube channel GadgetBlues explains the Chargecard in greater detail.

In December 1987, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Airport and Airway Safety and Capacity Act, which included a mandate for the FAA to “complete development” of a next-generation traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS II) for airplanes. This came 15 months after an August 1986 accident where a small private plane collided with Aeroméxico Flight 498 over Cerritos, California. The mid-air collision killed all 67 persons on both planes as well as 15 more people on the ground. Radar Data Systems was among several companies that developed TCAS II prototypes.

Jimmie Moglia started Computer Friends, Inc., in 1985 to market the MacInker, a device he invented to “re-ink” ribbons used in dot-matrix printers. Moglia later expanded the business into video add-on boards for the Macintosh II, including TV Producer and the ColorFreeze-24, a full-color image capture board. It appears, however, that the primary business of Computer Friends remained selling ink cartridges and refill kits for printers until it closed in the early 2000s.

Chapter 12: Investment Software

Tim Slater, a guest in our next Computer Chronicles episode from June 1988, gave an interview in 2022 to The Sunny Harris Show! with Samuel K. Tennis podcast about his career promoting the concept of technical analysis as an investment strategy. In brief, technical analysis is where you base investment decisions on the performance of a stock over time–i.e., its price fluctuations and volume of shares traded–without assessing the underlying merits of the company. As Slater explained to Sunny Harris, his mentor in technical analysis didn’t even know the names of the companies he analyzed. His staff simply brought him the charts of the company’s stock performance without any identifying information.

If that sounds ridiculous, you might consider an alternative strategy known as fundamental analysis, which looks at the intrinsic value of a company by examining financial statements, the quality of the management, overall economic conditions, and other factors. Fundamental analysis is commonly used by investors when looking to build a long-term stock portfolio, while technical analysis is often favored by the short-term investor looking to turn a quick profit. Of course, this isn’t a binary choice, and many savvy investors use a combination of both technical and fundamental analysis in their decisionmaking.

Did “Black Monday” Sour Investors on PCs?

So how do computers–and specifically investment software–factor into all this? That’s the question this episode spent most of its time examining. As we’re wrapping up the fifth season of Computer Chronicles, Jan Lewis sat in as co-host for this episode and the next one.

Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing Lewis a QuoTrek, which was featured in the previous Chronicles episode on investment software from February 1986. The QuoTrek was a handheld device that enabled users to receive real-time updates on their stocks through FM radio signals. To demonstrate, Cheifet entered the stock code for Apple Computer. The QuoTrek showed that Apple’s stock closed at $38.60 per share the previous trading day. (Chronicles taped on Saturday, so this would have been a Friday closing price.)

Cheifet noted that devices like the QuoTrek demonstrated how technology had increased the flow of information so quickly in the area of investments. When talking about computers and investors, however, many people were still thinking about the October 1987 stock market crash–aka “Black Monday”–which was blamed on computers. Could this be an area where computers were a bad thing rather than a good thing?

Lewis said that overall, computers were a good thing. They helped to spread the flow of information to more and more people–and in the stock market, information was what made you money. On the other hand, computers could also be programmed to automatically issue sell orders when certain conditions were met. That was essentially what led to the crash, i.e., multiple computers using the same formulas all issued sell orders at the same time. But the answer was not to stop technology but rather better regulation. Here, the stock markets themselves responded to the crash by limiting when investors could rely on program-based trading.

Investors Learned the Ins-and-Outs of Software

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from the Jeffers Computerized Investor Center in Pleasanton, California, just outside of San Francisco. Woods said that computer owners who would like to use their PC to help with their investments could get assistance from the Center. The Center helped individual investors to become more self-sufficient by teaching them how to use the same kind of software and database services that professionals used.

J. Terry Jeffers, the chairman of Jeffers Computerized Investor Corporation, told Woods that the changes in hardware and software that had taken place in the last three years or so had been dramatic. With what he called the new “third generation” of personal computers–presumably a reference to Intel 386-based machines–software had finally become as easy to use as the advertisements claimed.

At the Center’s classroom, Woods explained, charting historical trends and stock price movements (i.e., technical analysis) was central to the curriculum. For Macintosh users, the program of choice was The Wall Street Investor. IBM classes used an integrated package called The Active Investor.

Jeffers believed that investors who learned to master their computers were prepared for anything–even Black Monday. While he made no claim to being a prophet who knew exactly what was going to happen, Jeffers said it was clear that the person who had a computer and used the right software at least had a picture of what was happening. That gave them a warning. Whether they acted on that warning was another matter.

Woods reiterated that while the Center did not promise to teach “mystical” powers, it did offer computer users an edge in what could sometimes be a bumpy ride along Wall Street.

Fundamental Analysis: So Many Variables

John Dutra and Elizabeth Lieve joined Chefiet and Lewis for the next segment. Dutra was the vice president of Texas-based Savant Corporation. Lieve was a software services manager with New York-based Value Line, Inc. 

Getting right to the point, Lewis asked Dutra to explain the differences between fundamental analysis and technical analysis. Dutra said technical analysis generally referred to stock prices and stock volumes, i.e., the history of a stock price over time. Fundamental analysis referred to just about everything else–how much money did the company make, how much did it have in the bank, how much did it spend on research and development, and so forth.

Cheifet then asked Dutra to demonstrate his company’s product, The Fundamental Investor, which was part of a series of investment programs published by Savant. Dutra began by showing the main menu, which was organized like a flowchart. The fundamental analysis component included separate sections labeled “Data,” “Analysis,” and “Catalog.” The “Catalog” section managed the data sources. Dutra said the software supported a number of popular on-line investment databases, including those from Disclosure, Inc., Standard and Poor’s, and Ford Investor Services, Inc. 

Altogether, there was about 700 pieces of information in the software, and the user could add their own additional sources, including data and even equations. For example, Dutra said you could add a specific equation to calculate debt-adjusted price sales that was recently published in Forbes magazine, which he demonstrated.

Cheifet asked how an individual investor would actually use this software to make decisions. Dutra said you would go to the “Analyze” module. There, you could enter search criteria. For instance, he did a search for stocks where the latest price was greater than $5.00 and less than $25.00 per share. The program then displayed a bar graph of stocks fitting those parameters.

Cheifet asked about the data sources used to pull that information. Right now, Dutra said it was coming from data diskettes provided by Disclosure, Inc. But you could combine information from other data sources as well. To illustrate, he added a parameter to look for companies with both a price-earnings ratio and a dividend yield of 5. The software then displayed a list of 23 companies meeting those requirements. Dutra said information on those 23 companies could then be transferred via the software’s included communications module and updated on a daily basis.

Cheifet asked about the cost of Fundamental Investor. Dutra said the software itself cost $395. But the data was an additional cost. It might only be 10 or 15 cents if you downloaded just one piece of information. But if you purchased something like the entire Disclosure database of 12,000 companies, which came as a monthly subscription provided on diskettes, that would cost $1,400.

Turning to Lieve, Cheifet asked her about Value Line’s product, Value/Screen Plus, which was considered a more high-end product than Savant’s offerings. Lieve said Value/Screen was only offered as a subscription service, which cost between $211 and $1,500 per year. But that subscription included both the software and the data as well as any upgrades.

Cheifet asked how Value/Screen worked. Lieve said that unlike Fundamental Investor, which drew from multiple third-party data sources, Value/Screen only used data provided by Value Line. She noted that data was compiled by Value Line’s analysts, who had a proven track record of outperforming the market as a whole. The software itself was mainly a screening utility.

Demonstrating the software, Lieve explained there were 38 different variables. Cheifet emphasized that this was still fundamental analysis as opposed to technical analysis. Lieve then moved into her demo. She created a list of variables earlier for the software to search. These included looking for a stock with a recent price of under $50 per share; a “safety rank” of under 3; and a “timeliness rank” of under 2. Cheifet asked for an explanation of those ranks. Lieve said Value Line analysts ranked both categories on a scale of 1(best) to 5 (worst). A safety rank of 1 or 2 meant it was considered a safe investment, while a timeliness rank of 1 or 2 meant this was a good time to buy the stock.

Lieve then ran her search using the three criteria. It produced a report screen listing nine recommended stocks. The user could then pull up a ticker report on any of the listed companies. She did so, which displayed a list of all of the variables for that company. You could also use a separate function to create a combined report for all nine companies. That report was formatted as a table that could be downloaded to Lotus 1-2-3 or a similar spreadsheet program.

Cheifet turned back to Dutra and asked if this type of investment software actually leveled the playing field between individual investors and the “big guys.” Dutra said it helped an awful lot. There was still a gap between people who did this for a living versus individuals who used software to invest from home. But the software still made a big difference from the way things were 10 or 20 years ago.

Cheifet then asked if the person with better investment software really had an advantage over someone whose software wasn’t quite as good. Dutra said he thought so. Over the last few years, as more and more investors became involved with computer software, he found that his customers were using it because they had a friend who recommended it.

A Portfolio Management Intermission

Wendy Woods’ second and final remote segment focused on yet another area of investment software–portfolio management. Reporting from Montgomery Securities, a San Francisco-based investment bank, Woods said that for investors, time is money. Decisions had to be made daily if not hourly. And the problem was compounded when an investor owned dozens of stocks.

That’s where portfolio management software came in. At Montgomery Securities, a PC software packaged called Professional Portfolio from Advent Software tracked the performance of some 50 client portfolios. This was a job for the number-crunching skills of a computer. Each stock was updated daily and automatically through an interface to the company’s mainframe, with the profit-and-loss (P&L) calculated in the blink of an eye.

Beth Sereni, an administrative assistant with Montgomery, explained that if at the end of a day she tried to manually post all of the trades and calculate the P&L, for one account it would take her at least 30 minutes. Using Advent’s software, she could get the same information for 40 accounts in 3 minutes.

Woods noted that the daily P&L was the bottom line. But the software calculated each portfolio’s performance over time and issued full reports when needed. To be clear, Professional Portfolio was not for everyone. For one thing, it cost $5,000. For another, it required a certain level of experience. But for those with the money and the experience, it proved to be an invaluable tool that saved time and made money.

Technical Analysis: Looking at the Charts

The aforementioned Tim Slater, along with Curtis Carman, joined Cheifet and Lewis for the final studio segment, which focused on software for technical analysis. Slater was vice president of marketing with CompuTrac Inc., a division of New Orelans-based Telerate Systems, Inc. Carman was director of sales with Equis International.

Lewis opened by asking Slater to explain technical analysis and whether it was better than fundamental analysis. Slater said no, both forms of analysis were good tools, and most serious investors should be both a “fundamentalist” and a “technician.” The technical approach was the study of price data only. The technician believed that everything known about a specific stock was built into that price structure.

Lewis interjected, asking if that meant all of the information from fundamental analysis was therefore reflected in the technical analysis. Slater said that was correct. He believed that an investor should study the fundamentals to know they were buying something of value–or selling something that was overvalued–and use technical analysis to determine the timing of their transaction.

Cheifet turned to Carman and asked him to demonstrate his company’s technical analysis product, MetaStock Professional. Carman opened the program, which displayed a list of various securities, including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. For the demo, he selected Lotus Development Corporation. Using preprogrammed keyboard macros, Carman showed how MetaStock displayed information using multiple windows. (To be clear, this was not Microsoft Windows.) Essentially, MetaStock divided the screen into four windows, with each containing its own chart representing a different analysis of Lotus Development’s stock price data.

Carman then pulled up a new chart showing stock price data for Texaco on a single screen. From this screen, he drew “trend lines” to extrapolate the potential change in Texaco’s stock price over the next 30 days. Lewis asked if the average investor would actually understand how to use this sort of technical analysis tool. Carman said yes, the typical user could take advantage of the software’s built-in help system and 100-page manual to get a good feel for how things worked.

Continuing the demo, Carman pulled up IBM stock data and displayed it using a Gann grid, which was a new feature in MetaStock. He also showed other types of trend lines you could superimpose over the stock data. There were a couple of other features demonstrated, but to wrap this up, they all were different ways of trying to figure out where a stock price was trending over time.

Turning back to Slater, Cheifet asked how the approach he took with his product, CompuTrac/PC, differed from MetaStock Professional and the fundamental analysis packages demonstrated during the prior studio segment. Slater said technical analysis was more complex. A technician had to study their craft for about a year before really getting into it. However, there was still value in performing technical analysis from the first day. Like anything else, you were dealing with professional traders using technical analysis, so it benefited the investor to arm themselves with a tool like CompuTrac.

Slater then demonstrated CompuTrac. Like MetaStock, you could use keyboard macros with CompuTrac, which Slater did here. He pulled up a chart documenting the price of gold. Slater said the program pulled in 348 data points to create a chart and add pre-defined trend lines. He added that CompuTrac had the ability to store trend lines. In terms of reading the chart, he said this was a chart reflecting “indecision,” meaning you had higher highs and lower lows. Whichever way the price broke away from the trend lines would lead the technician to conclude that is where the market was moving. The longer the trend, the more powerful the move. (No, that didn’t make any sense to me either.)

Slater then added some additional lines to the chart reflecting what he called an Alpha-Beta study. He said that a question investors often faced was what to do when dealing with a “sideways choppy” market. This type of study could help alert you to when you were in those types of markets. Basically, it helped the investor decide when to hold or sell a stock. Finally, the software could graph the profitability of transactions made using the suggested analysis over the past year. Using optimization, the investor could also test different parameters to come up with the best strategy.

Cheifet noted that Slater had made a long hardcopy of CompuTrac’s analysis on printer paper. (Imagine a banner made in The Print Shop but for stock data.) The printout stacked the various studies one on top of another to make it easier for investors to review. It was also possible to print out longer charts going back as far as you had data. This printout was made on a dot-matrix printer, but Slater said CompuTrac also worked with laser printers.

Cheifet asked Carman about the price of MetaStock Professional. Carman said it cost $295. The software was compatible with 14 different stock price databases, which obviously carried additional costs. As for CompuTrac, Slater said it used the same databases as MetaStock.

Slater Parlayed Software Into Long Dow Jones Career

Tim Slater moved to New Orleans in 1957 after graduating from New York’s Cornell University and completing a service commitment to the United States Army. Slater recalled in his 2022 interview with Sunny Harris that he spent most of his spare time engaged in stock trading and eventually rented an office in downtown New Orleans so he could visit the local brokerages and access their Quotron machines.

In 1977, Slater purchased one of the newly released Apple II computers, hoping it would aid him in his technical analysis of stock prices. He wasn’t much of a programmer, however, so he ended up recruiting Jim Schmit, a former IBM systems engineer teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans, to develop the necessary software, which they called CompuTrac.

Slater never intended to market CompuTrac as a commercial product. His goal was simply to facilitate his own research and trading. But hiring Schmit and several other programmers proved to be expensive–about $60,000 in late 1970s money–so he decided to spread out the cost by selling the finished software package to a limited group of 30 “partners.”

Eventually, Slater decided to make the software available to anyone who wanted it. As he told Harris, there was nothing proprietary about CompuTrac. The underlying program relied on “public domain” formulas. It was simply faster for most people to use a computer to do the actual calculations. So he started sending out disks–and even cassette tapes–to anyone who wanted to try before CompuTrac before buying it.

Of course, public sales led to people asking Slater questions about how technical analysis itself worked. So in 1980, he launched the first Technical Analysis Group Seminar in New Orleans, which became an annual conference. About 16 or 17 people attended that first seminar, Slater recalled. And slowly but steady the CompuTrac business grew.

Now, we’re not talking about something on the scale of Lotus 1-2-3. Slater said that by 1985, there were about 3,500 total users of CompuTrac. The program was also still confined to the Apple II, as Schmit designed it to take advantage of that system’s particular graphics system.

However, by September 1985 Slater realized he faced increasing competition in the investment software market, so he decided to sell the business to Telerate, Inc. Back in 1981, Slater formed Computer Assisted Analysis, Inc., which in turn had two subsidiaries, Compu Trac, Inc., and Delta Digital Design, Inc. The latter was a company that Slater and Jim Schmit started to design and build dedicated workstations for the investment community.

Telerate was a distributor of real-time market data founded in 1969 by Neil Hirsch, then a 21-year-old clerk at Merrill Lynch. Within just a few years, Hirsch managed to burn through the money he’d borrowed to launch his fledgling business. In 1972, financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald acquired a 25 percent stake in Telerate. Not only did Cantor Fitzgerald assume $500,000 in debt as part of the deal, Telerate now obtained access to Cantor’s lucrative business trading in United States Treasury securities. By the end of the 1970s, Cantor owned 77 percent of Telerate and entered into an alliance with the Associated Press and Dow Jones to sell financial information to overseas customers.

Over the next decade, Dow Jones moved from being Telerate’s partner to its new parent company. In November 1989, Dow Jones paid $515 million to acquire an additional 25 percent stake in Telerate, giving it 92 percent of the company. This meant that Dow Jones now also owned the Compu Trac business, which Tim Slater continued to run from New Orleans. By this point, CompuTrac had been rebranded TeleTrac and was now primarily sold for the IBM PC and compatibles, although the company continued to support the original Apple II version.

Slater later recalled that he went to Dow Jones management after the Telerate acquisition completed and offered to continue running his Technical Analysis Group seminars as a form of “advertising” for the company. In other words, Slater saw his role as the educational arm of Dow Jones rather than generating direct sales. Dow Jones apparently went for it, and Slater remained with the company–reorganized as Dow Jones Telerate in 1992–until 1998, when he hosted his final seminar in Las Vegas just before retiring. (As for the software, Dow Jones Telerate ended support for TeleTrac in 1994.) That same year, Dow Jones sold Telerate to Bridge Information Systems, Inc., which then renamed its new division Bridge Telerate.

Three years after that, in February 2001, Bridge Information Systems filed for bankruptcy. During the bankruptcy proceedings, MoneyLine Network acquired Bridge Telerate for $10 million, which renamed it to–you guessed it–MoneyLine Telerate. This final incarnation of Telerate lasted until 2005, when it was sold to Reuters and absorbed into its existing market data business.

Savant Software Found New Life in New Hampshire

John E. Dutra IV and Clifford Creel founded Savant Software, Inc., in 1982. Previously, Dutra was a manager at a Shell Chemicals plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Creel was a former U.S. Navy submarine officer with a PhD in chemical physics from MIT who worked for another division of Shell based in Houston. (Dutra’s father, John E. Dutra III, was himself a retired U.S. Navy commander who captained five different vessels during his 27-year career.)

Houston was also the original home base for Savant. Dutra and Creel started out with a similar goal that of Tim Slater–to develop investment analysis software for the Apple II. In their case, however, Dutra and Creel wanted to create an integrated software package software that provided both technical and fundamental analysis. They soon realized that the Apple II was not the best platform for their ambitious goals, so they quickly pivoted to the IBM PC and never looked back.

Savant released the first version of its integrated software package, The Savant Investor Series, in 1983. It met with critical and commercial success. James C. Condon, writing a review for the New York Times, described Savant’s technical analysis component as “the Cadillac” of technical investing software.

In 1991, Dutra and Creel decided they’d had enough of the hot Texas summers and moved themselves–and their business–to Bedford, New Hampshire. The new Savant Software, Inc., released TopVest, the successor to the original Savant Investor Series package, the following year. Three years later, in 1994, Savant got out of the software publishing business and became a contract developer. Over the next decade or so, Savant developed proprietary software for the investment, trucking, and banking industries, among others.

Dutra and Creel dissolved Savant Software, Inc., in June 2008.

Value Line Overcomes Founding Family’s Scandals

In 1931, Arnold Berhnard lost his job at Moody’s Investors Service due to the onset of the Great Depression. The 30-year-old Bernhard was still a relative newcomer to the world of investing. The son of German and Romanian immigrants, Bernhard started his career as a drama critic for Time magazine before joining Moody’s as an analyst and account executive.

After Moody’s fired him, Bernhard founded Arnold Bernhard & Company, where he continued to handle some of his old customer accounts. In 1936, Bernhard published his first Value Line Ratings of Normal Value, an investment newsletter that rated 120 stocks based on simple equations that he’d developed. In 1946, Bernhard hired Samuel Eisenstadt, a statistician, who revamped the methodology for what was now called the Value Line Investment Survey by creating a single formula that could measure the relative performance of about 1,700 stocks. Nearly 20 years later, in 1965, Value Line introduced the 1-to-5 ratings system that Elizabeth Lieve discussed in this episode.

Value Line has faced a number of scandals over the years. In May 1971, a federal judge in New York issued an injunction as part of a settlement between Value Line and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC alleged that in 1968 and 1969, Value Line and Arnold Bernhard personally “accepted fees in connection with the purchase of certain unregistered securities” by two of the company’s mutual funds without informing investors. The SEC also believed that Value Line analysts deliberately withheld information from the company’s subscribers and shareholders. Bernhard and Value Line accepted the injunction–basically agreeing not to commit any future violations of securities laws–without officially admitting the SEC’s allegations.

Three years later, in 1974, a series of civil lawsuits alleged a former Value Line editor accepted $15,000 in bribes from two brokers in exchange for writing favorable recommendations for certain stocks. Again, the company denied any wrongdoing, but Value Line reportedly spent about $500,000 to settle the lawsuits.

More recently, in 2009, the SEC again took legal action against Value Line. This time the alleged wrongdoer wasn’t Arnold Bernhard, who died in 1987, but his daughter and successor as Value Line’s CEO, Jean Bernhard Buttner. The SEC alleged that from 1986 to 2004, Value Line and Buttner “engaged in a fraudulent practice that misappropriated assets from the Value Line Family of Mutual Funds” by inflating brokerage commission payments. Essentially, Buttner had third-party brokers perform trades that only cost 1 or 2 cents apiece. But she had the brokers bill Value Line 4.88 cents per trade. Buttner then “rebated” a portion of this back to the brokers and kept the remainder. Altogether, the SEC said Buttner and a Value Line vice president defrauded their own mutual fund investors out of more than $24 million through the bogus commission scheme.

Like her father, Buttner did not formally admit the SEC’s charges. But she agreed to a settlement that required her to step down from the leadership of Value Line and barred her from serving as a director or officer of any other public company. She also agreed to pay a $1 million civil fine. Howard A. Brecher, the company’s chief legal officer, took over as chairman and CEO and remains in that position as of this writing in January 2025.

Indeed, despite its checkered history, Value Line remains in business today. The original Arnold Bernhard & Co. actually spun off most of its business assets into a separate publicly traded company–Value Line, Inc.–in 1982. Arnold Bernhard & Co. remains the main shareholder, however, controlling 91.63 percent of Value Line, Inc., stock as of the company’s most recent annual report to the SEC. The company’s main business unit is Value Line Publishing LLC, which continues to produce a series of investment newsletters as well as various digital services for investors. For the fiscal year ended April 30, 2024, Value Line reported net income (profit) of $14.6 million.

MetaStock Still Charting in the Mid-2020s

Steven B. Achelis founded Computer Asset Management in 1982, renaming the company Equis International in 1989. In what’s becoming a familiar pattern, Achelis started out developing investment software for the Apple II. Achelis later pivoted to the IBM PC, releasing the first version of MetaStock in 1985.

Over the next decade, MetaStock developed a solid customer base for a niche investment software product, with reportedly 40,000 users by 1995. In January 1996, Achelis decided to sell Equis International to Retuers after reportedly rejecting five previous offers for his company–including one from Reuters just a few months earlier.

Achelis told the Provo Daily Herald he finally decided to sell for two reasons. First, Reuters was a $4 billion company compared to his $5 million company. Second, Reuters was the largest provider of financial content in the world, which put them in a prime position to exploit the growing Internet. “Most companies don’t recognize how the Internet and personal computers will change, and are changing, how everything is done,” he told Herald columnist David Politis.

Equis International continued to operate under Reuters and release updated versions of MetaStock. In 2008, the United Kingdom-based Thomson Corporation purchased Reuters to create Thomson Reuters Corporation. In 2013, Thomson Reuters sold off the MetaStock software and related assets to Innovative Market Analysis, LLC, a new Utah-based company created by Scott R. Brown, which continues to do business to this day under the MetaStock name. In fact, MetaStock released the most recent version of its flagship program–MetaStock 19–in 2024.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and first aired during the week of June 1, 1988. The studio segments were recorded on May 21, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun that aired in September 1989.

Stewart Cheifet recorded his cold open from the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. Founded as the San Francisco Stock Exchange in 1882, it became the Pacific Stock Exchange following a 1957 merger with the Los Angeles Oil Exchange, shortened to just the Pacific Exchange in 1997. The actual trading floor in San Francisco closed in 2001 as the Pacific Exchange transitioned to all-electronic operations. (The building where Cheifet appeared now houses a spa.) In 2005, Archipelago Holdings purchased the Pacific Exchange and merged it into the New York Stock Exchange.

For more information on how the use of computer trading led to the 1987 stock market crash, Mark Carlson of the Federal Reserve Board published a paper in 2006 that goes into detail.

John Terry Jeffers died in March 2010 at the age of 69. A graduate of Brigham Young University with an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Jeffers founded Jeffers Corporation in September 1983. Later renamed Jeffers Computerized Investor Corporation (JCIC), the business appears to have ceased active operations sometime in 1990.

Sandy Robertson, Robert Coleman, and Ken Siebel founded Robertson, Coleman & Siebel in 1969 as one of the first technology-focused investment banks in California. In 1971, Thomas Weisel joined the firm as a junior partner. Seven years later, Weisel led a takeover of the firm, which he then renamed Montgomery Securities. The new name referred to the location of the firm’s offices on Montgomery Street in San Francisco. In July 1997, NationsBank purchased Montgomery Securities for $1.2 billion in cash and stock. Montgomery then became a NationsBank subsidiary called NationsBanc Montgomery Securities Inc. Weisel continued to run this subsidiary until September 1998, when he resigned after he reportedly lost a power struggle with NationsBank CEO Hugh McColl, Jr. Ironically, their dispute was over McColl’s later abandoned plan to merge Montgomery with another NationsBank subsidiary, Robertson Stephens, a wealth management firm co-founded by Sandy Robertson. Shortly thereafter, Bank of America acquired NationsBank and absorbed what remained of Montgomery Securities into Bank of America Securities.

Beth Sereni remained at Montgomery Securities until 1996, rising through the ranks to become an institutional sales trader. She then moved into the music business, working in marketing roles for a couple of botique record labels through the early 2010s. Since 2012, she’s worked in the wine industry in marketing and administrative support roles.

Curtis Carman graduated from the University of Utah in 1987. He joined Equis International not long afterwards. In 1995, Carman joined Iomega where he oversaw the company’s distribution in Utah and later North Carolina. In 1998, he moved to Dish Network as a general manager for several of their regional offices. Five years later, he returned to Utah and joined iBAHN, an IT company serving the hospitality industry, where he was director of logistics and deployment for 19 years, leaving in 2022.

During the studio introduction, Stewart Cheifet quoted Apple Computer’s share price at $38.60 at the close of trading on Friday, May 20, 1988. Adjusting for numerous stock splits over the years, if you’d purchased $1,000 in Apple stock on that day and held it for the past 36 years, it would be worth $327,938.60, as of the close of trading on Thursday, January 2, 2025, which sounds impressive until you realize that still wouldn’t be enough money to make a 20 percent down payment on a single-family home near Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, California.

Chapter 13: Personal CAD Software

The fifth season of Computer Chronicles came to a close in June 1988 with an episode focused on computer-aided design (CAD) software. As is true with many major developments in the history of computing, CAD originated in military applications. Indeed, the first use of the term “computer-aided design” is credited to Douglas T. Ross, the head of the Computer Applications Group at MIT’s Servomechanisms Lab in the 1950s, who used CAD to describe a 1959 contract to design automated control systems for the United States Air Force.

These early CAD systems often required multi-million dollar mainframe computers. And as Stewart Cheifet noted in his cold open for this episode, a professional CAD system in 1988 could still run upwards of $20,000. But it was also now possible to run fairly sophisticated CAD software on personal computers, including Intel 386-based PCs and the Macintosh II, which could purchased for as little as $100.

Cheifet opened the main program by showing Jan Lewis, sitting in as co-host, an Apple II program called Car Builder, which he described as a “CAD program for kids.” As the name suggested, Car Builder enabled the user to create simple car designs and perform basic tests, such as simulating the effects wind. Cheifet jokingly named his car design “HyperCar” after Lewis’ HyperAge magazine.

Cheifet then asked Lewis to distinguish between a computer drawing program and a full-blown CAD/CAM program. (CAM stands for computer-aided manufacturing.) Continuing with the car example, Lewis said a real manufacturer like General Motors needed software that could do a large number of permutations quickly. Personal CAD software brought this level of sophistication down to a level where individuals could handle it, albeit without as much intricacy. And unlike a drawing program, CAD software manipulated objects through various conditions, while a draw program was meant to create a static image.

Construction Company Touted In-House CAD System

Wendy Woods presented her first remote report from the San Francisco offices of Bechtel Group, Inc., an international architectural, engineering, and construction firm. Over B-roll of computer-generated animations of a space shuttle, a subway station, and a roller coaster, Woods said all of these designs currently existed exclusively within the memory of a computer. Common to all of these designs was a level of detail and realism that made it possible to build a factory, power plant, or transit system entirely in digital form before committing it to construction.

The software that made this possible, Woods said, was a combination of packages developed by Bechtel. 3DM was a three-dimensional modeling system that permitted an engineering team to design and view a project in layers, from the outside structure to the individual elements inside. Since the program drew its data from the original schematic–or logical design–it accurately represented each element and system and how they fit together. The program could also detect how changes in any one part of a system might affect another.

Woods added that the same digital data used to create the static model could be used to build an animated model with a software package called Walkthru. This software permitted an engineer to examine a solid model of the project, move individual parts, and inspect the premises in real-time like a tiny human model (as opposed to a model for tiny humans).

3DM and Walkthru had all but replaced manual blueprints at Bechtel, Woods concluded. More importantly, the software established a common design database that every project member could rely on and contribute to.

The Power of CAD for Under $100

Bob Fulton and Mike Riddle joined Cheifet and Lewis back in the studio. Fulton was the president and CEO of Washington-based Generic Software, Inc., which made Generic CADD. Riddle was the president of Arizona-based Evolution Computing, Inc., which developed FastCAD.

Lewis opened by noting that there had been a proliferation of CAD packages within the past year, including Riddle’s FastCAD. What was the reason for this? Riddle said the hardware had improved quite a bit in terms of speed and memory, and the cost had come down to the point where more people could afford a computer that could handle both graphics and word processing at the same time.

Cheifet noted that in contrast to CAD programs costing thousands of dollars, Fulton’s Generic CADD sold for about $99. He asked for a demo. Fulton used Generic CADD to create a simple floor plan for a house. He started by creating interior walls followed by some bathroom and kitchen fixtures. Cheifet asked if the fixtures were something the user could create. Fulton said yes, you could create them or buy premade objects.

In response to a question from Lewis, Fulton next showed how you could replace an object in a design, such as substituting a bathtub for a shower in the bathroom. Cheifet followed up, asking what would you do if the bathtub didn’t fit into the existing floor plan. Fulton said you could move the wall, assuming this was a new design and not, say, your existing house. Cheifet noted this was similar to a spreadsheet in that you could “experiment” with different designs, such as moving furniture around a room.

Cheifet asked about the typical user for Generic CADD. Would it be a homeowner or would it also be a professional architect or designer? Futon said there was no “typical” user. He said about 24 percent of the Generic CADD user base were architects and engineers. Another 36 percent were Fortune 1000 corporations. The remaining 40 percent were a wide range of individuals such as Realtors, police officers, firefighters, and even people making quilts.

Turning to Riddle, Cheifet asked for a demonstration of FastCAD. Riddle also pulled up a floor plan for a house–in this case, his own residence in Arizona. Riddle said he’d recently converted one of his bedrooms into an office. This required moving one of the walls out by about 2 feet (0.6 meters). He then showed how this was done in FastCAD. There was also an undo command so he could reverse the change and compare it to the original layout.

Riddle then pulled up a design for a simple single-room layout that displayed the actual measurements. By adjusting the dimensions of the room, the software would automatically update those measurements. Lewis asked if the measurements could be displayed in metric units. Riddle said yes, there was an option to change the units to meters or even inches.

Continuing his demo, Riddle pulled up a 2D perspective drawing a desert-style ranch home designed by an architect. It was possible to change the perspective and zoom in on specific parts of the image. Cheifet asked if it was possible to do 3D rendering. Riddle said FastCAD was a 2D CAD program. But Evolution Computing also had a 3D program that would be shipping soon. He pulled up a demo of that software, which showed a wireframe 3D image of a teapot from four different angles. (This may have been a nod to the famous teapot model created by Martin Newell at the University of Utah in 1975 to demonstrate early computer graphics technology.)

Cheifet noted that one of FastCAD’s features was in fact its speed. What was the benefit of speed in a CAD program? Riddle said many people assumed it was something like completing an 8-hour job in just 6 hours. But the real benefit was that instead of taking 20 seconds to make a change to a design, it now only took 3 or 4 seconds. That meant you didn’t lose your train of thought as you perfected a design. It was therefore easier to experiment with changes.

CAD Reseller Offered Complete Systems and Training

Wendy Woods returned for her second remote report, this time from InterCad Inc. in Santa Clara, California. Woods said that for those just getting into the business of computerizing their design and drafting, life could be very confusing. There was usually a good chunk of money to consider–between $35,000 and $50,000–and hundreds of combinations of hardware and software.

That was where InterCad came in, Woods said. InterCad was a “value-added reseller” that put together a custom package of hardware and software to fill a client’s needs, whether that was designing a building, a widget, or even a printed circuit board.

John Murphy, InterCad’s general manager, told Woods that his clients often had limited exposure to computers. They were primarily engineers who wanted to focus on design. They weren’t experts on computers, digitizers, plotters, and so forth, so that was where InterCad could step in and help. Woods noted that value-added resellers like InterCad also provided service and training, which further minimized the confusion that a first-time CAD buyer could face.

In closing, Woods said that there was no indication that choosing a CAD system was going to get any easier. Within the next five years, there was expected to be a number of new factors to consider, including the prevalence of networking; “artificial intelligence” features in software; faster, cheaper, and more powerful systems; and even a new class of users. This all meant that businesses like InterCad would have plenty to do well into the future.

Exploring the Possibilities of CAD on the Mac

John Saguto and Nick Pavlovic joined Cheifet and Lewis for the final studio segment. Saguto was the marketing director with Versacad Corp., which developed VersaCAD. (The corporate name did not capitalize “CAD.”) Pavlovic was the president of Visual Information, Inc., which developed Design and Solid Dimensions.

Lewis noted that Versacad had recently rewritten its PC VersaCAD software for the Macintosh. Why? Saguto said it came down to the Macintosh’s graphical user interface. That made it possible for a Mac user to learn VersaCAD quicker. He added the Macintosh version required a much different approach than with MS-DOS and UNIX-based systems, which were still built on text interfaces.

Pressing further, Lewis asked why the Macintosh version of VersaCAD was a complete rewrite as opposed to a port of the old package. Saguto said a port would not have allowed Versacad to address one of the biggest problems with CAD packages, which was to simplify it so more users could actually operate the software. Combining the Macintosh GUI with VersaCAD’s already easy-to-use interface made it one of the most complete CAD packages available for the Mac.

Turning to Pavlovic, Cheifet asked for a demonstration of Design and Solid Dimensions, which was also a CAD package for the Macintosh II. Pavlovic described Dimensions as a “conceptual design and presentation system.” He pulled up a 3D image of a piston connecting rod to show off the program’s smooth shading and edges. He then pulled up a graphic display of 3D letters generated using the software’s ray-tracing. This made it possible to create 3D presentations incorporating text and graphics.

Pavlovic next showed a 3D display of both the inside of an office and the exterior of the office building. You could also show the exterior of the building in wireframe mode. He added some exterior objects–palm trees–to the building’s parking lot while still in wireframe mode. He also showed how you could scale the size of objects by making one of the palm trees bigger than the others. It was also possible to do an animation of a design, showing it from multiple angles.

Cheifet noted that the animation stopped when Pavlovic used the mouse. Pavlovic said that was an intentional design choice to help the user work more quickly and efficiently. Similarly, the software would stop a refresh of a design to allow the user to choose a new command from the menu.

Turning back to Saguto, Cheifet noted that the Macintosh version of VersaCAD did some interesting things with Apple’s HyperCard. Saguto pulled up a demo containing an office building floor plan. He demonstrated how the software tracked every object, in this case by having two interior office doors move to show they would collide.

Saguto then showed off what Cheifet referenced, a HyperCard application of VersaCAD called “HyperCAD.” There were about half a dozen routines specifically designed to import information from a VersaCAD database into HyperCard. For his demo, Saguto created a graphical report summarizing the cost of various parts used in a VersaCAD design.

Finally, Cheifet asked about VersaCAD’s 3D capabilities. Saguto pulled up a 3D drawing of the same office floor plan from earlier, only now it displayed four different angles and added colors to the images.

Mike Riddle’s Complicated History with Autodesk

One CAD product we did not hear about in this episode was Autodesk’s AutoCAD, which even in 1988 was generally considered the market leader in this category. It turns out that FastCAD developer Mike Riddle was also one of the people responsible for creating the original Autodesk. According to the late David E. Weisberg’s comprehensive history of CAD, Riddle graduated from Arizona State University in 1973 and went to work for a steel fabricator where he was first exposed to a CAD system, in this case a $250,000 mainframe used to design steel supports for a nuclear power plant.

By the end of the 1970s, Riddle was a self-employed computer consultant. In 1977, he started developing his own microcomputer-based CAD program called Interact. Five years later, in 1982, he joined a group of software developers in forming a company called Marin Software Partners. The original plan was for the new company to develop software programs contributed by the individual partners.

John Walker, the leader of the group, quickly determined that Riddle’s Interact was the strongest offering among the original partners’ contributions. Riddle agreed to a non-exclusive licensing agreement, allowing the partnership to develop and publish Interact in exchange for a 10-percent royalty. Walker initially changed the name of the program to MicroCAD and debuted it along with a filing program he called Autodesk at the March 1982 West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco.

A few weeks later, Marin Software Partners formally incorporated. They originally planned to name the company Desktop Solutions, but after the California Secretary of State’s office rejected that and several alternatives, Walker decided to use the Autodesk name as a temporary placeholder for the corporate name. It ended up sticking, however, and thus Autodesk, Inc., was born.

In late 1982, Autodesk renamed its version of Riddle’s CAD software AutoCAD. As Autodesk held a non-exclusive license, Riddle continued to develop the original Interact on his own. Indeed, Riddle apparently had little to no contact with the Autodesk team in California, as he continued to reside in Tempe, Arizona.

By 1985, Riddle started marketing a sub-$500 version of Interact designed for the Macintosh called EasyCAD. Two years later, he released a DOS equivalent called FastCAD. This did not sit well with Autodesk, which by this point had morophed from a programmer-controlled partnership into a public company run by professional management. The new Autodesk not only took issue with Riddle offering a lower-cost competing product to AutoCAD, but also the original licensing agreement. As AutoCAD sales soared, the annual royalty payments to Riddle exceeded $1 million.

Things soon decayed into litigation, with Autodesk trying to force Riddle into pulling EasyCAD from the market, and Riddle claiming Autodesk was behind on its royalty payments. The parties settled in 1992, with Autodesk making a one-time payment to Riddle of $11.9 million in exchange for a waiver of any future payments. Riddle could also continue to market EasyCAD and FastCAD unimpeded by Autodesk, which he continued to do through the 2020s.

Incidentally, Autodesk did manage to sort-of kill one other product featured in this episode. In March 1989, Autodesk purchased Bob Fulton’s Generic Software, Inc., for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Fulton said Generic had sales of about $7 million, which was about one-fifth of Autodesk’s revenues. Autodesk did continue to update and release Generic CADD up until around 1992, at which time the company effectively abandoned the product. A different company, Washington-based Numera Software Corporation, subsequently hired several of the original Generic CADD developers, who then created an enhanced version called VisualCADD. The rights to VisualCADD currently belong to Gold Run Partners, Inc., which released the most recent version (9.0.1) in February 2024.

VersaCAD Founder Later Reacquired Software

Tom Lazear and William Yunek founded T&W Systems in 1977 as a part-time business to develop medical billing software. Lazear’s wife worked at a surgical practice where Tunek was the manager. After completing that project, Lazear, a computer engineer by training, turned his attention to developing a CAD system. This led to the T-Square, a CAD package that used a Terak 8510/a microcomputer–one of the first such machines to have a bitmap graphics display–and software programmed in UCSD Pascal. The basic system cost $23,500, which as David Weisenberg noted was a bargain when compared to the typical minicomputer-based CAD systems of the late 1970s, which ran around $125,000.

T&W Systems formally debuted the T-Square at the fall 1981 COMDEX show. Shortly afterwards, Tom Lazear’s son Mike reprogrammed the T-Square software to work on the Apple II. Now, we’re not talking a stock Apple II Plus that you bought at ComptuerLand. The complete CAD system–dubbed CADapple–cost around $10,000 and came with a plotter and the CAD software, which initially sold for $2,495 on its own.

The following year, 1983, T&W ported the T-Square software to the IBM PC, which it dubbed VersaCAD and sold for an initial retail price of $1,995. This version still required the USCD Pascal operating system. It was not until 1984 that T&W released a PC version written specifically for MS-DOS. That same year, the company introduced a separate $4,000 UNIX version designed for the Sun Microsystems Sun-2 workstation.

In 1986, Lazear changed the name of the business from T&W Systems to Versacad Corporation. By this point, Versacad was doing about $5.5 million in annual sales and its product line included reselling Mike Riddle’s EasyCAD for the Macintosh. Versacad did release its own version of VersaCAD for the Mac in 1987, but it apparently didn’t sell well.

In November 1987, Massachusetts-based Prime Computer Inc. acquired Versacad. Originally a minicomputer manufacturer, Prime Computer saw Versacad as its entry into the CAD business. Indeed, just a few weeks after completing the Versacad deal, Prime Computer launched a hostile takeover of Computervision, one of the oldest companies in the field. Prime ended up paying $435 million for Computervision. A year later, Prime Computer made a third CAD acquisition, purchasing Calma Company from General Electric.

By this time, Tom Lazear was now a Prime Computer vice president in charge of the three CAD units. But he decided to leave the company and together with his son formed their own business, Archway Systems, Inc., in 1989. Archway originally provided consulting and reseller services for what was now Prime Computer’s Computervision division.

Meanwhile, Prime Computer itself fell victim to a $1.3 billion hostile takeover bid launched by MAI Basic Four, Inc., a California-based computer company. To thwart the takeover, Prime Computer chairman David Dunn negotiated a leveraged buyout of the company led by investment banking firm J.H. Whitney & Co., which funded the deal largely through issuing junk bonds.

In other words, Whitney saddled Prime Computer with a ton of debt from which the company never managed to fully recover. As the company’s core minicomputer business started to crater–thanks largely to the rise of the 386 PC–Prime Computer shed its non-CAD businesses and renamed itself Computervision Corporation in 1992. The new Computervision then went public again with a stock sale that barely made a dent in the company’s massive debt.

Computervision continued to struggle through the 1990s, and in 1998, it was finally sold to Massachusetts-based Parametric Technlogy Corporation (PTC) in a stock swap valued at $260 million. PTC had no interest in keeping VersaCAD, which had been languishing since the Prime Computer transition to Computervision, and in 1999 PTC agreed to give the product back to Tom Lazear and his Archway Systems. (At the time, there were still about 1,500 active VersaCAD licenses.) According to David Weisenberg, the only payment was Archway’s promise to develop a program to convert VersaCAD files into a format usable by PTC’s own Pro/ENGINEER CAD software.

The Lazear family continued to update and release VersaCAD into the mid-2010s, with the most recent release in December 2015.

Notes from the Random Access File

This episode is available at the Internet Archive and was first broadcast in June 1988. The studio segments were recorded on May 21, 1988. The recording on the Archive is a rerun from September 1989.

Optimum Resource, Inc., developed Car Builder. The original program debuted on MS-DOS machines in 1982. The version seen in this episode was the Apple II port, which released in 1985. Richard Hefter founded Optimum Resource in January 1981 primarily to develop a series of educational games featuring a character called “Stickybear.” (Paul Schindler reviewed one such title, The Stickybear ABC, in a 1985 review featuring his then-four-year-old daughter.) Hefter and Optimum continued to develop Stickybear titles until around 1995.

Warren A. Bechtel founded Bechtel Corporation in 1898. Originally a railroad construction company, Bechtel became famous in the 1930s for leading the consortium that built the Hoover dam. By the mid-1980s, Bechtel was one of the world’s largest international engineering and construction firm, which it remains today. According to David Weisberg, a group of Bechtel employees led by Alton “Buddy” Cleveland initially developed 3DM and Walkthru as an internal CAD system sometime around 1980. In 1987, Bechtel created a Massachusetts-based subsidiary, Bechtel Software, Inc., to sell the internal system on the open market. There weren’t many customers, however, so Bechtel pulled the plug after a couple of years. Cleveland and three of his colleagues subsequently left Bechtel in 1991 to form Jacobus Technology, which developed a new CAD system for industrial plant design called JSpace.

John Murphy founded InterCad Inc. in 1981. In August 1987, Bishop Graphics Inc. acquired InterCad and its sister company, Precision Drafting Inc. Founded in 1965 as Danatron Corporation, Bishop Graphics spent most of its history supplying physical materials to engineers who designed printed circuit boards. Once it became possible to design circuit boards on computers, however, Bishop struggled to keep up. The company’s longtime CEO, Martin J. Slavin, reportedly resisted computerization, believing CAD to be a fad. His board disagreed and replaced him in August 1986 with Richard Drysdale, a venture capitalist. It was Drysdale who pursued InterCad as part of an aggressive push into CAD. (Drysdale also shortened the company’s name to Bishop Inc.) For the next few years, InterCad provided one of the few steady sources of revenue for the struggling Bishop, largely through the sale of CAD systems based on Sun Microsystems workstations. As best I can tell, both Bishop and InterCad ceased operations at some point in the 1990s, but I couldn’t nail down an exact date.

John Murphy left InterCad in 1989. He then joined a former University of Colorado classmate, David Sosnowski, to start Advanced Systems Group, Inc. (ASG) a Denver-based consulting firm that advised companies on data storage. Murphy remained with ASG as its lead sales executive for the next 30 years. ASG dissolved in 2023. Murphy and Sosnowski continue to run an investment company, Tolfan Ventures, LLC, which among other things owns an interest in Apex Ski Boots, where Murphy is a board member.

Nick Pavlovic founded Visual Information, Inc., in February 1986, later changing the name to Visual Information Development, Inc (VIDI). The company’s flagship product was Presenter 3D, which was 3D modeling and animation software developed exclusively for the Macintosh. Pavlovic closed VIDI in 1999, citing an overall lack of support from Apple for 3D graphics, and released the final iteration of Presenter 3D as a free download.

John Saguto left Versacad in 1989. He later held sales executive positions for a number of companies, including Macromedia, Micrografx, and a 12-year stint at Autodesk. Saguto retired from the tech industry in 2001. Since then he’s worked as a disaster relief supervisor for the American Red Cross and Team Rubicon USA. In 2017, he opened Sonoma Moto, a motorcycle repair shop in Sonoma County, California.

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