Computer Chronicles Revisited 117 — Computer Bowl I

On Saturday, October 4, 1953, the NBC Radio Network debuted a new program called College Quiz Bowl, which pitted teams of four students from two universities against one another in a general trivia conquest. Each school participated remotely from their local NBC affiliate, while the moderator, Allen Ludden, read the questions from network’s flagship station in New York City. The winning team received $500 and remained on the program until they were beaten.

College Quiz Bowl only lasted two seasons at NBC Radio. But its television successor, GE College Bowl, debuted in January 1959, on CBS. Again hosted by Ludden, this time both teams appeared in the same studio and competed for scholarship funds, with the winning school receiving $1,500 and the loser $500. A winning school could repeat up to five times as champion before “retiring” undefeated.

GE College Bowl aired until June 1970, moving from CBS to NBC in 1962, with Robert Earle replacing Allen Ludden as the moderator. Since then, there have been several attempts to revive the format, most recently a 2021 series, Capital One College Bowl, hosted by former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning on NBC, which ran for two seasons.

Birth of the Computer Bowl

While the original GE College Bowl had been off the air nearly 20 years when Computer Chronicles began its sixth season in October 1988, the earlier program inspired what would become an annual staple of the Chronicles calendar: The Computer Bowl.

The Computer Bowl was an event organized by The Computer Museum (TCM) in Boston, Massachusetts. TCM itself was not even 10 years old when it held its first Computer Bowl in 1988. The Museum grew out of conversations between Ken Olsen, the co-founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and Gordon Bell, a DEC engineering manager. Both men had been collecting and preserving early digital computers on their own. Dissatisfied with the efforts of established museums to take computing history seriously, they decided to build their own museum.

The Computer Museum thus began as a project within DEC. On September 23, 1979, DEC’s Operations Committee, a group composed of the company’s senior management, held a luncheon featuring a lecture by Sir Maurice Wilkes, an English computer scientist who worked on the EDSAC, one of the first electronic digital computers. Wilkes’ talk marked the soft launch of what was initially called the Digital Computer Museum.

Gordon Bell’s spouse, Dr. Gwen Bell, assumed responsibility for running the new museum on a day-to-day basis as its director and later president. In 1982, TCM became its own nonprofit charitable organization separate from DEC. On June 10, 1982, TCM held its formal opening celebration, and two years later, in November 1984, a permanent location opened at a 53,000-square foot waterside warehouse shared with the Boston Children’s Museum in a location dubbed “Museum Wharf.”

The Computer Bowl came about a few years later when Steve Coit, a venture capitalist, approached Gwen Bell. Coit was a computer trivia aficionado, and he’d compiled a book of about 800 questions on the history of the industry that he wanted to donate to TCM. Bell thought Coit’s book could form the basis for a College Bowl-style trivia contest, which could serve as fund-raiser for TCM’s educational programs. So Bell and Coit set about creating their own “Computer Bowl.”

In July 1988, TCM publicly announced the inaugural Computer Bowl would take place at Boston’s World Trade Center on the evening of October 7, 1988–nearly 35 years to the day after the original College Bowl premiered. There would be a “High Tech Tailgate Party” at 6:30 p.m., the main event at 8 p.m., and an awards dinner afterward. Computer Chronicles agreed to videotape the event and provide a live satellite feed to a West Coast viewing party at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. (Satellite problems actually delayed the start of the show until around 8:30 p.m.) The recorded event was subsequently broken up into two half-hour Chronicles episodes and broadcast at the start of the show’s sixth season a few weeks later.

TCM initially planned to make the Computer Bowl an every-other-year event, with Computer Bowl II taking place in 1990. Thereafter, it was an annual contest, with a total of 10 Computer Bowls held between 1988 and 1998. In 1999, TCM merged with the Museum of Science, Boston, and most of its collection was later transferred to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

An Educational Mission

In later years, Stewart Cheifet would personally serve as the on-stage host of the Computer Bowl. But for Computer Bowl I, he was merely an interested spectator. Cheifet recorded a brief introductory segment with one of the contestants, Esther Dyson. Cheifet emphasized rgar the real purpose of the event was to raise money for a “Junior Bowl” series of programs to help teach high school students about computers. And October happened to be “Computer Learning Month.”

Cheifet asked Dyson how she thought high schools were doing when it came to teaching students about computers. Dyson said events like the Computer Bowl were a sign we needed to do more. But it was starting to happen. Computers were in schools, teachers were learning how to use them, and students understood that they needed to not just study about computers but to use them. They would need to use computers in college, their jobs, and even in their homes.

Editorial Note

As previously mentioned, Computer Chronicles split its Computer Bowl coverage into two episodes that aired in back-to-back weeks. In this blog post, I will cover both episodes together. There was a separate introductory segment with Stewart Cheifet and Esther Dyson before the start of the second episode, which I’m ignoring here to maintain the flow of the post.

The Format

From this point forward, Chris Morgan took over as the host of Computer Bowl I. Morgan, a former editor-in-chief at longtime Computer Chronicles sponsor Byte magazine, prepared the Computer Bowl script based on Steve Coit’s original book of 800 questions. William R. Hearst III, the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, served as the “examiner” who asked the questions.

The format of the Computer Bowl loosely followed that of the GE College Bowl. The Computer Bowl rules were not actually explained, at least not on the broadcast, so it can be difficult to follow. Here’s a basic rundown:

Trying to follow the score as the match progressed proved impossible, as I think some questions were omitted from the Computer Chronicles broadcast to meet episode lengths. As a result, I’ll only post the scores at the end of each round as they were announced by Chris Morgan.

The Teams

East Coast

West Coast

Round 1

Question 1. Dick Heiser opened the world’s first microcomputer store in west Los Angeles in 1975. Was it called ComputerLand, Itty-Bitty Computer Company, or The Computer Store?

Bunnell correctly answered “The Computer Store.”

Question 2. Who wrote the first book about personal computers in 1974?

Joy incorrectly answered “Ted Hoff.” (Hoff was one of the co-inventors of the microprocessor at Intel.) Kapor then correctly answered “Ted Nelson,” adding that the book was Compter Lib / Dream Machines.

Question 3. How long would it take to send the “Encyclopedia Britannica” over a 2 GB fiber-optic cable? Would it be 2 seconds, 2 minutes, or 20 minutes?

Kapor correctly answered “2 seconds.”

Question 4 (Toss-Up). The letters in most software languages form acronyms. Which of the following language names was not an acronym: FORTRAN or ADA?

Joy correctly answered “ADA.”

West Coast Bonus: Name the computer languages invented by the following people (5 points each):

  1. Kenneth Iverson. The West correctly answered “APL.”
  2. John Backus. The West correctly answered “FORTRAN.”
  3. John McCarthy. The West correctly answered “LISP.”
  4. Nicholas Wirth. The West correctly answered “PASCAL.”

Question 5. What high-tech company determined whether the 18.5-minute gap in the Nixon tape was deliberate?

Kapor correctly answered “Bolt Beranek and Newman.” (Richard H. Bolt, the co-founder of BBN, was one of the forensic investigators who analyzed a recording made by President Richard M. Nixon three days after the Watergate break-in.)

Question 6 (Toss-Up). [John Conway’s Game of] Life is a well-known computer game. Of the following 3 people, who won Scientific American’s “Game of Life Contest” by creating the first “glider gun.” Was it Bill Gosper, Donald Knuth, or David Ahl?

Kapor correctly guessed it was “Bill Gosper.”

East Coast Bonus:

  1. In what Disney movie do the main characters live inside a computer? The East correctly answered “Tron.”
  2. What was the name of the robot in the film “The Day the Earth Stood Still”? Was it Robby, Gort, or Brainiac? The East incorrectly answered “Robby.” The correct answer was “Gort.” (“Robby” was the name of the robot in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and not, as is often mistakenly assumed, the robot from Lost in Space.)
  3. What computer “co-starred” with Robert Redford in the film “Three Days of the Condor”? Was it a PDP-11, an Apple II, or a Cray-1? The East correctly answered “PDP-11.”
  4. What company worked with Disney to supply effects for the film “Fantasia”? Was it IBM, Hewlett-Packard, or Sperry-Rand? The East incorrectly answered “Sperry-Rand.” The correct answer was “Hewlett-Packard.”

Question 7. What was the first name of the inventor of Boolean algebra?

Shaffer correctly answered “George.” (His full name was George Boole.)

Question 8. Dartmouth College is famous for many computer firsts…

Joy buzzed in at this point and incorrectly answered, “BASIC,” incurring a penalty for the West. He assumed the question had to do with what computer language was invented at Dartmouth, to which BASIC would have been the correct answer. Hearst then read the full question for the East Coast team:

Question 8 (take two). Dartmouth College is famous for many computer firsts. Of the following three pioneering events, which did not take place at Dartmouth: the first remote computer link-up, the first AI workshop, or the first color video terminal?

Kapor correctly answered “the first color video terminal.”

Question 9. Many people believe that ENIAC was the first electronic digital computer. But a recent article in “Scientific American” claims this honor should really go another computer pioneer. Was this person Stibitz, Atanasoff…

Kapor buzzed in at this point and correctly answered “Atanasoff.” (John Vincent Atanasoff, an Iowa State College professor, began developing an electronic digital computer in 1937 with a graduate student, Clifford Berry, but they abandoned work on the project in 1942 due to World War II.)

Question 10. The word “modem” is formed from what two words?

Kapor correctly answered “modulator” and “demodulator.”

This concluded the first round, with the score 90-45 East.

Round 2

Question 11. What was the first home computer to sell one million units? Was it the \Apple II…

Kapor buzzed in at this point and incorrectly answered “Apple II,” incurring a 10-point penalty for the East. Hearst then read the full question for the West team:

Question 11 (take 2). What was the first home computer to sell one million units? Was it the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20, or Tandy TRS-80?

Bunnell correctly answered “VIC-20.”

Question 12. The Pizza Time restaurant chain was started by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell…

Powell buzzed in at this point and correctly answered “Chuck-E-Cheese.” The rest of the question was “What was the name of Pizza Time’s mouse robot?”

Question 13. Is “Rocky’s Boots” a program to teach children logic, a walking robot, or a PC bootstrap program?

Dyson correctly answered, “a program to teach children logic.” (Paul Schindler reviewed Rocky’s Boots in a December 1985 Computer Chronicles episode.)

Question 14 (Toss-Up). During World War II, the Allies used computers to decode secret messages written by the Nazis on machines like this? (Morgan held up the machine.) Was this machine called the Ultra, the ACE, or the Enigma?

Joy correctly answered “the Enigma.”

West Coast Bonus: The “Bombe” and “Colossus” are names of two computing devices developed during World War II. Were they used for designing the atomic bomb, cryptography, or designing a radar?

The West correctly answered “cryptography.”

Question 15. What was the first software company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange?

Shaffer correctly answered “Cullinet.” (Cullinane Corporation went public in 1978 and was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1982. The following year, Cullinane changed its name to Cullinet.)

Question 16. Which of the following did Bill Gates not do: drop out of Harvard, program the PDP-10, or have a 1,000-person 25th birthday party?

Kapor correctly answered “have a 1,000-person 25th birthday party.” (Gates’ 25th birthday was October 28, 1980, which coincidentally was the day of the sole presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.)

Question 17. Who co-founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates?

Kapor correctly answered, “Paul Allen.”

Question 18. Are computers mentioned anywhere in George Orwell’s “1984”?

Kapor correctly answered, “no.” (This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the novel was first published in 1949.)

Question 19. In 1888, William Burroughs was granted a patent. Was it for the printing-adding machine, the difference engine, or the punched card?

Shaffer correctly answered “the printing-adding machine.”

Question 20. How far can electricity travel in a nanosecond?

Powell initially answered “1 foot.” This led to some deliberation between Hearst, the judges, and Powell. Powell clarified it was “three-quarters of a foot through physical media” and “1 foot theoretical” The judges accepted that answer. (Powell buzzed in before Hearst read the multiple-choice options; the exact answer they were looking for was “10.8 inches.”)

Question 21. Is CADUCEUS a high-level language, a Data General computer, or a medical diagnosis expert system?

Kapor correctly answered, “a medical diagnosis expert system.”

Question 22 (Toss-Up). What book about computers won the Pulitzer Prize?

Hathaway correctly answered The Soul of a New Machine. (Author Tracy Kidder won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.)

East Coast Bonus: Who wrote following books?

  1. The Art of Computer Programming. The East correctly answered “Donald Knuth.”
  2. The Third Apple. The East correctly answered “Jean-Louis Gassée.”
  3. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. The East incorrectly answered “Knight” and “Bridgewater.” (The correct answer was “Charles Babbage.”)

Question 23. A rectifier changes AC current to DC. What does an inverter do?

Poduska correctly answered “converts DC to AC.”

Question 24. Ivan Sutherland described the first interactive graphics program…

Kapor buzzed in early and correctly answered “Sketchpad.” (Sutherland described “Sketchpad” in his 1963 doctoral dissertation at MIT.)

This concluded the second round, with the score 180-115 East.

Round 3

Question 25. What is the most widely installed PC operating system?

Dyson correctly answered “DOS.”

Question 26. Of the following three terms, which does not describe a type of microprocessor: CISC, RISC, or WISC?

Joy correctly answered “WISC.”

Question 27. At what trade show “VisiCalc” first introduced?

Shaffer correctly answered “West Coast Computer Faire.” (Specifically, it was a private showing to the computer press at the 1979 West Coast Computer Faire according to VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin.)

Question 28 (Toss-Up). What was the first computer John von Neumann used–the [Harvard] Mark I or the Pilot ACE?

Kapor correctly answered the “Mark I.”

East Coast Bonus:

  1. Who wrote [the report] “IBM’s Billion Dollar Baby”? The East correctly answered “Portia Isaacson.”
  2. How many horizontal lines make up the IBM logo on computer screens: 8, 13, or both? The East incorrectly answered “13.” The correct answer was “both.” Hearst explained there were two official versions.

Question 29. Who raised $500 to start a company by selling a version of the “Spacewar!” computer game?

Shaffer correctly answered “Nolan Bushnell.”

A Brief Alex Smith Tangent

I want to briefly unpack that last question. The implication is that Bushnell raised $500 to start a company–Atari–by selling a “version” of Spacewar! That’s not exactly how it happened.

As recounted in much detail in Alexander Smith’s 2019 book They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Volume 1: 1971-1982, Bushnell first learned of Spacewar! when he saw the game at Stanford University. He then set about trying to recreate the game as a coin-operated amusement machine. Bushnell recruited a co-worker, Ted Dabney, to assist him with the project. They initially formed a partnership called Syzygy Company to design the game, which ended up being a substantially scaled-down version of the original Spacewar!

Critically, Syzygy did not manufacture or sell the game. Bushnell licensed the design to an established coin-op manufacturer, Nutting Associates, who then manufactured and sold the finished game under the name Computer Space. Bushnell worked for Nutting as its chief engineer during this period, although he retained the intellectual property rights to the game. Following the release of Computer Space, Bushnell left Nutting and, together with Dabney, established Atari, Inc., which then absorbed the assets of the former Syzygy Company.

According to Smith, Bushnell and Dabney initially contributed $100 each to buy the basic components they needed to build their game prototype. When they later formed Syzygy, each man contributed an additional $250 each to formally launch the partnership. This may have been the source of the $500 figure cited in the Computer Bowl question, but that was not money raised from selling the game. (For that matter, the answer to the question–as worded–should have been “Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney,” and not Bushnell alone.)

Round 3 (Continued)

Question 30. Was the US Festival sponsored by Stewart Brand…

Joy buzzed in at this point and correctly answered “Steve Wozniak.”

Question 31 (Toss-Up). Some say that the personal computer era began when a microcomputer appeared on the January 1975 cover of “Popular Electronics”…

Powell buzzed in at this point and correctly answered the “Altair.” (The question was a multiple choice to identify that computer.)

West Coast Bonus:

  1. Six months before the famous “Popular Electronics” cover, another computer appeared on a magazine cover. The computer was the Mark-8. Was the magazine “Scientific American,” “EDN,” or “Radio-Electronics”? The West correctly answered “Radio-Electronics.”
  2. What microprocessor was used in the Mark-8? The West incorrectly answered the [Intel] 8008. The correct answer was the Intel 4004. (Actually, the right answer was the 8008. There was audible rumbling in the audience, suggesting a number of people caught the error.)
  3. Which was the first computer magazine: “Computers & Automation,” “Datamation,” or “Computerworld”? The West correctly answered “Computers & Automation.”

Question 32. What is the term for software permanently stored in ROM?

Kapor incorrectly answered “operating system.” Powell then correctly answered “firmware.”

Question 33. Is there a way to read a magnetic tape if you don’t have a tape reader?

Goldberg correctly answered “yes.” (Hearst elaborated that you could read the tape by using a special magnetic powder or fluid.)

Question 34 (Toss-Up). Are IBM’s headquarters on Madison Avenue, in Poughkeepsie, or in Armonk?

Hathaway correctly answered “Armonk.” (All three locations are in the state of New York.)

East Coast Bonus. We know of at least two high-level computer languages whose names read the same way backwards as forwards. What are they?

The East correctly answered “ADA” and “C.”

Question 35. What was the only personal computer to be named after the state in which it was produced?

Shaffer correctly answered “Ohio Scientific.” (Uh, what about “Texas Instruments”?)

Question 36. Was the Whetstone, a measure of computing performance…

Joy buzzed in at this point and incorrectly answered “computing performance.”

Question 36 (take two). Was the Whetstone, a measure of computing performance, developed in the USA, the United Kingdom, or France?

Kapor correctly answered “the United Kingdom.”

Question 37 (Toss-Up). Alan Turing contributed to the design of one computer that was built. Was it ENIAC or the Pilot ACE?

Goldberg incorrectly answered it was “ENIAC.” Kapor then correctly answered it was “Pilot ACE.”

East Coast Bonus:

  1. Who received a Tony nomination for Best Actor for portraying [Alan] Turing on Broadway this year: Sir Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, or Derek Jacobi? The East correctly answered “Derek Jacobi.” (Jacobi lost to Ron Silver.)
  2. What was the name of the play? The East correctly answered “Breaking the Code.”
  3. Where did Turing do his research during his stay in the United States? The East correctly answered “Princeton.”

This concluded the third round, with the score 290-175 East.

Round 4

Question 38. APL is a high-level software language. What does “APL” stand for?

Dyson correctly answered, “A Programming Language.”

Question 39. What arcade game started the computer arcade craze?

Powell correctly answered “Pong.”

Question 40. What is the name of the government-funded computer network linking defense research…

Joy buzzed in at this point and correctly answered “ARPANET.”

Question 41 (Toss-Up). What computer language uses “turtles”?

Kapor correctly answered “LOGO.”

East Coast Bonus:

  1. What does “CP/M” stand for? The East correctly answered “control program for microcomputers.”
  2. Who wrote CP/M? The East correctly answered “Gary Kildall.”
  3. What company did he work for at the time? The East correctly answered “Digital Research.” (This is technically incorrect. Kildall wrote CP/M while teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School; he later established Digital Research to distribute it commercially.)

Question 42. What company did Kentucky Fried Computers eventually become?

Bunnell correctly answered “North Star.”

Question 43. What was the name of Coleco’s ill-fated home computer?

Kapor correctly answered “Adam.”

Question 44 (Toss-Up). The miniature circuits that make up today’s computers are manufactured in a so-called clean room to avoid contamination. Which is cleaner: a Class 100 or Class 10 clean room?

Joy correctly answered “Class 10.”

West Coast Bonus. Name the computer company located at the following street address:

  1. 590 Madison Avenue. The West correctly answered “IBM” (in New York City).
  2. 1700 Green Hills Road. The West incorrectly answered “Data General.” The correct answer was “Borland” (in Scotts Valley, California).
  3. 20555 FM 149. The West correctly answered “Compaq” (in Montgomery, Texas).
  4. 100 Throckmorton [Street]. The West incorrectly answered “Kentucky Fried Computers.” The correct answer was “Tandy/Radio Shack” (in Fort Worth, Texas).
  5. 16011 NE 36th Way. The West correctly answered “Microsoft” (in Redmond, Washington).

Question 45. In 1921, Karel Čapek used the Czech word for “worker” in his play “R.U.R.”…

Dyson buzzed in at this point and correctly answered “robot,” that being the Czech word for “worker.”

Question 46. Is the largest employer in Silicon Valley the Air Force, Lockheed, or Apple Computer?

Joy correctly answered “Lockheed.”

Question 47 (Toss-Up). Prior to their use in computers, punched cards were used in which of the following machines: silk weaving machines, calculators…

Michels buzzed in at this point and correctly answered “silk weaving machines.”

West Coast Bonus:

  1. How many columns does an IBM standard computer punched card have? The West correctly answered “80.”
  2. What shape are the holes in an IBM computer-readable punched card? The West correctly answered “rectangular.”
  3. When punched cards first became popular in the 1890s, they had something in common with the dollar bill. What was it? The West–well, David Bunnell–quipped, “They weren’t worth very much.” The correct answer was “they were the same size,” as the cards were made to be stored in the same trays used for dollars.
  4. What is the name used for the tiny round piece of paper created by punching paper tape: pulp, chad, or fluff? The West correctly answered “chad.”

Question 48. DIP switches are small switches found inside computers. Does the “P” in PIP stand for peripheral, package, or pixel?

Kapor correctly answered “package.”

Question 49. What is the S-100?

Kapor correctly answered “a computer bus.”

Question 50 (Toss-Up). Is a picosecond shorter or longer than a nanosecond?

Joy correctly answered “shorter.”

West Coast Bonus. During the 1960s and 1970s, the eight major computer companies were referred to jokingly as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs.” How many of the Seven Dwarfs can you name (in seven guesses)?

The West correctly named all seven: NCR, GE, RCA, Control Data Corporation, Burroughs, Honeywell, and Sperry. (If we’re being nit-picky, that final “dwarf” was technically the Univac division of Sperry Rand.)

Question 51. What is the more common name for the IEEE 802.3 standard?

Kapor correctly answered “Ethernet.”

Question 52. In 1971, when RCA got out of the computer business, who bought their computer division?

Michels incorrectly answered “GE.” Poduska then incorrectly answered “Honeywell.” The correct answer was “Univac.”

That was the final question. The East Coast won by a final score of 375-310.

Final Records

EAST COAST Correct-Incorrect Answers
Shaffer (Captain) 6-0
Dyson 4-0
Hathaway 2-0
Kapor 20-2
Poduska 1-1
Team Bonuses 13-4
East Coast Total 46-7
WEST COAST Correct-Incorrect Answers
Bunnell (Captain) 3-0
Goldberg 1-1
Joy 8-3
Michels 1-1
Powell 5-0
Team Bonuses 20-4
West Coast Total 38-9

MVP Kapor an Odd Fit for Computer Industry

At the awards dinner following Computer Bowl I, Mitch Kapor was named the contest’s “MVP,” which should come as no surprise following his 20-2 record answering questions. For Kapor, this was apparently a dream come true, as he told the Boston Globe that he’d grown up a huge fan of GE College Bowl: “If you remember the film Diner, the Kevin Conway character was always watching College Bowl, answering the questions before anyone else. Well, that was me as a kid.” (Ironically, Kapor misidentified the actor; the character he referenced was played by Kevin Bacon; Kevin Conway was a different actor who Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will remember as the Klingon Emperor Kahless.)

Kapor’s College Bowl geekery was perhaps appropriate for someone who at one point considered becoming a college professor rather than the founder of a computer software company. Born in November 1950, Mitchell Kapor grew up on New York’s Long Island. Kapor first developed an interest in computers as a high school student in the mid-1960s. In the ninth grade, he built a simple computer using discrete transistors that he entered in a science fair. Later, as a high school senior, Kapor took a programming course on an IBM 1620 minicomputer. He later said of this experience during an oral history interview, “I discovered I was not a particularly gifted programmer. I made too many mistakes.”

Kapor entered Yale University in 1967 at the age of 16, where he majored in psychology. In his own words, he “barely squeaked through academically,” preferring to spend most of his time participating in the late 60s/early 70s counterculture and working as a disc jockey at the campus radio station. After graduation, he became a full-time afternoon DJ for WHCN-FM in Hartford, Connecticut, and also worked as a Transcendental Meditation teacher.

In 1973, Kapor and his first wife moved to Boston, where she had taken a job working for public television. Through his in-laws, Kapor got a job turning market research data into reports for large corporate clients. He quickly bored of that, and after his marriage broke up, Kapor spent the next six months pursuing Transcendental Meditation full-time. When he got bored with that, he decided to pursue his master’s degree in psychology and become a counselor. When he got bored with that, he decided to become an academic and applied to a doctoral program in psychology.

This brings us to July 1978. While waiting to hear back on his doctoral applications, Kapor started hanging around a local computer store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kapor had recently purchased an Apple II (after pawning his stereo) and he overheard a customer, a local ophthalmologist, talking about purchasing his own Apple II. As Kapor later recalled,

[I]t was clear he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with [the Apple II] … but he was going to use it somehow in his practice and he’d be able to take a tax deduction for it. I literally went up to this guy and I said, “Sir, I am a consultant and I think I can help you.” I do not know where I got the chutzpah to do this because this was very atypical for me.

Kapor talked his way into a $5-per-hour job writing a series of simple BASIC programs for the ophthalmologist’s practice. This led to other software consulting jobs. Again, Kapor was by no means a gifted programmer. He considered himself little more than an enthusiastic BASIC hacker.

Kapor went on to co-found a local Apple User Group and at one point even unsuccessfully applied for a job with Apple itself. Through an Apple connection, however, Kapor met an MIT doctoral student named Eric Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld asked Kapor to help him develop a simple statistics program to assist him with his research. This led to Kapor’s first commercial software product, Tiny Troll, a very rudimentary integrated software package written in BASIC for the Apple II.

Initially, Kapor and Rosenfeld sold copies of Tiny Troll by mail order out of Kapor’s apartment. Kapor then decided to go to MIT’s Sloan Business School and get his MBA with an eye towards becoming a full-time business software developer. As Kapor later recalled, being an entrepreneur was not something that came naturally or easily for him. Even Kapor’s father–the owner of a successful box factory–thought his son was more suited to being a college professor than a businessman.

But Kapor ended up getting his big break when he met Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the authors of VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program. Bricklin and Frankston referred Kapor to their publisher, Personal Software (later VisiCorp), who was looking for additional programs to bundle with VisiCalc. This led Kapor to drop out of business school in November 1979 and sign a contract with Personal Software to rewrite his Tiny Troll program into a pair of applications, VisiPlot and VisiTrend. Kapor and Rosenfeld formed a company, Micro Finance Systems, Inc., to oversee development of the software.

Kapor’s contract with Personal Software gave him a 33-percent royalty on all sales of VisiPlot and VisiTrend. This generated more than $500,000 in royalties in just the first six months the products were sold. With this new cash flow, Kapor started hiring other programmers–some of them high school students–to execute his designs for new application software.

Kapor’s most important hire was Jonathan Sachs, a former Data General programmer who left the company to start his own software consulting business, Concentric Data Systems, together with his former manager, John Henderson. Sachs and Henderson had been developing a spreadsheet program written in C to work with the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. Sachs ended up leaving Concentric with the rights to continue developing his spreadsheet, which he then brought to Kapor.

Meanwhile, Kapor wanted out of his deal with Personal Software, largely because he was afraid they would eventually try and stiff him on his 33-percent royalty payments. He ended up negotiating a one-time payment of $1.2 million to make a clean break with Personal Software. After then buying out Eric Rosenfeld’s share of the business, Kapor dissolved Micro Finance Systems, Inc., in 1982, and co-founded a new company with Sachs, which he named Lotus Development Corporation. (The name was a nod to Kapor’s past teaching Transcendental Meditation, where the lotus flower is considered a symbol of perfect enlightenment.)

While Sachs had been developing his spreadsheet for 8-bit Z80 machines running CP/M, plans quickly shifted when IBM released its Personal Computer at the end of 1981. Kapor and Sachs both realized that the IBM name alone would make the product an easier sell to business customers. Sachs started converting his C code into Intel 8088 assembly language, and by October 1982, Kapor publicly announced Lotus 1-2-3 at a press conference held at the Windows on the World restaurant in New York City’s World Trade Center.

Backed by funding from a venture capitalist who had been impressed with Tiny Troll, Lotus 1-2-3 shipped in January 1983 and was an immediate hit, selling 200,000 copies in its first year. In October 1983, Lotus Development Corporation went public. By 1986, Lotus was selling roughly 750,000 copies of Lotus 1-2-3 every year, and the company was aggressively pursuing new product and acquisitions.

By this point, however, Kapor got bored again. He later recalled that he simply “got tired of spreadsheets.” He was never an especially talented manager, and had in fact largely turned over the day-to-day operations to president and CEO Jim Manzi. Kapor also later recalled he had little patience for Lotus’ enterprise customers, who complained that development of new features for 1-2-3 was proceeding too fast for their tastes.

So in July 1986, Kapor abruptly resigned as chairman of Lotus Development Corporation. In 1987, he founded a new company, ON Technology, Inc., which developed a text information retrieval program called On Location for the Macintosh. Kapor ended up resigning from ON Technology as well in 1990, telling the Boston Globe in 1992, “My heart was no longer in it.”

Since leaving ON Technology, Kapor has remained an active investor, philanthropist, and political activist. Notably, Kapor co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital civil rights group, in 1994, and served as the founding chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, which develops the Firefox web browser. Kapor and his third wife, Dr. Fraeda Kapor Klein, also established the Kapor Center, which describes itself as a “family of interrelated justice-seeking organizations that both independently and collectively work to reimagine and reconstruct a more inclusive and equitable technology sector.”

East-West Merger Ended Badly

Two other Computer Bowl I contestants–one from the East Coast and one from the West Coast–would merge their companies less than a year later. In August 1989, Allen Michels’ Ardent Computer Corporation agreed to combine with Dr. John William Poduska’s Stellar Computer Inc. to form the awkward portmanteau Stardent Inc.

Ardent and Stellar had been direct competitors in the market for “graphics supercomputers,” essentially single-user workstations costing around $100,000 for use by scientists and engineers to generate 3D models.

Allen Michels, a former manager at Digital Equipment Corporation and Intel, co-founded his first company, Convergent Technololgies, Inc., in 1979. Bill Podsuka was a former MIT professor who had co-founded two companies, Prime Computer and Apollo Computer Inc.

But by late 1985, Michels had left Convergent and Poduska had done the same from Apollo. During a Christmas Eve get together at Poduska’s New Hampshire home, the two men discussed joining forces and starting their own 3D graphics workstation company to compete against market leader Silicon Graphics. The sticking point was that both of them wanted to run the show. Thus, they parted amicably and started rival companies instead.

Over the next four years, Ardent and Stellar “were beating each other’s brains out,” Poduska later told the Boston Globe, with each company burning through about $50 million in startup capital with zero profits to show for their efforts. By the summer of 1989, a few months after both men shared the stage at Computer Bowl I, Michels was back at Poduska’s house to discuss a merger. They signed the deal a few weeks later.

Now, this wasn’t quite a case of two bitter rivals simply deciding to bury the hatchet for the greater good. There was a third party involved. Osaka, Japan-based manufacturing conglomerate Kubota Corporation was the principal shareholder of Michels’ Ardent, owning about 45 percent of the company’s stock before the merger. After the merger, Kubota owned 22 percent of the combined Stardent, making it the largest single shareholder.

Kubota was not merely a passive investor. As part of the Stardent merger, the new company agreed to shift its manufacturing operations to a Kubota-controlled subsidiary.

Less than a year into the new Stardent’s existence, things started to unravel. In early July 1990, Kubota announced it would open a new subsidiary to assemble its computers in the United States, in order to get around 100-percent tariffs on computer exports imposed by the Reagan and Bush administrations.

A few days later, Michels and Matthew Sanders, another co-founder of the original Ardent, filed a lawsuit against Kubota, alleging the Japanese firm had effectively forced them into the Stardent merger and was now “scheming to strop Stardent of its best products and engineers so it can compete directly against Stardent,” according a Boston Globe report.

In response, Stardent fired Michels and Sanders from their roles as employees and co-chairmen of the company after a committee of outside directors determined their claims lacked merit. Shortly thereafter, Kubota agreed to invest an additional $50 million in Stardent, bringing its stake in the company to around 30 percent.

Poduska, who became CEO following the merger, was happy to take Kubota’s money, telling the Globe, “It’s a hell of a deal for us.” He believed that allowing Kubota to handle essentially all of Stardent’s manufacturing would free his staff up to focus on research and development.

Unfortunately, Kubota’s additional funding wasn’t enough to keep Stardent afloat. In November 1991, Poduska announced plans to close and liquidate Stardent after burning through a combined $200 million, including $130 million from Kubota. The company closed for good in March 1992. Poduska then established a new company, Advanced Visual Systems, Inc., which acquired most of the former Stardent’s software business. Kubota’s U.S. graphics subsidiary acquired Stardent’s hardware business, which became Kubota Graphics, but that business only lasted until 1994, when the parent company decided to exit the market.

Notes from the Random Access File