ae
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The ANALYTICAL ENGINE
Newsletter of the Computer History Association of California
ISSN 1071-6351
Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995
Kip Crosby, Managing Editor
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Editorial: ALMOST HOME ................................... 1
Editorial: HANGING TOGETHER .............................. 2
THE EDUCATION OF A COMPUTER MAKER:
Joe Schoendorf Remembers the HP 21xx/2000 ................ 3
THE MAC AND ME:
15 Years of Life with the Macintosh, by Jef Raskin ...... 15
IN MEMORIAM: TOM MANDEL ................................. 36
CAROTHERS JOINS CHAC ADVISORY BOARD ..................... 37
WEST WHIPS EAST IN BI-COASTAL COMPUTER BOWL ............. 37
A BOOST FOR SILICON VALLEY'S HISTORY .................... 38
DEDICATED TECHNICAL ARCHIVE IN SUNNYVALE ................ 38
VINTAGE ARTIFACTS AUCTIONED ON THE WEB .................. 39
NEW HOPE FOR THE AMIGA? ................................. 40
SPOTTER FLASH ........................................... 40
SPOTTER ALERT ........................................... 41
NOMINEES SOUGHT FOR CHAC ADVISORY BOARD ................. 41
MONEY, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING ..................... 41
YOU PUBLISH! OR WE PERISH! .............................. 42
Legacy Book Review:
Don Lancaster's TV TYPEWRITER COOKBOOK .................. 43
OVERVIEW OF BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSES ...................... 45
ACQUISITIONS ............................................ 45
LETTERS ................................................. 45
QUERIES ................................................. 50
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED ................................... 53
ADDRESSES OF CORRESPONDING ORGANIZATIONS ................ 54
THANKS TO.... .......................................... 55
NEXT ISSUE .............................................. 55
GUIDELINES FOR DISTRIBUTION ............................. 56
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION ............................... 56
NINES-CARD .............................................. 57
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Editorial: ALMOST HOME
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The biggest thing on the CHAC's collective mind, for the last
several months, has been whether we actually will rescue the SDS
930; and it now seems reasonable that we will, _if_ we can raise
enough money. We have the name of someone who specializes in
moving vintage electronic equipment. We have enough donated
storage space to pack it into. All we need now is the money to
ship it.
For the last year the ENGINE has done a remarkable job of
supporting itself, and paying most of our recurring bills, out of
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 2
subscription revenue. But there's no way that subs can cover a
large, extraordinary expense like the cost of moving a mainframe.
Once again we ask for donations from concerned individuals,
groups and corporations.
The SDS 930 at Table Mountain Observatory is almost certainly the
last intact, bootable, fully documented SDS computer in the
world. The Federal agency that owns it has worked miracles to
keep it whole; but time is short, and pressure to scrap this
hardware is mounting. We must rescue it all, or none, and soon,
if ever.
This is the last chance. Give to save the great 930 from being
tipped and crushed; give to brighten the spark of our most
central purpose. Bring a mainframe home to the applause it
deserves.
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Editorial: HANGING TOGETHER
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Since the last ENGINE appeared, we've discovered two historical
organizations whose purposes resemble our own; the Palo Alto-
based Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, and the Computer
Technical Archive in Sunnyvale. (See pp. 24.) These organizations
and others, like the Sunnyvale Historical Society, the Perham
Foundation, the Hewlett-Packard Archives, and the Intel Museum,
are working hard to preserve history while it's accessible and
memorable.
This is the best news we could offer. Building a museum,
cataloging artifacts, creating a conceptual and philosophical
architecture to organize the history of computing -- these are
massive tasks. (More so than we realized when we founded the
CHAC, but big ideas are like big dogs; sometimes you pull them,
and sometimes they pull you.) No single organization can realis-
tically address them all. But small organizations with related
purposes, springing up and persisting whatever the obstacles, are
a sure sign of the _grassroots support_ that will be broad and
deep enough to do the work as it deserves to be done.
Contradictions and struggles are the restlessness of a great
beginning. Too much history lies dormant and disorganized in
filing cabinets, warehouses, garages. It's easy to be overwhelmed
by the size of the task ahead. It can be hard to conceive of the
power that will accomplish it. But the power of devoted,
intelligent people, united by a great idea, deserves all our
faith.
_Sustain the history of computing._ For your support of the CHAC
and the ENGINE, we thank you. We encourage you, in the same
moment, to contact our affiliated organizations, find out more
about them, and offer your assistance. Your part in this rescue
is yours to choose.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 3
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HP's EARLY COMPUTERS
Part Two:
THE EDUCATION OF A COMPUTER MAKER
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An Interview with Joe Schoendorf
[Joseph Schoendorf is a venture partner at Accel Partners in
San Francisco. From 1966 until the mid-eighties he served HP in
many capacities, including as OEM marketing manager of the Data
Systems Division and as a director of the Systems Marketing
Center. His tenure at the company coincided exactly with HP's
entry into the minicomputer market, and his recollections of that
exciting struggle are vivid.]
_KC: Today I wanted to talk about the machines built between the
2116A and the 3000, which I find very interesting, both in
themselves and for what they represented. The 2116A was a
special-purpose computer also called the Instrumentation
Computer, and when people bought them for other things, it was
somewhat to the surprise of the company. After the 2000 and 2100
came the 3000, which was a computer everybody had to have, so
popular that people are writing software for it to this day. I'm
looking for the story of how HP got from one to the other._
JS: I'm going to add one layer to what you've said. I joined HP
in June 1966 at what was then the Dymec Division, which was the
systems division. It can be difficult to talk about the exact
year of introduction of an HP product because they think in terms
of a fiscal year, but it happened in November 1966. We actually
had a whole series of models from the 2116, probably three or
four years before the 2100; we had the 2116A, B, C, then the 2115
and then the 2114, which in its own right was an extraordinarily
popular machine and put us into lots of different businesses
besides instrumentation. The 2116A was a pure-play instru-
mentation computer, and we sold it like an instrument. We used to
go around and tell people very proudly that it met HP Class B
environmental specifications, which means it ran from zero to
55 C and anything up to 95% humidity; and its memory was lithium-
impregnated, so it wasn't sensitive to heat the way other
contemporary minicomputers were. It really was a rugged thing,
designed and built to run wherever your instruments would run.
_KC: Lithium-impregnated core, this was?_
JS: Yes. We put lithium in because memory could often be a
thermometer, behaving differently at different temperatures, and
lithium stabilized that; which let us advertise, because HP would
only advertise what was more than true, that the computer would
run in zero to 55 C, the same spec as for a voltmeter or any
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 4
other HP instrument. This was unheard of at the time for mini-
computers, which were then very unstable. To give you the
context, the PDP-8 was out at that point but the Data General
[Nova] had not yet appeared.
REAL-TIME GOES TO SEA
Our first computers were sold for instrumentation applications,
as we had intended. Our very first customer was Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institute, who had been using HP instruments and
acquiring data to mag tape on shipboard, with the data recorded
for batch processing later. The potential problem was that,
coming back from a trip, they had to hope the recording worked,
because if it hadn't, they had just spent 30 days out to sea for
nothing -- which was quite expensive for them. After they
installed the 2116A they could acquire the data, perform their
computations in real-time, and not only have immediate answers,
but be sure they had valid data while they were still out there.
Most of our 2116 orders were for instrumentation applications.
Shortly after that the 2115 came out, which amounted to a half-
sized 2116 with more memory -- even then customers were
constantly in search of more memory -- and then the 2114, which
I'm virtually certain predated the 2100 by a couple of years, and
which set the stage for the 2100 by moving Hewlett-Packard into
the OEM business for the first time.
OEM business I would call the center of the market at that time.
Early minicomputer market volume was driven by OEMs who bought
computers and did things with them, packaged it in other
[dedicated] systems. Fishback & Moore, F&M Systems in Dallas, was
a big engineering construction firm that made a specialty of
repackaging computers and reselling them. I'm trying to think of
some of our early customers for it.... Measurex, a major
Cupertino-based process control company, used the 2115 and 14, I
believe, as their prime OEM machine for paper plant management.
Dave Boston was the CEO.
THE 21xx BREAKS GROUND
When the 2100A came out, it was sort of the second-generation
product, if you considered the 2116, 15, 14 to be differentiated
by packaging and price. With each design we were able to make the
computer smaller, make it faster, and stay on the semiconductor
curve. As I recall, our claim to fame with the 2100 was that we
broke the $10,000 barrier for the 16-bit minicomputer; the
competition, by which I mean primarily the PDP-8, was a 12-bit
machine.
_KC: Got ya._
JS: It was a major difference. Now, the PDP-11 was contemporary
with the 2100A, but I believe that because it was a newer and
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 5
more complex machine, we beat them under the wire for $10K. The
other major advantage of the 2100A was that it broke the 64K
memory limitation -- compared to the 2116A, which was a 16K
memory machine. [Laughs] Not 16 meg! Most people bought memory
for HP minis in 4 and 8K segments because that fit their budget.
A 4K block of memory in the late 60s was $10,000 as I recall, and
we might have lowered it to $8,000 per 4K. If you had tried to
buy a megabyte of memory at those prices, that would bankrupt
you!
_KC: It certainly would. Now, when you say 4K in the case of the
2116, what was the word length?_
JS: It was 4K of 16-bit words. We had only 16-bit words. Now,
the 2100 came out as our first computer with semiconductor
memory, we went to RAM and there was no more core in the machine.
That let us get the packaging [size] down. And we made provision
for up to one megabyte of memory, or it might even have been two!
I remember a wonderful meeting with the person I regard as the
father of the 2100A, Bob Frankenberg, who is now the CEO of
Novell; I went in to him one day and asked why they allowed for a
meg of memory in the machine. His answer was absolutely mind-
blowing to me at the time, and in the perspective of history, it
still is. He said, "I got so tired of the sales and marketing
folks beating on me for more memory," -- because the old 64K
limitation was pretty severe -- "I wanted to put so much memory
in the machine that nobody would ever ask for any more."
_KC: A meg of semiconductor memory, in the context of the early
70s, was a heck of a lot of memory._
JS: A heck of a lot of memory and a heck of a lot more money!
But, as we've learned again and again in this industry, it soon
became a limitation, which is what led to the 32-bit machines.
_KC: Right. Now, the base configuration of the machine was 64K?_
JS: I believe so, but of course, the base configuration was
driven by price -- we were trying to make our computers
attractive in a way that was relatively new to us. Ed Hayes was
the OEM marketing manager, a marketing father of the 2100, and he
called the 2100 the "Thoroughly Modern Mini." That was its
marketing tag-line. He ran an advertisement that promoted a
configuration for the 2100 and, whatever the exact configuration
was, it was priced at $9,000 or $8,950, but there was an asterisk
on it that led to a disclaimer, "quantities of 50 or more" in
very small print. That was the way the game was played in OEM at
that time, because OEMs didn't buy one machine; they always
wanted to know what your price was for the quantity that they'd
find useful, and 50 was a good starting point for a reasonable-
sized OEM. Well, as I remember, either Hewlett or Packard saw the
ad and got very annoyed. Ed showed me a copy of the ad as we ran
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 6
it, I think in _Electronic News_, where one or the other had
taken his pen and written "I never want to see this kind of
advertisement again!" so hard that the point of the pen had
broken the newspaper.
_KC: Oops!_
JS: He was worried that we were misleading customers by changing
our pricing policy so radically. HP didn't really discount its
instruments. A big discount on an HP instrument would be three
per cent, and we would give that on the 31st day of every
February, with great duress, if Al Oliverio said it was okay,
which he usually didn't.
It was strictly ethical, strictly legal, absolutely standard
practice to advertise a typical OEM price reflecting fifteen or
twenty per cent discount for 50 machines; and that was our
published discount. But to advertise that as an up-front price,
and use it in small print as a base for the deal, was a complete
break with Hewlett-Packard tradition. It was one of the great
many anguishes that we went through trying to become a
minicomputer company, working from the background of having been
an instrument company. You can take that story as one example of
the psychic changes that had to occur because of who we were, and
how great we were, and what we were trying to become -- which was
a fierce competitor in the mini-computer business.
_KC: So, when the ad appeared, did it publish the quantity-one
price?_
JS: No, when it appeared, Hewlett read it as the quantity-50
price and he didn't approve the ad. The ad just got cut and I
don't think we ever ran another one like it. From then on, I
don't remember everything we did specifically, but we changed our
approach to life.
_KC: Now, the 2114 approached being a general-purpose computer?_
JS: The 2114 was in every respect a general-purpose, core-based
mini-computer and a really successful machine. I don't remember
its dollar profit or exactly what companies bought it, but it
certainly brought in new HP customers that numbered in the
hundreds. The first big order from Fishback & Moore in
particular, I believe, was for the 2115's or 2114's to control
the new California aqueducts. To pump water from up here to down
there would require 50 or 60 pumping stations along the route,
with a computer in each one, and our computer was chosen. It was
one of the biggest OEM wins we'd had until that time. I don't
know what they're running today, but in the '60s and '70s, the
California water system was built with the Hewlett-Packard 21xx;
I'm sure the configuration changed multiple times, but that was a
very big order for us and it underwrote very big changes in the
socioeconomic fabric of the State of California.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 7
_KC: It certainly did! Now, it wasn't only an order for a
respectable number of computers, but it was a high-profile
project._
JS: A project that made us a much more legitimate OEM supplier,
caused other OEMs to be attracted to Hewlett-Packard because we
could then be perceived as competitive and aggressive. When
companies are growing a business from zero, they're always marked
by their big orders. And that was a big order!
_KC: This is fine. When you want to assess comprehensively what
the computer has done for California, rather than separating the
technical history, the commercial history, and the social
history, you have to emphasize the ways it all fits together.
This is the kind of interview I really want because it considers
the way the technical stuff came down, the effect on the business
that was done, and the effect on the customer-base that it went
to. ....Shall we move on to the 2100?_
THE 2100A: DISASTER AVERTED
JS: The 2100 was, as I said, the true second-generation machine
based on semi-conductor memory; and it started life with a major
disaster, because we invented a power supply for it that didn't
work. It was the first high-speed switching power supply.
Thirty-five percent of the cost of a mini-computer in those days
was metal frame and power supply. If you were going to get the
cost down, the engineering targets you were likely to think of
first were the power supply and the metal frame, and if the power
supply could be made smaller, the size and cost of the frame
would follow it down. Well, we designed a power supply optimizing
for size and it didn't work, and I don't remember exactly why,
but it was temperature-sensitive as hell and it just would not
meet Hewlett-Packard's quality. We were ready to announce this
machine and they had to call on Barney Oliver at HP Labs in a
very Apollo-project-like "let's invent a brand new power supply
from scratch in a month that will work in this machine and save
our butts."
_KC: The other thing, to my understanding from Barney about the
power supply in the 2100, was that the one that didn't work was
also too big, and made for a bigger frame. Now that you talk
about 35 percent of the cost of the machine, I can understand the
impact. What Barney seemed proudest of, regarding that power
supply, was that it was half the size of the one it replaced._
JS: The size was absolutely critical. We were in disaster mode,
wondering what the hell we were going to do, and one of the
designs we actually considered used the old supply but put it in
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 8
a separate box from the CPU, which would have been a two-box
mini, with the power supply at a distance, like you get in some
audio componentry today. I think it would have been a marketing
disaster, and evidently my opinion was shared, because I know
Marketing just threw up all over that; and Barney saved the day -
- just plain and simple. This and a lot of other episodes taught
us a little bit about the OEM business, and about just selling
these things without so much religion, and we began to build a
pretty reasonable computer business.
DAYS OF THE GLADIATORS
_KC: Can you expand on the phrase "so much religion?"_
JS: Oh, we were religious from day one. There were always
internal wars as to who got to sell these machines. The Data
Systems Division, that Tom Perkins ran, got to sell the pure-play
digital computers. As soon as instrumentation capability was
included, that order went into what was, I think, still called
the Palo Alto Division or the Dymec Division. Each division
wanted to see that order on its own bottom line, so there were
always games being played: if we could get the customer to buy a
data systems interface, which was a 16-bit general-purpose
interface, the order came into the purview of this group, the
instrumentation computer group. There was a war between the pure
computer group and the instrumentation computer group that was
friendly rivalry, but it went on almost forever.
_KC: When you say the "pure computer group," the Data Systems
Division, you mean Cupertino?_
JS: Yes. Sometime in late 1969 or 1970, HP bought the Varian
building on Wolfe Road in Cupertino, what was called Building 40
-- or 41 -- which I believe they just tore down a few months ago.
They created a "real computer" business that was focused on pure-
play digital computers meant for end-user applications
development. That was in contrast to Palo Alto and Dymec, what
began as roughly the "technical computer" business and evolved
over the years to "technical and commercial" -- technical, we
sold to engineers, and commercial we sold to business people. But
in ways that was an ill-founded separation, because some of the
capabilities we had in the technical computer were capabilities
that business people wanted. One of the great stories -- pardon
me going fast-forward for a minute -- is of this pretty good
database that the commercial computer guys invented called
"Image," which ran in our DOS operating system, not DOS like
Microsoft DOS, but the disk operating system for the machine. In
contrast, the main operating system that the technical guys had
was a real-time operating system. Well, if you think about it, a
lot of commercial customers wanted real-time capability.
_KC: Oh, you bet they did!_
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 9
JS: They didn't have a use for instrumentation, you understand,
they just wanted real-time capability sort of as the equivalent
of today's multi-tasking preemptive capacity. Parenthetically, a
lot of the stuff that the personal computer guys think is rocket
science today, we were doing twenty years ago in proprietary
operating systems, and making it work! But I remember Paul Ely,
one of the truly great guys of the "pure computer" division and a
gentleman I consider a mentor, would not allow the real-time guys
to put a database to put Image under real-time. He just would not
allow it to happen.
_KC: What was his thinking, so far as you understood it?_
JS: Customers didn't need it, it would confuse the business, and
if real-time customers wanted Image, they should just buy DOS
because that's the way it was! In the face of this we ran a
guerrilla action -- including, I think, going over to the Data
Systems Division and stealing the source code -- so that we could
port Image to the real-time system. We were going to defy Paul's
direction, disobey on principle, and implement Image in real
time. (One of the accomplishments of that project, incidentally,
was to introduce me to my future wife, whom we had just hired out
of Iowa State as a computer science engineer.) The guy we put on
the project was someone we'd hired from Harvard named Freddy
Gibbons, who later went off and founded Software Publishing. He
was the product manager for Image-1000, as we called it then, be-
cause the real-time system -- the system that had the 2100 as
part of it -- was collectively designated the Series 1000; this
is in the mid-'70s. We introduced it, period, and it became a
very, very successful product, because real-time and database was
a natural combination that we sold to many companies who would
not otherwise have become customers of Hewlett-Packard.
_KC: Okay. Now it seems like time to throw in something Barney
mentioned, which was that, when you got as far as the 2000, 2100,
there was a certain sector of HP management that began to worry;
because HP was achieving a high profile in the general computer
business, and without compromising traditional standards of
quality and ruggedness, which had some people concerned that IBM
-- as Barney said -- might put a tenth of their talent on it and
really try to crush HP._
JS: That was exactly right. I mean, Hewlett was very
appropriately conservative here. Pardon me thinking anecdotally -
-
_KC: Please do._
JS: First of all, I don't remember the 2000 and the 2100 as
being the same thing. The 2000 was a time-share system that, I
think, came to market before the 2100 did and was first used with
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 10
the 2114. Ed McCracken was the father of it, both in the
visionary sense and in the commercial sense, and he built a
wonderful time-sharing business. I believe he had responsibility
for the educational marketplace, which was the prime market for
time-sharing in those days.
_KC: Right. And the time-sharing was inseparable from the version
of BASIC._
JS: It was time-sharing/BASIC, one and the same, and Mike Green
invented that, and then Mike went off to become a co-founder of
Tandem. Time-sharing was another capability that got us into big
businesses. Leasco became Hewlett-Packard's single largest
customer by buying our time-share systems and leasing them to
institutions, selling time, building service bureaus, making a
market by replacing the larger time-share systems that had been
run on mainframes. They built a huge business for themselves, and
obviously for us too.
_KC: And unlike some people, you didn't particularly object to
that. If somebody wanted to buy HP hardware and lease it out,
that was fine._
JS: Yeah, that was no problem.
OMEGA: OPPORTUNITY FORGONE
But this opportunity that we picked up unfortunately led to
another one that we missed. We ran a conservative company, which
is why it's as great as it is, because we've stood the test of
time, but we've also declined certain risks. We saw this
commercial data processing opportunity and launched a very big
project, under the leadership of Tom Perkins, called the Omega
Project -- to build a 32-bit computer at least three to four
years before DEC built the VAX.
_KC: You built a prototype._
JS: We built the prototype computer and were ready to launch it,
and it would have worked -- I mean, it ran! But it wasn't a
question of the product pure and simple. We didn't have a lot of
experience in pure commercial computing, in midrange distributed
computing, in commercial operating systems and COBOL, all of the
stuff that was going on then; so we were even more careful than
usual, because this would have required a frontal assault on
IBM's market and everybody knew it. Now, HP's strongest suit
besides reliability has always been support; we try to support
our products better than anybody else, and if we can't support
it, we don't sell it. As far as I remember, the issue finally
came to a head when Perkins told Hewlett he'd need a $5 million
investment to build a support organization for this product,
which started an examination of the whole cost of becoming a
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 11
serious computer player -- all the introduction costs and all the
support costs, infrastructure, inventory, training, to do it the
HP way. We began to wonder whether we could even complete the
project. In the end the risk was judged excessive and the top-
down decision was "kill the project."
_KC: Well, there were a number of influences on that decision.
Barney makes the point that, at the time the full R&D budget for
the Omega Project was being considered, Cupertino had already
spent a lot of money and had less to show for it than some people
found appropriate._
JS: They had not made any money.
_KC: Right. The other thing is that -- in context of the
comprehensive R&D, manufacturing and support budget for a new
line of computers -- everybody has to have remembered that Tom
Watson, for the launch of the System/360, had spent $5 _billion_
-- he had literally bet the company on introducing a new line.
There might have been some reluctance to take relatively the same
position._
JS: With a company that had not proved its ability to make a
profit in the business. At that point, the computer business did
not contribute profit to the Hewlett-Packard company very well at
all, whether you were talking about the technical or the
commercial computer business. Yes, that was a big bet that the
company chose not to take at the time, and I remember a
cataclysmic meeting for which they literally called all the
engineers into a room, and told them that the project was dead,
and at that very minute moving men came in and moved the Omega
prototypes out of the building, so nobody could ever work on them
again.
_KC: Were they destroyed?_
JS: I don't know. I know they were taken to warehouses. Whether
they were physically destroyed or not, that decision effectively
dispersed a lot of HP's most advanced resources in computing. You
just have to look at the consequences! Most of the people who
worked on that project ended up as founders of Tandem; and,
because of the so-called disaster of 32-bit computing, nobody
wanted to touch one again in any of HP's multiple computer
divisions. So when DEC came out with the VAX, which was a 32-bit
computer and a great one, we didn't respond because nobody had
the _cojones _to build up a project after what had happened to
Omega. We would have had a tremendous lead over DEC into the 32-
bit market, whether it was five years or four or three, and we
wouldn't touch it, we wouldn't respond. When we finally did
struggle with it, with projects like Vision and Wide Word and a
whole bunch of concepts that were being played with in the early
'80s -- by that time, not having a 32-bit machine was killing us.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 12
Only the loyalty of Hewlett-Packard customers prevented us from
going the hell out of the computer business during those years.
We could have, or would have.
_KC: But you did exactly the opposite; because the 2000 and the
2100 led up to the 3000, which, so far as I'm concerned, was the
machine that committed HP to the computer business irreversibly._
JS: Well, as I mentioned, the 2100 was a general-purpose, 16-bit
mini-computer that ran core and we used it with DOS and we used
it with the real-time executive and we used it with time-sharing
-- with, in essence, three separate computer operating systems.
GENESIS OF THE 3000
Now, the HP 3000 was a project that was getting underway just as
the Omega got canceled, so we said, if we can't build a 32-bit
machine, let's build the world's most modern 16-bit architecture;
one that can address a full range of purposes without being three
different machines. We decided on a register-based machine with
re-entrance and several other advances over the 2100 architecture
-- and I don't remember all the differences, but the 2100 had a
16-bit memory register that gave limited addressing capability
and the architecture was not comprehensively register-based....I
think it included an A&B register and that was it. So, to em-
phasize our design goals for the 3000, we created this three-ring
sign logo for real-time, time-sharing and batch. The time-sharing
came from the 2000; the batch came from DOS; and real-time came
from the real-time. And then we broke the cardinal rule at
Hewlett-Packard; we started to advertise and sell that machine
before we built it.
_KC: Ouch!_
JS: We took orders for it based on what we thought it would do,
not based on what it did, and we had people lined up. Had it done
what we claimed it would do, that machine would have been
phenomenal, but it wasn't possible. I think we told people it
would do 64 terminals of time-sharing and run multiple jobs of
batch and run real-time all at the same time. That was so far
beyond the state of the art that people were just coming to us
and betting on it, because this was Hewlett-Packard talking, and
we didn't go out and talk through our hats, so we had a lot of
credibility, but this time we weren't talking through our mouths.
We got in big trouble! And we finally had to go out and pull the
3000 off the market after it had been introduced, after we had
taken orders for it, because we could not deliver what we had
committed to deliver.
_KC: This was 1971. In what ways did the 3000, as first
introduced, fail to live up to its advance billing?_
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 13
JS: Almost every way. I'm serious. With respect to software, I
think it ended up not doing anything we said it would do. The
number of terminals it supported was about four, instead of 64,
and it couldn't run DOS if you were doing anything else. I mean,
it was just really slow. We pulled the product off the market. We
sent teams of senior managers out to sites where 3000's were
already installed, to offer refunds and say, "We're sorry! We
shouldn't have taken your money." Some customers wouldn't give us
the machine back because they liked it and they knew eventually
we'd get it right, but we were so ethical that we had to sever
contracts and, in effect, say "This is not a sale. We sold you
the wrong thing. Here's your money back. Give us the machine and
we'll see you later." This wasn't "it didn't work by a little
bit," it didn't work by a lot!
_KC: So the majority of first-generation series 3000s were
pulled._
JS: Overwhelming majority.
_KC: And when was the re-introduction done?_
JS: I don't remember the exact year, but a couple of years later
we relaunched with very toned-down specs that only included about
half the capability we'd originally promised. In fact, we never
did deliver a 3000 that fulfilled the original design goal, which
was real-time, batch and time-share all running simultaneously in
the same machine.
"FIVE YEARS TO GET DEBUGGED"
_KC: That didn't prevent the 3000 from becoming an immensely
popular computer._
JS: After four or five very hard years of building a business,
during which we learned how to sell true commercial data
processing and distributed computing. That was a great learning
curve for the company and we did get it right, but the process
took us at least five years, and McCracken called that exactly.
He used to go around telling people that any new operating system
would take five years to get debugged and to find commercial
acceptance in the marketplace. I think that was prophetic,
because that's about how long it took the Macintosh to get right
and at least how long it took Windows to get right.
_KC: At least!_
JS: McCracken said "at least," and that was a contrast, because
we were always thinking, "Well, we've introduced this thing: year
one, it's going to work."
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 14
_KC: And that sort of stood the industry perception on its head
because people must have begun to realize, by then, that with
luck you could get a generation of hardware right in 12 to 18
months._
JS: For us then, probably 18 to 24, coming down to 12 to 18. We
had a long-cycle design mentality; it took us too long to build
hardware and we were trying to reduce that, to get it down to 12
months, but it took us two years at that time to do anything
reasonable.
_KC: Even so, there's a major disparity between that and five
years for the operating system._
JS: Yes.
_KC: I have to touch on a point here, and it may be a painful
point. The first time you took people's money before you had the
thing to sell to them, it turned out to be not a win, to put it
mildly. What effect did that have on HP's marketing practices
from then on?_
JS: Some people lost their jobs. General managers were moved and
pulled out of the business. I think Bill Terry was one of the
victims. We became ultra-conservative in marketing. Don't in-
troduce it until you can prove it and ship it! We went to the
other extreme, the way we had with instruments. We never
introduced an instrument we couldn't demonstrate and deliver in a
reasonable time-frame. When we could demonstrate a capability to
a customer and prove that we could build in quantity, then we'd
deliver it. Actually we became, I would say, a bit shell-shocked.
_KC: Back to core values, but in a way it was a salutary lesson._
JS: It was a good lesson about how you do things, and it rebuilt
our credibility; not without people losing their jobs -- which in
HP, meant getting other jobs, not getting fired -- but George
Newman was one of the people who was involved in that whole
thing, too. We were very chastened. It hurt us badly, hurt our
psyches, hurt our sense of winning. And it probably caused some
people some major career points.
FLOATING-POINT DIVISION
_KC: One more question: If there was this split in the perceived
computing market, between the real-time or engineering system and
the time-shared commercial system, to what extent was that split
carried forward into the division between the 3000 and the 9000?_
JS: HP was always organized on a division basis, and that was
its greatness. It was also its weakness in the computer business,
because you couldn't break up computer markets by divisions, and
there was a war on at Hewlett-Packard from day one about "which
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 15
computing platform, which hardware, which software." At one point
we realized that we had over half a dozen different BASICs in the
corporation, none of them compatible, each aimed at particular
markets by the division that sponsored it. We were horribly
inefficient in attacking the market because a division could do
anything it wanted; there was maximum independence and minimum
coordination. The problems got worse as platforms and their divi-
sions proliferated -- the hand-held division, the desk-top
division. Our entry into the 32-bit computer finally came out of
the desk-top division, because the Focus chip set was designed to
power a computer that was ten times faster than the 9845, which
was a single-user desk-top BASIC system, that we then tried to
put UNIX on and make it a general-purpose "workstation" using a
$100 million proprietary chipset -- instead of going with the
then-standard 68000 from Motorola, and that's a whole different
story....
-------------------------------------------------
THE MAC AND ME:
15 Years of Life with the Macintosh
-------------------------------------------------
by Jef Raskin
INTRODUCTION
The success of the Macintosh cannot be credited to any one
person. I gave it its human-oriented, graphics-based, compact-
sized nature from the very first, invented some now-universal
interface concepts, and made many decisions that proved
fundamental to its success. I hired a crew of unknowns who have
become, almost without exception, men and women known throughout
the industry for their continued innovation. It was not just me,
but my original Macintosh crew of four, then a dozen or so, and
finally hundreds of people, who created that first Macintosh. Now
thousands at Apple continue to create and expand the Macintosh
line of computers and the machines that will follow in its
footprint. And even so it would have been a dead-end product,
after all this effort, without the work done by thousands of
software developers who give tens of millions of Macintosh users
the tools they need. In this logarithmically spiraling cascade of
numbers we come today to something over a hundred million people
who use -- at their desks at home or at work, in their schools
and libraries, at the beach, in airplanes, everywhere -- systems
that look and feel much like Macs. Amplified by all this effort
and the sincerest form of flattery, the influence of the
Macintosh may well have touched the lives of over one percent of
the world's population.
The phenomenon that I have just described represents the
expansion of one person's stream of ideas into a flood, but the
stream had to first gather force from numerous tributaries. It
was not just my own inspiration, but the flowing together of the
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 16
genius of Ivan Sutherland and Douglas Englebart, the scientists
at Xerox PARC, the development of the microprocessor, the success
of the Apple II, the efforts of many other people whose work I
studied and learned from (I will never be able to thank them all)
-- and a lot of luck -- that led to that one nexus in space-time,
in the spring of 1979, when I went to the CEO of Apple and told
him that I wanted to design a new product I had been dreaming of
for a while, and that I wanted to call it Macintosh.
In 1994 the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh
was celebrated with a rash of articles -- some of dubious
accuracy -- and parties at Apple and elsewhere. But it was also
the 15th anniversary of the origin of the Macintosh project. This
is the story of how the Mac, a product that has changed the face
and interface of computing, first came into being.
THE HUMAN-ORIENTED COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENT
It's hard to say when the conceptual framework for the Mac began.
Parts of it can be discerned as early as 1965 when I was a
graduate student in computer science at Penn State. Already
steeped in the technicalities of computer design and programming,
I nonetheless found computers aggravatingly -- and unnecessarily
-- difficult to use, and always looked for ways to make them less
intimidating. I soon earned a reputation as being sympathetic and
helpful to our least technical users, especially those in the
arts and humanities. Since I was (and am) as comfortable in the
humanities and the fine arts as I am with science and
mathematics, I never forgot our shared pain and frustration with
the nonsensical ways computers were (and are) operated. In
contrast, most of my fellow students celebrated their detailed
knowledge and seemed to enjoy the power and status that
distinguished them from "ordinary users." They preferred to work
with hard-nosed programming students with whom they could attack
problems in full jargon.
In my 1967 thesis, "The Quick Draw Graphics System," I took issue
with the display architecture then in vogue. At this time, input
was mostly via punched cards, and output took the form of ex-
travagant quantities of oversize paper sheets from massive and
noisy "line printers." Those who wanted pictures turned to
expensive plotters designed to do engineering drawings. There
were only a few CRT terminals at the Penn State computer center,
and these could display only letters and symbols, usually in
green or white on a black background. Hamstrung by specialized
electronics -- in particular a circuit called a "character
generator" -- that permitted no other use, they could not display
graphics. One display at the center could draw thin, spidery
lines on its large screen. With it you could do drawings that now
seem crude, annotated by child-like stick-figure lettering.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 17
In this milieu my thesis was radical in suggesting that computer
displays should be graphics- rather than character-based. I
argued that, by considering characters as just a particular kind
of graphics, we could produce whatever fonts we wished, and mix
text and drawings with the same freedom as on the drawn or
printed page. To prove my point, I wrote a program that generated
the complex, two-dimensional notation of music. To accomplish
this, I needed to enter graphic data into the computer system.
Commercial digitizers were then as expensive as a small house; my
only choice was to design and build one. Its input was somewhat
indirect, in that as I pointed here and there, it produced
punched cards which had to be read into the computer later. With
only limited access to a machine shop and within the tiny budget
a graduate student might worm from the university, I found it
hard to achieve the required precision and repeatability; but my
digitizer, although mechanically and electronically Rube-
Goldbergish, was an inexpensive and practical one-point-at-a-time
Graphic Input Device (GID). I did not know of [Douglas] Engle-
bart, on the West Coast, and his recent invention of the mouse;
even if I had, it would have been hard to hook it up to the
mainframe we were using.
A mark of how much things have changed was my casual use of the
word "fonts" in the paragraph above. Today, almost every computer
user thinks of character display and printing in terms of fonts;
but when I was a graduate student -- and even when I started the
Macintosh project -- most people in the computer world did not
think of fonts in connection with computers. When I talked about
the merits of serif and sans-serif fonts, the advantages of
variable- over fixed-pitch fonts, or the beauties of Bodoni's
work, I got blank stares and people might mutter. "There goes
Raskin with his odd art stuff again." To talk about fonts and
drawing was to emigrate from computer science to the world of
graphic artists, typographers and other "arts people." Now,
everybody seems to have a few dozen fonts on their computer to
play with; what I wished for has happened.
Another radical claim I made in my thesis was that ease of use
should have a higher priority in the design of computers than
speed and efficiency. Learning how to make code run in shorter
time, or less memory, or both, was central to computer science
training; human interface was not given the slightest
consideration. Computer time was expensive then, and pride of
place for human convenience was an alien concept. It was not
unimportant at that time to use internal computer resources ef-
ficiently, and it is still essential today. But efficiency should
be neither an end in itself nor the highest ambition of the
computer scientist -- contrary to the impression one often got in
graduate school in computer science.
Old-fashioned computer centers were an ideal breeding ground for
pranks. Appalled by the daily waste of paper, a few friends and I
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 18
once decorated the computer center building with a day's dis-
carded output. Early arrivers the next morning found a band of
white interrupting the red brick, and had to do some tearing to
get into the building. The same stunt now could be considered a
work of art. On another occasion a state-level dignitary was
visiting the computer center. I set up the computer so that
opening the massive printer cover (done by a remote command)
would dump a wastebasket full of the punched-out paper chips from
a card-punch into an air vent intake, giving the startling effect
of a short-lived snow storm coming up from the floor. No one
doubted the identity of the perpetrator (I guess I had a
reputation) so sweeping and vacuuming were my lot.
My friend and office-mate Steve Zins and I engaged in a rubber-
band gun arms race: my best designs were single-shot guns of
unprecedented accuracy, needed to shoot the flies generated by
the adjacent cow fields. Steve created a Gatling gun that could
plaster my chest with some 60 rubber bands in less than a second
(though the gun took five minutes to load for that one burst.)
But I digress...
TO THE WEST COAST
The first truly interactive graphical computer system that came
to my attention was Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad. Though the
hardware available at Penn State would not allow me to follow his
lead, Sutherland's work was a revelation and an inspiration. It
used a CRT display and had a light-sensitive "pen" for graphic
input. In high school I had built a rudimentary light pen for an
oscilloscope, so I immediately knew how it worked. One pecu-
liarity is that you had to put up a mark of some sort (Sutherland
used the word "INK") so the pen had some light to detect. You
just could not start drawing without first pointing to the "ink,"
after which the computer could track the light pen. If you tilted
the pen too far or moved it away from the screen, the computer
"lost" the pen.
These details must be emphasized. Without them it is too easy to
imagine, when you hear that Sutherland's ground-breaking system
had "rubber band" lines and could do graphic input and output,
that it all worked in the now-familiar Macintosh and Windows
fashion. By present lights Sutherland's system was crude and
limited. In its own day it was a wonder and an inspiration.
As I fretted with the details of getting my thesis approved, I
began dreaming of a computer that would be graphical, easy to
learn, easy to use, capable of everyday tasks such as word
processing, and, above all, affordable. At the time this was not
just a dream, but simply impossible. For a while, getting my
degree also appeared an impossible dream; my thesis was rejected
for not following the rules. One rule in particular was that you
were to use only one font in a thesis; they didn't want you to
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 19
turn out part of it on one typewriter and the rest on another.
This had launched a local industry of typists who knew the
university rules to the letter, and whom you paid to produce the
final draft exactly to specifications, in the required number of
copies.
My thesis had characters in several fonts, exactly to demonstrate
that one could produce distinct fonts on a graphics-based system.
The use of varied fonts was, I complained, part of the subject
matter; to rule out their use was to attack the content, and not
just the form, of the thesis. After months of verbal wrangling
and a memo war, my thesis was accepted, fonts and all.
Tired of Pennsylvania winters and Penn State's cold bureaucrats,
my wife and I drove west, until we ran out of land in La Jolla,
just north of San Diego. We knew nobody in the area, but by luck
had ended up at the University of California's Scripps
Institution of Oceanography. Walking out onto the Scripps pier I
saw, for the first time, a pelican abruptly fold its wings and
splash into the ocean. I thought it had been shot.
EARLIER INFLUENCES
Sometime in middle or early high school I was given a copy of
Claude Shannon's marvelous _Information Theory_. I can remember
no other books from that time, by both title and author, except
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It was eye-
opening and completely wonderful to learn that this ephemeral,
seemingly unquantitative stuff called information was amenable to
a physics as rigorous as that for objects and motion -- and that
this physics was almost purely mathematical in its development.
This was extremely appealing, as mathematics was by far my first
love, queen of all the subjects I could command. It may seem
premature for one at the age of 14 or so to be so smitten; but it
was my good fortune that Ron Genise -- a most wonderful teacher,
and later friend -- had begun, in my sixth grade, to make the
beauty and power of mathematics as alive and vivid for me as the
performance of sports figures and cars were for my classmates. I
believe that he first pointed out the Shannon book to me, and if
my memory is astray on that point, at least I know that he led me
to the intellectual point of view from which I could appreciate
it.
During this time I read an article about the rate at which
information (measured, as Shannon had shown, in bits per second)
could be communicated from the eyes to the brain. The number
seemed much too low. For example, I could sight-read pieces by
Chopin and Beethoven on the piano. As an early exercise in
information theory I calculated the number of bits in each
symbol. This is not difficult; for example, a note head specifies
one of the 88 notes on the piano, and this takes a little over
seven bits. It also specifies a duration, which for most
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 20
practical purposes has one of 8 values, which is exactly three
bits of information. So a note conveys approximately 10 bits of
information.
Ignoring other symbols and some details here (I was more precise
in the paper I wrote at the time) and considering music where one
is reading four chords each of six notes in a second, implies a
transmission rate of 2400 bits per second (2400 baud.) This
exceeded the rate at which neurophysiologists believed the senses
could transmit data. This made me realize that I wasn't really
reading each note, but analyzing the chords into harmonies:
"that's an E-flat major chord in the first inversion..." and so
on. All my brain had to deal with was the single concept of a
certain chord, and not all the details of each note. Later,
reading about psychology, I found that I had re-discovered a phe-
nomenon called "chunking" which allows us to grasp much more than
would be indicated the slow data rates experiment shows our
brains can handle.
This has been a paradigm typical of my entire life; supposedly
different disciplines merge or interact, reinforcing each other.
Studying math opens the path to a book on the physics of
information which informs my classical musical studies, enhanced
by my having ignored my music teacher's wishes and learned to
play from jazz "charts" instead of sticking only to classical
music. The speed at which I can read music seems to violate a
fact I read in a science magazine (I am a compulsive reader, and
will read almost anything,) the solution to which gives me an
anchor of understanding when I am learning about something in
psychology years later. Somehow it all fits together.
FAMILY AND FEMINISM
My parents brought my brother and me up to recognize oppression
and to fight it. Popular, gregarious, and very active in civic
events, they risked friendship and fortune in defending racial
equality in the 1950s and 60s.
The following is part of the column I wrote about my father for
the local paper:
----------
My father, Bill, died last week. It was not at all unexpected.
His health had been failing since my mother died a few years ago.
Recently he had had a stroke and was also diagnosed with
congestive heart failure. He could barely speak. My brother
Michael had flown in from Boston and the three of us were
together for what was to be the last time. Bill struggled for
speech and repeated, "What can I say? What can I say?", a phrase
he had always used when overcome with emotion. We told him that
he didn't have to say anything, but he finally said, with evident
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 21
effort, "I love you." and embarrassed us a little by taking our
hands and kissing them All I could think to do was to return the
gesture and kiss his hand. At this he smiled his delightful
smile, made lop-sided by his stroke, yet a smile that reminded us
for a moment of the father he had been.
If you had met him you'd have found a mild-mannered man, soft-
spoken, well-liked and without self-interested ambition. The love
between my parents was constant and evident to all who knew them.
A responsible citizen, a merchant, a member of the school board
after my brother and I had gone on to college -- he would not be
on the board while we were students to avoid tainting our
achievements with suspicions of favoritism. For many years he was
the secretary of the Lions Club. He never accepted the many
nominations to be president. He liked to lead by example, by
quiet persuasion, and with gentle humor from the sidelines.
On moral issues he was inflexible; I have space for only one
example. In the '50's, long before the present civil rights
movement was in full steam, he incurred the enmity of nearly the
entire town by supporting the hiring of man of African descent as
an English teacher, and backing another as a member of the Lions
Club. I remember a long-time customer coming in to our store and
saying, with true regret in her tone, "I can no longer shop here.
You understand why."
We had a solemn family meeting. Our parents told us that we had a
choice to make: if we continued to back our beliefs we would be
very poor for a while, there would be no toys at year's end, no
going to restaurants, and so forth. We knew what he meant, our
family-owned store was too often quiet, the piles of layaways for
Christmas were not building up in the basement as they had in
previous years. The other choice, he said, was to hold onto our
beliefs privately but not push matters. He would not impose his
values and the attendant risks on his children. It was up to us
and we knew he would abide by our decision. Michael and I had no
patience with people who judged others on their race or cultural
background, and we said (as Bill proudly recounted years later)
without hesitation that we didn't care about presents but that we
did care about our friends. To do nothing was to give tacit
approval to racism.
Some would say that we lost. We had to sell the store across from
the railroad station and set up shop in a poorer neighborhood.
Instead of big Buicks and Packards we drove the cheapest Renault.
We no longer had a summer house by the lake. And the lovely
presents we had become used to came no more. The Lions club split
in two, a large whites-only club and a tiny integrated one with
my father as secretary. But we won. The high school had its first
black teacher, and others followed. The white Lions club faded
and Bill's survived.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 22
There were no services; he was an atheist as righteous as any
church-goer. He donated his body to science, and his love of
humanity to his sons.
----------
The messages were clear. One was: figure out what is right and
then stick to your guns. Another: principle is more important
than practicality. These were two of the beliefs that propelled
the Macintosh as it came into being. I was not uncomfortable
defying common wisdom.
This early training also made it easy for me to recognize girls
and women as an oppressed class in our society. As a child I had
seen my intellectually brilliant cousin, Miriam, given dolls
while I would get the far more interesting Erector sets and chem-
istry labs we both preferred. My feminist leanings were deepened
by some of the things that later happened to my friend Karen
Kalinsky. For example, when we were undergraduates at S. U. N. Y.
at Stony Brook, I held a job in the computer center. Karen, also
a math major, became interested in computers and decided to take
the programming course; the head of the computer center there had
offered jobs to the people who got the three highest scores on
the final and Karen was rarely outscored on any test. Looking at
the posted list, we saw that she had received the top score, and
we anticipated working together at the computer center. The jobs,
however, went to the three top men in the class! We were mad, she
raised a ruckus, and I quit in protest.
We went to Penn State next. As usual, I got a job at the computer
center, and as usual, they wouldn't hire her -- in spite of
credentials better than mine in some ways, such as grade point
average -- because her "boy friend" worked there. After we were
married, there was no way she could be hired. Nepotism, you know.
By the time we reached the west coast, degrees in hand, we were
smarter about jobs. She took a position first, running the
computer at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at
University of California at San Diego (UCSD.) Shortly thereafter,
I got a job at the University Computer Center. They didn't think
to ask a man if his wife worked in a professional capacity -- on
the form it only asked if your husband worked at the University.
I also saw some of the sexist hurdles my cousin Miriam had to
face, such as being ignored by the professors in classes. (Miriam
is now a professor and researcher at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor.) These experiences are relevant to our story; for
one thing, they influenced my choice of the name "Macintosh" for
my favorite computer.
While working at the UCSD computer center, I became familiar with
other parts of the school. The music department, filled with
avant garde composers and performers, was intrigued by my back-
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 23
ground in both computers and music (I had designed and built the
first electronic music studio at Penn State.) It looked like a
good fit and I became a graduate student there, working toward a
Ph.D. in music. UCSD, like some English universities, is divided
into colleges; at the time, the first two were named Revelle and
Muir Colleges, and the newest was simply called "Third College."
By a peculiar series of events (that would, for once, take us too
far afield if I described it here,) I soon became the computer
center director and a professor of Visual Art at Third College,
positions I held from 1969 through 1974.
The main computer center at Revelle College was noisy,
antiseptic, and lit by fluorescent lights that glared off white
vinyl floors. It was punch-card-oriented and built around a
physically huge, multi-million dollar mainframe computer. The
computer center I designed for Third College, located in a war-
surplus Quonset hut, was very different. It used a pair of Data
General Nova minicomputers with 16 interactive terminals. The
decor was bean-bag chairs and Japanese paper lanterns, giving my
center a friendly, funky feel. It became the natural home for
people with what were then seen as "odd" computer applications,
like music and art. Some of the campus's computer aficionados
found that they preferred the unhurried, interactive context of
the minicomputers to the fluorescent, buzzy mainframe environment
on the other side of campus. In light of today's personal
computers, which operate in homes, cars, and at the beach, it is
hard to remember that in the early 1970's a computer center such
as the one I created was countercultural, and perhaps unique.
THE THIRD COLLEGE COMPUTER CENTER
My computer center was funded primarily by the National Science
Foundation and the University of California. I suspect that if
Senators Proxmire or Helms had ever visited it they would have
mistaken it for a typical waste of taxpayer's money. It looked
more like a place to get stoned than to get educated, a hippy
haven.
But looks are just looks, and I have always made my courses
friendly in spirit while I demanded hard work from the students.
The new computer center was an effective educational facility.
Only ten per cent of the undergraduates who learned programming
at UCSD went through my courses, but nearly half of the students
who held paying jobs at the main computer center had done so.
There was no doubt that the Third College computer center was
doing a good job at creating future computer scientists. Better
still, it was reaching students who would otherwise never have
gone near a mainframe, just as the Macintosh would someday be
used by people who thought they'd never touch a computer. It was
not the technology that made my teaching so effective, but the
interface! Students learned more and better in a pleasant
environment where, to test their programs, they simply pressed a
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 24
key and got results. The other side of campus was batch-oriented;
you presented a deck and went to the printer to await your
output. Fortunately Ken Bowles, the director of the Revelle
center, had an enlightened attitude for someone in his position
at the time; he did not regard a second, student-oriented
computer center as a challenge to his hegemony. Years later
Bowles would spearhead development of the computer language and
operating system called UCSD Pascal, which would be essential to
the success of Apple and the Macintosh.
In retrospect, the Third College Computer Center was all that a
grant administrator could wish for: it met its educational aims,
resulted in appropriate publications, and later went on to
inspire commercial products that have boosted the GNP (gross
national product) to the tune of billions of dollars. It is
definitely possible to see precursors of the Macintosh in the
Third College center's low tables with small rectangular monitors
and detached keyboards. Though they had to be tied to a common
system, the effect was as if each student had a personal
computer. Resources had to be shared in 1973, when a 4K byte
(enough to hold about 800 words of English) random access memory
(RAM) memory unit cost nearly two thousand dollars. As this is
written, each 4K bytes of RAM in my Macintosh computer costs less
than 10 cents.
During the summers, I used one of the Novas as my personal
computer. My mostly volunteer staff and student friends (notably
Jon Collins, Barbara Zakarian, Bill Atkinson, and Steve Clark)
helped me put the computer into the back of my truck on a wheeled
dolly, and we used it wherever we went. One memorable time we
took it with us into a restaurant, using it to figure the bill
and the tip, to the amazement of the waitresses and patrons who
crowded around. A computer outside of a lab was an absolute
novelty. These experiences with a "portable" computer system gave
me a foretaste of what it would be like to own a personal
computer. Like the crocodile in Peter Pan, I would never forget
that taste, and craved it for years.
SAIL AND SILICON VALLEY
In 1972 I visited the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (SAIL,) which had an established reputation as a
center for advanced research in computer science. I was also
introduced to another magical place that had recently opened and
was a short bicycle ride away. The Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC) was to become even better known than SAIL in the
coming years. Thanks to a strong common interest in early music
as well as computers, I soon found a close friend in the person
of Doug Wyatt, a tall, thin man who is as quiet as he is
technically brilliant and musically talented. Doug took a leave
of absence from PARC and came down to San Diego for a while to
write new software for my computer center.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 25
A programming language I designed, "FLOW," was implemented and
improved by Doug. The human interface used in this system, as
well as the design of the language itself, were somewhat ahead of
their time. It proved so effective that it came to the attention
of the cognitive psychologist Don Norman, later to become a
leader in the fields of cognitive psychology and man-machine
interfaces, who is now an Apple Fellow and a writer of popular
books on the subject. Norman did some of his first computer-
interface-related work investigating why students learned faster
and better with the "FLOW" computer language.
The next summer I was invited to become a Visiting Scholar at
SAIL. It was a great place to be. I remember fondly the memorable
daily, end-of-the-day volleyball game, after which most of us
would retire to the lounge and watch _Star Trek_. After which a
lot of us would get supper and go back to work. There are a
number of reasons why I remember watching _Star Trek_. I enjoyed
the show, and once it led to a remarkable incident.
To understand what happened, you have to know that an
experimental robot occasionally roamed the halls and parking lots
at SAIL. The rambling robot (in case you were picturing C3PO
walking across the desert with R2D2) looked like a wheeled table
full of surplus electronics. It was not at all humanoid, or even
robotoid. On this occasion we were sitting down to watch Captain
Kirk and his enterprising crew when the robot wandered in,
stopped, swiveled its TV eye at the set and sat there throughout
the show. At the end, it whirred into life, rolled itself around,
and left as we did. Later I learned that Hans Moravec was working
at a terminal that did not have TV feed (most terminals at the AI
lab did -- another development way ahead of its time that I was
exposed to) and had sent in the robot to beam the picture and
sound back to his monitor. It occurred to me that we were
probably the only people in the universe watching _Star Trek_ in
the company of a robot.
While at SAIL I used the early Defense Department progenitor of
the now-popular Internet. ARPAnet allowed us to communicate with
and use remote computers. It felt like magic to be sitting in
California and running a computer at MIT. I became an early e-
mail junkie, a habit that I have yet to kick after 20 years.
PARC
The populations at SAIL and PARC intermingled freely and I found
myself gravitating more and more toward the beanbag chairs at
PARC. A significant portion of their work was based on the same
goals as my own, to make the power of computers accessible to
non-specialists. I suspect that I fit in easily and well because
they didn't have to start by converting me to their point of
view; I was already there. I meanwhile felt at home since, for
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 26
the first time, I was among computer scientists who were on the
same wavelength as I. They had accomplished independently what my
thesis had called for a few years earlier: computers that were
graphic-based, without impediments such as character generators.
What was more exciting was that the people I spoke with were
concentrating on interface design, which I also saw as the area
of computer science most in need of development.
By 1974 I was fed up with the politics in the UCSD art department
and left the University, making my point in artistic fashion by
ascending in a huge hot air balloon, playing the sopranino
recorder, and announcing my resignation from 100 feet up in the
air. I was also tired of the directions the computer industry was
taking. It was all "more" and "bigger" and "faster," but not
really better (this history is being repeated with personal
computers today.) Nobody seemed interested in what I was
preaching about usability. I sold my house near San Diego and
moved to Brisbane, a town just south of San Francisco. I tried
the life of a street musician and music teacher, started a com-
pany that made radio-controlled model airplane kits (a business
that continues today,) and became the conductor of the San
Francisco Chamber Opera. I also worked briefly as a packaging
designer, but left when I couldn't convince the owner that we
could design boxes faster and better with a computer. In the
1990's the owner's son, who better understood what I had
proposed, wrote a set of computer programs to do box layout, and
now has a successful business making boxes -- and an even more
successful one selling the software.
I also worked as an advertising and portfolio photographer
(having been taught a bit about the art by my former student and
forever mentor David Wing, now a professor of art at Grossmont
College east of San Diego.) During this period of wandering, I
started a company called Bannister & Crun to write software and
manuals. The company was named after two characters (Minnie
Bannister and Henry Crun) featured on the BBC's beloved Goon
Show. Between the way the Goon Show's players mangled English and
the spotty reception of my shortwave radio, it was sometimes hard
following their humor; they were to radio what Monty Python was
to become to TV.
Our first job at Bannister & Crun was to computerize the South
San Francisco sewer billing system, a job that required me to
visit the sewage treatment plant from time to time and work on
one of the most dreadfully designed computers I had ever seen, an
early Qantel model. We also worked on other software projects and
wrote manuals for companies that included National Semiconductor
and Heathkit.
ENTER THE MICROCOMPUTER
In late 1974 the general purpose microprocessor chip was put on
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 27
the market and I remember discussing its incredible potential
with Doug Wyatt and a mutual musical friend, a talented and
extraordinarily pleasant man named Brian Howard. Of broad
learning, with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford,
he was working for the preventive medicine department at the uni-
versity, doing a characteristically wide range of things
including building test equipment. Brian was to become a central
intelligence in the development of the Macintosh and, later, one
of the designers of Apple's first laser printer -- another
product that changed the face of computing. He continues as a
respected engineer at Apple.
When the first microcomputer kit, the MITS Altair, was announced
in 1975, Brian, Doug, and I just had to have one. With soldering
iron, oscilloscope, and logic probe in hand, Doug and I built the
Altair and (somewhat to our surprise) got it working. This was a
non-trivial endeavor, but Doug's combination of methodical care
and clever insight solved many a problem. I was experienced with
a soldering iron and felt comfortable with the construction
because electronics had been a hobby of mine as a child. I had
won a science fair prize for a computer I made while in high
school. Building a computer is, perhaps, nothing to crow about
now, but in 1960 individuals just didn't have computers and kids
didn't use or program them. I was still a hardware jock as an
undergraduate, designing and building a computer from scratch for
the Biology department at the State University of New York, then
at Oyster Bay (now Stony Brook.) This background proved useful
when creating the Mac, since I had a realistic idea of what could
and could not be done with electronic components. Having done
electronic design and testing myself, I could communicate with
electronic wizards, and not be snowed when they spoke of
impedance or logic levels.
We got the Altair running a program that did stock market
analysis, and we sold it for about $5,000 to Jim Hurst, a stock
market guru. He'd been paying $10,000 per month in time-shared
computer charges for the same work, so the micro system amortized
out in two weeks -- a great savings to him. The computer had cost
us a few hundred dollars and had served well as an introduction
to microcomputing. With part of our profits we bought a slightly
more sophisticated IMSAI, and I built the first modem kit that
became available. I made back a bit of the money I spent on that
kit by authoring a review of it for _Dr. Dobb's Journal_. I liked
reviewing kits and I was soon writing the "Consumer Notes" column
for that magazine. I became a reporter on the early personal
computer scene; pieces I wrote appeared in _Personal Computing,
Interface Age,_ the _Silicon Gulch Gazette, Kilobaud,
Datamation,_ and _Byte_ magazine.
Jim Warren, who ran the wonderfully-named _Dr. Dobb's Journal of
Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia_ (Running Light without
Overbyte,) is a delightful, jovial, and unconventional man who
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 28
sparked much in the industry. He created the West Coast Computer
Faires and now works on creating political enfranchisement
through technology. He often managed the Faires by cruising their
huge exhibit halls on roller skates. One of the assignments he
gave me in 1976 was to interview two fellow-members of the now-
legendary Homebrew Computer Club centered in Palo Alto. The club,
many of whose members went on to become prominent in the computer
industry, was moderated by the very funny and genial Lee
Felsenstein. This was also the man who designed the modem I
reviewed (it's a small valley.) Doug Wyatt and I got an ovation
one night when I announced that we had run our IMSAI for over a
month without once taking the top off to fix something; it was a
real milestone (and a tribute to clean soldering.)
THE TWO STEVES
The members I was sent to interview were building a new computer
in their garage. By coincidence both were named "Steve" and their
project was the Apple I. I was impressed by Steve "Woz" Wozniak's
brilliant and efficient design and pre-decoded bus concept, and
his exposition of the advantages of the 6800 and 6502
architecture over the competing 8008 and 8080-based machines.
(Incredibly, this competition between architectures continues to
this day.) I remember Woz explaining how the pre-decoded bus made
peripherals simpler, that you could send information to
peripherals the same way you wrote to memory, and that memory
wasn't paged -- unimportant details in this essay perhaps, but
indicative of the kinds of considerations that Woz paid careful
attention to. And I loved the name "Apple" instead of the techie
names everybody else was using; it fit my kind of iconoclastic
spirit. Now we have become so accustomed to it that it is hard to
remember how joltingly countercultural that name was at first. A
computer company named "Apple"?
The other Steve, Steve Jobs, was a delight to talk to about less
technical aspects of computers. His enthusiasm and business
orientation were exciting. They were just starting on the design
of the Apple II, and I tried to convince them that they should
employ bit-mapped graphics and not have a character generator,
but Woz thought that software couldn't handle the character
generation task fast enough and Steve Jobs didn't understand why
I thought it so important. I had a different vision of what a
microcomputer should be like, and PARC's programmers and my own
work had convinced me that software could do the job. I tried to
convince Woz by working out the code to put bit-mapped characters
on the screen and calculating timings by counting cycles, but the
Steves were not open to the idea. The concepts I espoused were
far from the mainstream of computer design and for all their
mold-breaking thinking, Steve and Steve were very strongly
conditioned by the minicomputers they had seen. To do them
justice, Woz was absolutely correct in stating that a character
generator was much faster and its software less memory intensive
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 29
than my all-graphics approach. But had I been able to convey my
vision better, I suspect he could have made bit-mapping work fast
enough back then.
It was by the slimmest of chances that the Apple II had a high
resolution graphics mode (Hi-Res) on which bit-mapped graphics
could later be explored. Woz was not going to include it but Jobs
asked Woz how many chips it would take to add the feature. Woz
said that it would take only two, so Jobs insisted that they
could afford it. Sometimes history stumbles along from accident
to accident, things are done that seem like a good idea at the
time, and every now and then they are.
I tried to convince Jobs and Woz to visit PARC, which was a very
academic and open place (Xerox may later have felt that PARC was
too open,) but did not succeed. Jobs repeatedly told me (and any-
body else he could get hold of) that a large corporation like
Xerox couldn't do anything interesting. Hewlett-Packard's
rejection of Woz's proposal for a personal computer, when he
worked there, was a prime example of such corporate blindness,
and ever after remained part of their psychological motivation.
If I could have told them then that Hewlett Packard would someday
make millions of dollars simply by selling peripherals to Apple
computer products (as has happened,) the Steves would have been
ecstatic, and rightfully so.
APPLE MANUALS
I worked with Jobs and Woz and, under the aegis of Bannister &
Crun, wrote a user-oriented portion of the manual for the Apple
I. There was a tiny misunderstanding about the price: I was
talking about $50 per finished page and they thought I had said
that it would cost $50 for me to write the whole manual. We
resolved our differences amicably and work proceeded.
At about this time Jobs made a decision crucial to the history of
personal computers. Paul Terrell ran the Byte Shop in Mountain
View, one of the first retail computer stores in the world. When
Jobs and Woz asked his advice he insisted that the Apple II must
have a non-rectilinear, consumer-oriented, plastic case and --
unlike the Apple I and many of its competitors -- should never be
sold as a kit for which potential users had to scrounge parts at
local surplus or electronics stores. I well remember the hassle
of finding keyboards that worked properly with the very early
microcomputers, and connectors to fit the idiosyncratic circuit
boards. The Apple II, Terrell suggested, should circumvent these
problems by being factory-built with an integral keyboard and
power supply.
Terrell was not quite alone in recognizing these desiderata. The
SOL, designed by Lee Felsenstein and manufactured by Processor
Technology, had a typewriter look. A Utah company, Sphere, sold a
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 30
complete little machine with a programmer's hexadecimal keyboard
(base 16 numbers only) and included a video screen even before
the Apple I was released. The Commodore PET and TRS-80, both
designed with much attention to consumer needs, followed soon
after the Apple II. But though Apple was not alone, it had
important advantages. One was Woz's remarkable BASIC interpreter
with color graphics commands embedded in it. Another was that
Apple was led by a raving firebrand in the person of Steve Jobs -
- which was just what the industry needed.
Bannister & Crun was engaged to write the manual for Apple II's
BASIC. This gave me the chance to put some of what I had learned
as a computer science professor into a vehicle that I believed
would reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a few
years. It had been hard to give up teaching, which I love and yet
hope to get back to, but (as I wrote to my parents) I felt that I
could do more good for education by working at Apple than in any
other way open to me.
The BASIC manual, first published in 1978, turned out to be a
trend-setter. Instead of starting off with the then-customary
explanation of the internal architecture of the computer, it got
right to what people had to do to get the product working. It
first explained in a step-by-step manner how to hook up the
computer and use the keyboard. It then quickly moved the learner
into doing color graphics (in 1978!). Another first: the manual
used color illustrations and photos.
Today, when computer products are graded by magazines on the
quality of their documentation, it may be surprising to learn
that the nascent company barely saw the need for an Apple II
manual at all. Mike Scott (Scotty,) a large man whose occa-
sionally high-handed manner and gruff speaking style could be
intimidating, had come from National Semiconductor to be Apple's
president. He said, half seriously, that at National they had
done very well with one-page data sheets, and I could save the
company a lot of money by doing likewise. I soon learned that in
spite of his manner, he was open to cogent arguments. Later he
was to protect and nurture my Macintosh project when it was at a
delicate stage.
Writing user documentation was a perfect prelude to creating the
Macintosh at Apple. Doing manuals forced me to look at each
product -- in excruciating detail -- from the customer's point of
view. It is an experience I wish all computer and interface
designers could share. Any design flaw that interferes with
learning or using the product becomes painfully apparent as you
struggle to explain the quirk to the user. Time after time Brian
Howard and I would wrestle with these problems, our frustrations
coming out as subtle, snide remarks about design errors --
remarks that, in those innocent days, often appeared in our
manuals. This sometimes annoyed marketing people, but it actually
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 31
served the purposes of Apple's products. The comments told the
truth, showed sympathy for the customer's plight, and created
credibility for the rest of the manual and the company as a
whole. Too many manuals are fairy tales about how a product is
supposed to work, or how it worked in the previous version.
When we wrote the Apple II manuals at Bannister & Crun the
product was already finished -- we weren't trying to write a
manual from specifications or rough prototypes. Trying to
document a product still in development is an often-made mistake
which guarantees a second-rate result. Since almost everybody now
does this, customers have come to accept such manuals as
standard. It can't work well, since you are documenting something
different than what the customer will get, you are writing about
a fiction, a planned product (and we all know that products
always turn out exactly as planned.) To be sure, the manual can
be edited to conform with changes, but that is not nearly as good
as having the whole picture in mind from the beginning. Besides,
you never catch all the changes, as the customers eventually find
out.
We weren't the only group writing good manuals; another example
was the superb HP 35 manual. The HP 35 was the first scientific
pocket calculator, another fabulous product that opened up an
industry. Its manual was an inspiration in terms of writing, use
of color and layout, and informal conversational style. Instead
of a lecture about the calculator's remarkable stack architecture
or revolutionary custom electronic chips, the manual started you
out punching buttons and seeing what happened. Later, when the
topic had some value and experiential basis, you were given a
mental model of what was going on inside. Along with my Apple I
and Apple II (serial number 2) I keep my HP 35, still in working
condition, in my office. The inspiring manual is displayed
alongside it.
The Apple II manuals also worked because they were tested with
typical users and rewritten as necessary, a concept nearly unique
at the time in the computer industry, and one now regularly aban-
doned (to the detriment of users everywhere) under the excuse of
time pressures. The time thus "saved" is not always a win; what
the manufacturer gains by a few weeks' shorter product cycle is
lost doubly -- to customer dissatisfaction, and as a continual
drain on the bottom line attributable to increased support costs.
As CEO of Bannister & Crun I demanded that I have a real product
in its packaging before I wrote a manual, and in those days I got
what I asked for. Errors in the manuals were extraordinarily rare
thanks to these procedures. Brian Howard turned out to be a great
editor, along with his other talents; his comments and those of
Doug Wyatt were my education in how to write clearly and simply.
My writing has never achieved the standards they set, but
inasmuch as it is better than it was, they -- and the many other
people who have since bravely waded through my first drafts and
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 32
let me know in no uncertain terms that a lot more work was
required -- deserve a lot of credit.
APPLE'S MANAGEMENT
Having already approved the use of high-quality, coated paper,
four-color illustrations, two-color printing throughout, and
full-length manuals, management was reluctant to support the use
of a wire binding so that the manual would lie flat (at least we
had gone beyond flat lies.) I had often observed that most users
didn't have a third hand to hold the manual open as they typed.
During 1977, when I was merely a vendor to the company, two key
people supported my point of view: co-founder Steve Jobs and
chairman "Mike" Markkula, also known by his initials "ACM."
Markkula had profited significantly from his experience at Intel,
not only financially, but as a well-polished manager. Not having
been in industry, I had never worked with a person of his
extraordinary business skills, and I am still striving to live up
to some of the examples he set. For one, he always gave the
impression of having all the time in the world to hear what I had
to say. He proved that he was listening, either by acting on my
suggestions, or by taking the time to explain to me why they were
not good ideas. One of my not-very-good ideas was to lower the
price of the Apple II. I had been upset when I figured out how
large Apple's margins were. Markkula patiently explained that
while Apple's products were more expensive, the resultant
financial strength of the company meant that Apple would be there
for its customers in the future. It would have the money to
develop new products and successfully market them while its
competitors, who seemed to be doing a favor to their customers in
the short term, would soon be out of business. He was right.
Jobs, in the early days of Apple, was an adamant protector of my
writer's prerogatives who championed the need for testing and
revision when Scotty didn't see things my way. Thus protected, I
did the manuals as I thought they should be done, and Apple got
what the press -- and even other companies -- praised as the best
manuals in the business.
DEPARTMENT BUILDING
In mid-1977 I was still running Bannister & Crun, but my writing
for Apple and the magazines had made me pretty well known in the
industry, and I had lots of job offers. Chuck Peddle, leader of
the PET computer project at Commodore, wanted me for a position
there. Steve Jobs, who is as persistent a person as I've ever
met, kept on asking me to join Apple as head of their
publications department. I repeatedly declined, and he eventually
asked what it would take to get me to join Apple. To put him off
I made an impossible list which included an office with a window
and a musical instrument, time to play gigs (I didn't want to let
my musician friends down,) flexible hours, Apple's hiring
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 33
everybody at Bannister & Crun who wanted a job at Apple, and so
on. He simply agreed to all my conditions, which I then wrote
down; as it turned out, I should have done this with more of his
promises. Bannister & Crun became Apple's publications department
with me at its helm. I joined on the 3rd of January, 1978 as
Apple's 31st employee. I presented no resume and signed no forms.
Apple did no checking on my background. That I had led a team
that had produced the nascent industry's best manuals was enough.
One day I heard that a new product, called the Apple II Pro, was
being put together in the lab. From some technical details, I
surmised that it could not possibly work as expected. So I snuck
into the laboratory and turned on the prototype. Sure enough, it
didn't do what it was supposed to. I went to Mike Markkula and
told him that the machine wasn't up to snuff, and he replied that
I couldn't be right, his engineers had assured him that all the
problems had been solved. He was actually making plans for
marketing and shipping the product and was about to start taking
orders from dealers.
I took him to the lab and demonstrated my discovery. Upon talking
to the people working on the project I had discovered a classic
management nightmare (though it was new to me at the time): the
engineers working on the project said that while the project was
mostly going OK, there were still some unresolved problems. The
next level reported to their bosses that a handful of problems
would no doubt be rapidly fixed; they in turn told Scotty that it
was nearly done, and Scotty told Markkula that it was just about
ready to roll. In a more mature company I would probably have
been fired immediately for my end-run around the hierarchy, but
this time I was able to make a case for a "New Product Review"
department. This would do for systems and software what QA
(Quality Assurance) programs did for circuit boards and
mechanical assembly. Suddenly, I was managing two departments.
Computers are not terribly useful without software (my definition
of a computer is "a box for running software".) I argued that
Apple would need to provide something new, application software,
if we were to sell computers more widely. I created what may have
been the first application software department at any
microcomputer company. I tried to convince Apple to buy Visicalc,
the first spreadsheet, when it was offered to us, but was out-
gunned by Jobs and Markkula. It was Markkula's theory -- at least
as he expressed it years later -- that to become a major
application provider would have put a damper on third-party
software developers, in the long run hurting Apple. What he said
at the time I do not remember, but I do remember remaining
unconvinced. With Markkula's approval I took a brief leave from
Apple, arguing that if I could help make Visicalc a winner,
Visicalc would sell a lot of Apple II's. As a result, I got to
write the tutorial portion of the Visicalc manual, reporting to
Dan Fylstra. Visicalc did sell a lot of our computers,
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 34
established a new category of software, and -- since it was a
business application -- greatly helped the credibility of
microcomputers in general.
In 1979 I found managers for two of my departments and became
manager of Applications Software. Meanwhile, I was chafing at the
limitations of the Apple II. The publications department managed
to keep a secret that would have been embarrassing to the company
had it been revealed at the time: the publications department was
using not Apple IIs but Poly 88 computers. We were running a word
processor I had designed and which had been implemented at
Bannister & Crun. The Polys were a competing microcomputer that
could handle both upper and lower-case letters -- a necessity in
manuals. Due to mediocre design (they had no Woz,) poor
marketing, and less imaginative management, they were soon out of
business. Back in the garage days, in 1976, I had argued that the
Apple II must have lower-case letters, but Woz disagreed. I held
that the single biggest use of microcomputers would be word
processing, he claimed that they would be used for game playing
and programming in BASIC. But he had the ultimate argument:
upper-case-only character generators were lots cheaper.
Though I often felt they were on the right track, I still could
find myself at odds with Apple's founders, who were a strange mix
of the radical and the conservative. They wanted to create per-
sonal computers, but expected them to work much like the hard-to-
use minicomputers from DEC, HP, and Data General. Dragging the
two Steves into the interface future was preaching in an unknown
tongue, and from my perspective, they didn't appear to be the
advanced thinkers that they were made out to be in the press.
They were visionary, and working like mad to drag the world into
the personal computer future, it's just that I was a few years
further out in the future. In spite of these differences I was
the typical way-over-100%-effort and totally Apple-oriented
employee. This extended into my personal life. Apple's Cupertino
phone number was 996-1010. When I moved to Cupertino, I chose my
home phone number, symbolically, to be just one step ahead of the
rest of Apple: it was 996-1009.
BITMAPPING
Apple employees were a diadem of the brightest and best cut
jewels of Silicon Valley, some well known and some newly
discovered. I was amazed at the competence of the people, whether
in financial management, marketing, manufacturing, engineering or
whatever; and they all seemed willing to share their knowledge
and points of view with me. Competence clustered at Apple,
partially thanks to the many contacts men like Markkula and Scott
and our investors had in the industry, and partly as a result of
Steve Jobs' incredible persistence. When Jobs was convinced he
wanted someone, that person would be hounded to death,
complimented, provided blandishments suited to his or her nature,
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 35
and offered the world. Soon enough, Apple could deliver many of
these promises. At NeXT, Jobs was to continue making similar
promises, repeating the ploys he had developed in Apple's first
years, to the disappointment of investors, employees, and
customers alike. Too often we mistake the randomness of the
universe as our own accomplishment when things go our way. Still
more often we take that same randomness, when it goes against us,
and regard it as punishment for our sins. In a complex world it
is often impossible to tell accident from design.
When Ken Rothmuller was hired from HP to start the Lisa project
(which was after I had proposed the Macintosh, but before it was
officially approved as a research project) I saw a new oppor-
tunity to get my computer interface and architecture ideas
accepted. I argued again that the screen architecture of this new
product should be bit-mapped. But where I had failed with Woz and
Jobs, I managed to convince Ken and his crew -- probably to Ken's
detriment as Jobs found him difficult to work with (i.e. had
strong opinions and didn't kowtow) and fired him. Jobs probably
found me equally difficult, but I had already proved myself and
my very productive and cost-effective publications department was
one of Apple's many gems; it would have been hard to justify
getting rid of me.
In spite of the loss of Ken Rothmuller, the bit-mapped screen
survived. This was a key win for me and (though they didn't know
it at the time) for Apple, because it would force the software I
was dreaming of to be implemented. No longer would computers be
restricted to whatever font was in the character generator, and
have to treat characters and graphics as fundamentally different
kinds of things. Another major battle that I fought was to have
black characters on a white background instead of the then-
conventional white (or green!) lettering on a black background.
The Lisa hardware designers were, like Jobs and Woz, dead set
against this idea, noting that it took too much power, would
require a higher refresh rate to avoid flicker, was not the way
computers usually worked, and so on. I argued that people often
printed computer output on white paper, and that was black-on-
white, and that if you wanted it to look the same on screen and
print (the WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get principle)
you had to do it black-on-white. But my industrial-strength
argument had to do with something the Lisa crew (like the whole
microcomputer industry) was just not thinking about: grayscale,
or dithered, graphic images. If you worked in white-on-black and
had a part-text and part-graphics image on the screen, which got
reversed on printing, then either the screen or paper image would
have to be a negative, and nobody wants to be forced to look at
negatives.
Again, after many memos, meetings, and informal and formal
discussions, I managed to sell the idea. It was another key to
the future.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 36
--------------------
Copyright (c) 1995 by Jef Raskin as a portion of a book in its
preliminary version. Comments and corrections are welcomed.
Please send them to jefraskin@aol.com.
-------------------------------------------------
IN MEMORIAM: TOM MANDEL
-------------------------------------------------
Tom Mandel, a highly regarded futurist and a specialist in on-
line communications, died at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto on
Wednesday, April 5. At the time of his death he was 49 and had
been a long-time employee of SRI International. He also
administered the electronic version of Time Magazine distributed
by America Online.
While Dr. Mandel did his most formal work at SRI, he was best
known to the computing community as a definitive participant in
the emerging phenomenon known as cyberspace. Not content to view
computer networking as a simple medium of communication, he
worked tirelessly on the Sausalito-based WELL (Whole Earth
'lectronic Link) to create a global forum where diverse ideas and
opinions could be explored thoroughly in real time. He was
abundantly comfortable with opinions himself, and brought
intelligence, a quick wit, and a quick temper to ten years of
postings in any number of discussions.
Dr. Mandel was diagnosed with inoperable cancer on November 4 of
last year, and immediately began a frank discussion of his
prognosis, concerns and fears in a WELL forum he called My Turn.
(Traffic from the forum was excerpted in the April 25th New York
Times.) Expert medical attention could not slow the progress of
his illness; but, true to his perceived responsibility within the
on-line community, he continued to post on the WELL until three
days before his death.
A native of Chicago, Dr. Mandel lived primarily in Hawaii until
1965, when he joined the U. S. Marine Corps and served a tour of
duty in Vietnam. He then returned to finish college, earning a
bachelor of arts degree in futuristics from the University of
Hawaii in 1972.
The ANALYTICAL ENGINE extends condolence to Tom Mandel's wife,
Maria Syndicus of Mountain View; his mother, Mrs. Fred Mandel of
San Mateo; his sister, Susan Cathey of Fresno; and his brother,
Steve Mandel of New York.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 37
-------------------------------------------------
CAROTHERS JOINS CHAC ADVISORY BOARD
-------------------------------------------------
Steve Carothers, a science teacher and head of the Technology
Committee at J. L. Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, CA, has
joined the Advisory Board of the CHAC.
Carothers has worked extensively to introduce middle-school
students to computer communications, including on-line services,
Internet presence, and the World Wide Web. He has also
volunteered as a coach for Odyssey of the Mind, an international
problem-solving competition for secondary-school students,
sponsored by IBM. We value his membership on the Board, and look
forward to his counsel, particularly on development of educa-
tional resources in computer history.
-------------------------------------------------
WEST WHIPS EAST IN BI-COASTAL COMPUTER BOWL
-------------------------------------------------
The seventh annual Computer Bowl(tm) competition, played for the
first time in cyberspace on the evening of April 20, was won
decisively by the West Coast team with a final score of 230 to
180. Held simultaneously at the World Trade Center (Boston, MA)
and the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center and connected by
satellite uplink, the one-hour competition was hosted by industry
executive Chris Morgan and by Nicholas Negroponte, director of
the MIT Media Lab.
The winning West Coast team included Eric Benhamou, 3Com; Steve
Blank, Rocket Science Games; Andy Hertzfeld, General Magic; Roel
Pieper, LTB Networks; and Captain Cheryl Vedoe, Tenth Planet.
East Coast contestants were Joe Alsop, Progress Software; Captain
Katherine Clark, Landmark Systems; Paul Gillin, ComputerWorld;
John Landry, Lotus Development; and Carl Ledbetter, AT&T Consumer
Products. Gillin, voted East Coast MVP, and Blank, West Coast
MVP, received awards sponsored by ComputerWorld Magazine and
presented by publisher Gary Beach.
At half-time, The Computer Museum held a Celebrity Auction of
items and services donated by individuals and pioneers in the
high-tech industry. Popular items included a book of essays about
Albert Einstein, signed by him; the opportunity to be publisher
of ComputerWorld for one week; and an original painting by AARON,
the world's only artificially intelligent robot artist. Auction
and gate proceeds contributed more than $250,000 to The Computer
Museum's educational programs.
This is believed to be the first time a game show for broadcast
has been conducted without the players in the same room. Game
play was supervised by Dave Nelson and Bob Frankston, using a
customized digital buzzer system designed to eliminate
transcontinental timing delays.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 38
Subscribers to America Online (AOL) could log on to receive the
questions as they were being asked of the contestants, then
determine their individual scores after every question. Prizes
were awarded to the highest-scoring AOL players. It also aired
nationally as a special edition of "Computer Chronicles" on 298
PBS television stations and in 200 major cities worldwide.
-------------------------------------------------
A BOOST FOR SILICON VALLEY'S HISTORY
-------------------------------------------------
The other day, just up our street, we discovered a "new"
organization that will make a major contribution to this area's
historical literature. The Santa Clara Valley Historical
Association, by the end of this year, will "document the origins
and history of the most technologically innovative region in
modern times" in a book-and-videotape set, _The Making of Silicon
Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance._
Narrated by Walter Cronkite, the videotape will combine still
photographs, archival footage, and interviews into a vivid
chronology of the Valley's development, from the founding of
Stanford University to today and tomorrow. Interview subjects
include Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Ed McCracken, Steve Jobs,
Gordon Moore, Regis McKenna, Finis Conner, Mike Malone....we
don't have space for the whole list, but it's amazingly
comprehensive.
Projected retail price of the set is $24.95 -- not much for a
potential classic of photojournalism. We'll let you know when
it's available!
-------------------------------------------------
DEDICATED TECHNICAL ARCHIVE IN SUNNYVALE
-------------------------------------------------
Days after we discovered the Santa Clara Valley Historical
Association, Frank McConnell forwarded an ad from _IEEE Grid_
soliciting donations of technical docs for the new Computer
Technical Archives in Sunnyvale. With the stated objective "[to]
create a unique collection of documents related to the computer
industry....not generally available in any other public
collections," the Archive boasts roughly 1,500 linear feet of
materials. Its director, Bill vanCleemput, actively seeks a wide
variety of collectible docs including:
Software user docs and code
Demo disks or tapes
Data sheets and collateral marketing material
Press releases
Quarterly and annual corporate reports
Business plans
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 39
News clippings
Research reports
Master's and Ph. D. theses (those not available from University
Microfilms)
The lion's share of the current collection is stored in lockers
and the Archive seeks funding (of course) to expand the
collection and make it publicly accessible.
The CHAC looks forward to close and fruitful collaboration with
the Computer Technical Archives as we confront the entirely
nontrivial job of saving the paper (and mag) history of Califor-
nia's computers. If you have anything you'd like to offer Bill,
you can snail-mail him at Box 4376, Stanford CA 94309 USA; FAX to
him at +1 408-733-8008, or voice him at +1 408-733-1300.
-------------------------------------------------
VINTAGE ARTIFACTS AUCTIONED ON THE WEB
-------------------------------------------------
As we go to press, a "virtual auction house" -- Onsale, Inc., in
Mountain View, CA -- has begun operation on the World Wide Web at
www.onsale.com. Founded by former GO Corporation executive Jerry
Kaplan, Onsale offers vintage computer hardware, software and
docs to the highest on-line bidder. All lots are illustrated,
provenances are carefully written and bidding rules seem
scrupulously fair.
Our whirlwind tour of current lots disclosed a few startling
prices -- is a tan-case Osborne One really worth a thousand
bucks? -- but much worthwhile material is in the thoroughly
affordable range of US$10 to $50. Some classic and early
sourcebooks on computing, like original publications by von
Neumann, Turing and Wilkes, would tempt almost anyone to go
higher. There's even a 1906 Millionaire, one of the earliest and
best-known mechanical calculators, although a starting bid of
$4,000 means you might have to hock your laptop to pay for it.
(We make no representation that these lots will still be
available when you read this, but others will take their places.)
An organized collector's market in computer memorabilia is a new
phenomenon, and its repercussions can only be imagined. On one
hand, agreed-upon standards of valuation may mean that less of
this material will be casually destroyed -- and more will be
learned about what remains. On the other, such a market might
stimulate speculative pricing that would put vintage computers
out of reach for amateur collector/historians. We don't know
which way this cat will jump, but ENGINE readers can be trusted
to assess the issues fairly and decide for themselves.
Philosophy aside, this hypertextual "auction catalog" is probably
as engrossing as anything on the Web. Whether you bid -- just a
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 40
click! -- or abstain, you might find yourself browsing far into
the night. We did.
-------------------------------------------------
NEW HOPE FOR THE AMIGA?
-------------------------------------------------
Fresh buzz of an Amiga revival followed the announcement that
Escom AG, Germany's second-largest computer company, had acquired
the assets of Commodore International Ltd. for the advantageous
price of US$6.6 million. Escom president Manfred Schmitt
announced that his company proposed a comprehensive line of desk-
top computers including Amigas, to be built in China, and
Commodore PowerPC's, probably to be built in Europe.
Although Schmitt and others are optimistic about the sale, it
still faces many hurdles, including the necessary approval of the
U. S. Bankruptcy Court and of the Supreme Court of the Bahamas,
where Commodore was incorporated. Objections have also been
raised by IBM, by Dell Computer Corporation -- an unsuccessful
bidder for these assets -- and by a Commodore trustee. Finally,
Commodore's creditors have not yet agreed to the terms of sale.
Personally, we hate to see popular and potent technology hog-tied
by courts. Recent third-party development in Germany and
elsewhere demonstrates that the Amiga platform still has lots of
room to grow. We understand that Commodore's legal situation is
of paralyzing complexity, and that a fair settlement is a
prerequisite; but that shouldn't "paralyze" future production of
Amigas, which are still eagerly sought by professionals in film,
video, music and many other fields.
-------------------------------------------------
SPOTTER FLASH
-------------------------------------------------
The CHAC has been featured in "Business Reports: Techie
Collectibles," an article on computer collecting by freelance
writer Gary M. Stern, appearing in the May issue of _Profiles_,
the inflight magazine of Continental Airlines. Thanks to Gary, to
editor Anna Studabaker -- who sent us a copy -- and of course to
Continental.
The useful article by Dr. Edward Then ("The Discolouration of
Plastic Computer Cases," ENGINE 2.3) is summarized in _Kovels on
Antiques and Collectibles_ for May 1995. This is one more
indication that obsolete computers are gaining the notice of
antiquarians and collectors, and we're glad to encourage the
adoption of proper conservation techniques.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 41
-------------------------------------------------
SPOTTER ALERT
-------------------------------------------------
Copies of the ENGINE, the FAQ, and project information have been
pouring out to print and broadcast media, especially in Silicon
Valley. We do have tearsheets of most of the ink we know about.
But is there ink we haven't heard of? Once more, with feeling: If
you spot any mention of CHAC or the ENGINE in any periodical,
_please,_
* If your copy of the piece is clippable, clip and mail to the
Palo Alto address.
* If you can't spare the physical copy, send the text as net.mail
to engine@chac.org, or photocopy and fax to the Palo Alto
address.
* If you're too busy for that, just send the publication name,
date and page number and we'll do the hunting.
Thanks! (And thanks to the spotters who have given us invaluable
help with keeping up so far.)
-------------------------------------------------
NOMINEES SOUGHT FOR CHAC ADVISORY BOARD
-------------------------------------------------
The Computer History Association of California invites
nominations for membership on its new Advisory Board, a planning
body that will help shape our policies on such important
questions as accession, fundraising, exhibition, site selection,
education, and publishing.
An ideal nominee will have, first, a demonstrated interest in
computer history or other technical history; second, a noteworthy
record of accomplishment in a field or fields related to the
mission of the CHAC; and, finally, a commitment to the survival
of the nonprofit sector. While we anticipate that the majority of
Board members will be residents of California, we welcome
nominees from any state or nation.
Please submit nominations by e-mail to engine@chac.org, by fax to
+1 415 856-9914, or by snail-mail to the Palo Alto address.
-------------------------------------------------
MONEY, the UNIVERSE, and EVERYTHING
-------------------------------------------------
It had to happen; the ENGINE's gaining weight again. We've always
been 100% fat-free, but putting on muscle is one of our favorite
activities. More pages, more pictures, and color are only a
matter of time.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 42
Now, more pages and more copies do cost more to print. Fine! That
contradiction resolves beautifully when _you_ subscribe to the
paper edition. And if you do it now, your sub will start just in
time for these muscular, captivating, picture-laden issues.
The best ENGINEs are yet to come. If you're already a subscriber,
your renewal will be its own reward as we send you _more_ and
_better_ computer history for the same old thirty-five bucks. If
you've been thinking about subscribing, surely you can be equally
tempted by the same logic. Join the ever-growing -- but still
select -- roster of CHAC members today.
(And if you're one of the few -- yes, there are a few -- whose
subs have lapsed? Hey. These hefty issues-to-be are exactly the
ones you might miss; not to mention that, if you end up with
holes in your collection, we can't promise to supply back issues
indefinitely. Dig into the stuff on your desk, find your renewal
form, and send it with a check. Thank you!)
-------------------------------------------------
YOU PUBLISH! OR WE PERISH!
-------------------------------------------------
Each word of our title -- Computer History Association of
California -- has a special and resonant meaning. Let us point
out in particular that "California" means _all_ of California,
without slight or favor.
The first eight issues of the ENGINE (hey! it's true!) have
inquired into the history of Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, IBM,
and several other renowned companies. But almost every major
article we've published has been set in Northern California.
Certainly our material has earned an enviable reputation for the
ENGINE and frankly, if we were lazy, we'd mine Silicon Valley for
articles and interviews that would fill our journal for the next
thirty years. And yet....
What about the pioneering institutions like UCLA, like Cal Poly,
like the Jet Propulsion Labs? What about the Golden Land's great
hardware builders -- SDS and Lobo, to name just two? What about
cutting-edge coders, from Northrop to Quarterdeck and beyond? The
computer history of Southern California is a treasure chest
waiting to be cracked.
If _you_ worked in computing in Southern California, we want to
hear from you. More precisely, we'd like you to wave an article
in our faces. Read the GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION, fire up your
mail software, and break the silence of the whispering palms!
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 43
-------------------------------------------------
Legacy Book Review:
TV TYPEWRITER COOKBOOK
-------------------------------------------------
Don Lancaster
Howard W. Sams, Inc., 1976
256 pages, $9.95 (paper)
ISBN 0-672-21313-3
Reviewed by Kip Crosby
_And it did come to pass, brothers and sisters, that LSI begat
VLSI, and VLSI begat ULSI. And the suits entreated, let the
micron be cloven, or we may go no further. And the lithographers
muttered, nay, nay; but the engineers proclaimed, yea, yea; and
behold, the micron was split in two. And in the fullness of time,
once more the suits did implore...._
Well, having squinted at my share of modern CPU dice, I can
assure you that those quarter-microns are _really hard to see._
Naturally, they're also crucial to the astounding functionality
of contemporary chipsets. VLSI in its maturity has become one of
the truly Big Wins of modern technology; a win so dazzling that
not many are tempted to ponder the corollary loss. What have we
lost? Read Don Lancaster's _TV Typewriter Cookbook_ and you'll
know the answer.
Between 1973 and 1976, electronics for the hobbyist was
revolutionized (again) when integrated circuits became easily
available and cheap. Don Lancaster possessed a masterful
understanding of solid-state electronics, demonstrated at length
by his earlier _TTL Cookbook_; and his specialty was the modular,
straightforward circuit design that the electronic experimenter
has always loved. He saw that by using a wide variety of IC's,
conveniently through-plated blank PC boards, a handy TV set, and
some diodes, resistors and keycaps, a hobbyist could affordably
build a device he christened a "TV Typewriter" -- really a
formidable knockoff of a video display terminal, but (at mid-
seventies prices) hundreds or thousands of dollars cheaper than a
"real" VDT. Lancaster claimed repeatedly that his device could be
reproduced for "$30 to $150" and, even if the lower figure was
wishful thinking, the higher was probably generous.
Building the TVT was not for the faint of heart or tremulous of
hand, but if you had bench space, patience, ready access to
parts, and a reliable soldering iron, ten bucks more would buy
you this book and the keys to the kingdom. In 256 (hmmmm....)
copiously illustrated pages, Lancaster shepherds his reader
through electronics and scanning fundamentals and the basics of
data encoding -- ASCII, Baudot and Selectric -- before plunging
into an exhaustively annotated comparison of commercially
available IC types. Then he discusses memory, stressing proper
application of PROMs and SRAMs, and constantly showing concern
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 44
for the reader's wallet with money-saving shortcuts -- some of
which seem horrific today, like lighting only five of the seven
bars of an output LED.
But the truly scary parts, for the modern computer user, are
chapters four through eight, which treat system timing, cursor
management, keyboard design and encoding, and serial and video
interfaces. No summary I could give will be as vividly
illustrative as a sample:
_In Figure 5-6, we have used inverting tristate drivers for the
tv typewriter timing and for external minicomputer control. We
could also use a third set of drivers for access by a frame-
rate cursor. But, since the frame-rate rise and fall time is
not very critical (we have the entire vertical interval to
use,) we can continuously "float" the frame-rate cursor
addresses onto the memory address lines with high-value
resistors. If we enable neither the tvt timing nor the
external timing, the frame-rate cursor addresses appear on the
memory bus. If we enable either of the other address sources,
the low-impedance output of the drivers swamps the cursor
address and takes over...._
This passage, like much of the book, can be puzzled out concept
by concept. But as someone who bought his first micro several
years after this book was published, I've relied on my cursor for
over a decade without ever thinking about swamped addresses.
Similarly, if you use an external modem, you probably get very
annoyed on the rare occasions your serial port locks up. And if
you accidentally press a key before you let up on the one before,
do you still get the output you want? Then your keyboard has n-
key-rollover; and believe me, twenty years ago, n-key-rollover
was _tough_ to design and build. Expensive, too.
This book was of tremendous value in 1976 and remains so today,
but the emphasis has migrated from the practical to the
historical. The technical problems that Lancaster anatomizes have
long since been solved, their solutions embedded in submicron
ASICs produced by the billion. It would be unthinkable today to
find a description of video circuitry that extended to the merest
flip-flop -- at least in a mass-market paperback. The tremendous
density and modularity of modern computer components, together
with the changed character of an audience that can buy rather
than build, means that today's books about "How Computers Work"
speak primarily in conceptual terms. All the more important to
remember that those flip-flops, etched into nearly ageless
silicon, are working for a living in your Pentium or Sparcserver,
hidden by a gray epoxy cap from sight and imagination.
Lancaster's book is an inimitable classic poised exactly on a
cusp of history, when the micro revolution was showing its
earliest force, but the hand-wiring of circuits was still common
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 45
art. Few other books as potently demonstrate the mystical moment
when the solder only just flows and you know you hit it right.
Scout your used bookstores for the _TV Typewriter Cookbook_ -- it
may be hard to find but easy to spot, our copy is screaming
chartreuse -- and read it carefully, slowing down for the bad
corners. Then sit back and think "That was just the terminal. I'd
still have to build the computer." You'll know at last how
computers work....and why you'd probably rather buy, plug and
play.
-------------------------------------------------
OVERVIEW OF BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSES
-------------------------------------------------
Various governments sent us forms that we had to fill out and
mail back. None of them bounced, so we must be doing something
right.
-------------------------------------------------
ACQUISITIONS
-------------------------------------------------
Dilating on this would only be depressing. Let's just say that if
we can ever find any more storage space, we're going to have
_lots_ more computers. Assuming they still exist by then.
-------------------------------------------------
LETTERS
-------------------------------------------------
20-YEAR REUNION FOR MITS ALTAIR
We're organizing a 20-Year Reunion of MITS Altair folks who took
part in creating the first affordable "micro-computer," the MITS
Altair in Albuquerque, NM. Ed Roberts, MITS founder and president
20 years ago, has been contacted and plans to attend. David
Bunnell, MITS tech writer and later founder of PC World Magazine,
has also been contacted, as have dozens of other former MITS
folks.
The governor of New Mexico is sending personal letters of
invitation to these, plus Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who first
formed "Micro-soft" in Albuquerque twenty years ago. We've been
in contact with Paul Allen's office and been told "the timeframe
is good for him...", though we don't yet have a firm commitment.
The reunion will be held of the second day of the New Mexico
Computer Fair & Expo, a three-day computer show at the
Albuquerque Convention Center from June 9-11, 1995, organized by
ComputerScene Magazine in New Mexico.
If you know anyone who worked for MITS during the time of the
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 46
Altair's creation, or for more information on the reunion or the
New Mexico Computer Fair & Expo, please call ComputerScene at 1-
800-658-6790.
_Greg Hansen_
Publisher, ComputerScene Magazine
UNISYS HISTORY NEWSLETTER ONLINE
The Unisys History Newsletter was written and published by George
Gray. George is a Systems Programmer for the State of Georgia
Department of Administrative Services and is heavily involved in
Unite Inc., a Unisys User Group. He began his work on the Unisys
History Newsletter as a hobby and published these six
newsletters; now, he writes a regular column for UniSphere
magazine. UniSphere is currently working on getting the remaining
articles online via WWW, but unfortunately they are not available
yet. With George's permission, I am able to bring you these six
fascinating articles on-line.
The newsletter is located at the WWW URL
http://www.cc.gatech.edu:80/services/unisys-folklore/
Here are the six titles:
UNIVAC in Pittsburgh 1953-1963 , Vol. 1, Num. 1 (September 1992).
The UNIVAC Solid State Computer, Vol. 1, Num. 2 (December 1992).
EXEC II, Vol. 1, Num. 3 (March 1993).
The UNIVAC 1100 in the Early 70s, Vol. 1, Num. 4 (June 1993).
The UNIVAC File Computer, Vol. ?, Num. ?
The UNIVAC III Computer, Vol. ?, Num. ?
As you can see, mostly UNIVAC/Sperry history, but there is a
light sprinkling of Burroughs within a few of these articles.
Enjoy!
_Randy Carpenter_
Georgia State University
syscrc@panther.gsu.edu
THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the PDP-8
On March 22, 1965, DEC unveiled the PDP-8 computer. That was 30
years ago, and it's worth a pause to remember how far we've come
since that day!
For US$18,500, you could buy a 300 pound desktop computer,
implemented in word-parallel solid state logic, with a 12 bit
word and 4K words of 1.5 microsecond core memory. The price
included an ASR 33 teletype, and the available paper-tape-based
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 47
software included an assembler, a FORTRAN compiler, and a text
editor of sorts.
For more money, if you had room for two 6 foot tall mounting
racks, you could expand the system to 32K of core memory and add
other peripherals such as DECtape drives (functionally equivalent
to floppy disk, but slower.)
The PDP-8 computer was the minicomputer that opened up the small
computer marketplace we know today! It was the first word-
parallel machine costing less than $20,000, and its upward-
compatible successors broke the $10,000 and $7,000 price
barriers. Many PDP-8 systems continue in use today, mostly in
industrial automation applications, and DEC continued to
manufacture machines based on this architecture until 1990, when
the microprocessor based DECmate III+ word processing system was
finally discontinued.
For a trip back through time, you can find more information about
the PDP-8 on the Web at:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/
Followups should be directed to alt.sys.pdp8.
_Doug Jones_
jones@cs.uiowa.edu
HCS: VERY MUCH ALIVE, THANK YOU
Dear fellow members, friends and enthusiasts, I am writing to
tell you that the Historical Computer Society and "Historically
Brewed" are still alive! We have not disappeared forever. We are
about to resurface with the long lost, and eagerly sought after
issue #8 of "HB." I am very sorry for the lateness of issue #8
and for leaving you all in the dark for so long. In the past, I
have been late with other issues of "HB," but never this long. I
have experienced many personal difficulties and challenges over
the last few months and my life aside from HCS has become
extremely busy with the simple task of earning a living to
support my family (if only I could run HCS full-time). I would
also like to announce the birth of our son, Andrew David, on
March 20th.
To get to the point; I find that I am unable to further handle
the entire operation of HCS -- now more than ever. It is very
important to me . . but I have let it slip. There almost seemed
to be no light at the end of the tunnel, but the good news is --
HCS has added two new additions to its management. I would like
to announce to you -- Kevin Stumpf, HCS' new Associate Editor and
Walter Peterson, HCS' new Technical Director. Together (with your
help too!) we plan to get HCS and "HB" back on track. There is
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 48
still much interest, I receive loads of letters and e-mail, and
we have a readership of over 300 members. You all have been very
understanding and I know that we all want HCS to succeed. I have
discovered that the hardest thing to recognize when managing a
project, is when to realize that you can not do everything
yourself, and when to delegate responsibility and authority to
others. I've learned some valuable lessons.
Here are a few other announcements:
* Issue #8 will go out April 8th, whether at its best or not.
Work on issue #9 will commence immediately thereafter.
* Issue #9 will contain an exclusive interview with Ed Roberts,
the creator of the MITS Altair and "Father" of the PC revolution.
We let January slip by without even mentioning the 20th
anniversary of the personal computer -- the Jan. 1975 issue of
"Popular Electronics" announcing the Altair to the world!
* Walter Peterson has plans to create a place for HCS on the
Internet very soon! Stay tuned.
* As Associate Editor, Kevin Stumpf will be taking responsibility
for answering overdue correspondence, e-mail and article
coordination.
* Please allow us another week or so to get caught up on orders.
If we still owe you a back issue, book or anything -- then write
and remind me.
* Help spread the word about the Historical Computer Society!
Show "HB" to your local college library, computer club and
computer stores.
* Please send your stories and photos of computers!! We need a
regular photo page.
Computer History is inspiring and dynamic. I have never regretted
what I started, nor have I ever wanted to quit. I have just been
overwhelmed. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Thank you for
all of your support and confidence!
Kind regards,
_David A. Greelish_
President and Founder
Historical Computer Society
historical@aol.com
[We sympathize -- to an amazing extent -- with David's response,
and salute his undimmed spirit. Producing a magazine of high
caliber, for a small and specialized audience, is an unending
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 49
struggle; and certainly the ENGINE, too, has been late in its
time. Yet, because "computer history is inspiring and dynamic,"
_Historically Brewed_ and the ENGINE must persist, must prevail.
Please support the HCS in its laudable mission. -- Ed.]
[We were enthused and reassured to receive _HB_ #8 just as we
went to press. See PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED, p. 33. ]
MSX EMULATOR AVAILABLE
The 0.9 Unix/X version of a portable MSX/MSX2/MSX2+ emulator is
available at
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/fms/MSX/Sources.html
This version includes *disk support*, support for several
different kinds of MegaROM cartridges, MSX2+ option, and many
small improvements.
_Marat Fayzullin_
University of Maryland
[We urge any interested reader to check out Marat's Web site,
www.cs.umd.edu/users/fms. It's one of the widest-ranging and most
eccentric computer history Web pages around -- and that's a
compliment. -- Eds.]
PDP RE-UNION DINNER
during DECUS-95 AUSTRALIA
Here is an opportunity for all those past (and present) Digital
PDP users (or anyone interested in PDP-1 through to PDP-15) to
get together at a Re-Union Dinner to be held during the
Symposium, on the Monday evening, 21st August, 1995. This has
been chosen to avoid clashing with other Symposium events.
The celebration will be held during the Symposium week, but not
formally part of the Symposium, so that non-Symposium-goers could
attend. It should cost no more than $45 per head for DECUS
members and $50 for non-members.
The committee is seeking ADVANCE BOOKINGS -- do not send any
money yet -- so that we can decide on a suitable location.
We hope to make this a fun night for all with displays of
light/portable memorabilia and some Guru Quizzes.
The fact that 1995 is 30 years since the release of the PDP-8,
and 25 years since the release of the PDP-11, should give added
impetus to the function. Note that there will be a PDP-8 30th
Anniversary Display at DECUS-95.
Enquiries: Mike Chevallier (02-498 3383) and John Geremin (02-
764 4855).
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 50
-------------------------------------------------
QUERIES
-------------------------------------------------
TCP/IP ON A 3COM SERVER --
OH, BOY....
I'm looking for the TCP/IP software for an old 3Com/Bridge CS/210
terminal server. All I have is the XNS disk.
Please respond if you have this software, I would really like to
get this up and running. 3Com will not help me. Thanks much.
_James Sanford_
jsanford@geeks.org
BCPL SOURCE:
ANYONE HAVE IT HANDY?
I have just gotten the portable BCPL compiler working on my PC
and would appreciate any pointers to archived BCPL source code. I
would be particularly interested in acquiring the sources to OS6
by Strachey and Stoy; also the two monographs on OS6 published in
the Oxford Programming Research Group Monographs series, 197?
_Hans B. Pufal_
Cross Products Ltd, Leeds, England Hans@crosspro.demon.co.uk
HP 35 CALCULATOR:
ACCESSORIES WANTED
Anybody got one floating around? Have calculator, would like to
find clean manual and leather case. TIA,
_Randy_
Randyc3@aol.com
HP APOLLO 425e:
GENERAL INFO SOUGHT
What was an HP Apollo 9000 Model 425e? I seem to remember that
the model 300 was a 68030 based workstations, so does 4xx
indicate a 68040 machine? If so, what does the 25e bit mean? What
was the rest of the machine like (ie graphics)? Any info
gratefully received,
_Dave Wragg_
dpw93@ecs.soton.ac.uk
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 51
IBM SYS/36: BACKGROUND WANTED
Could someone point me to information about the IBM Model 36
minicomputer, and [perhaps] specifically the B23 version? All I
know so far of any historical relevance is that it was released
after the System/32 [ca. 1975].
References to books/e-texts or actual core dumps of your favorite
bugs in the machine would be greatly appreciated.
_Richard "frodo" Martin_
g4frodo@cdf.toronto.edu
LOCKHEED ELECTRONICS
INFO WANTED
Anyone out there who worked on / designed or used a Lockheed
Electronics LEC or MAC 16 minicomputer or the telefile Computer
Products TCP16/5 mini which emulated it (in microcode); I would
be interested in hearing from you.
Regards,
_Scott Finner_
srfinner@acacia.itd.uts.edu.au
uPROC STATISTICS SOUGHT ASAP
I'm doing some research on microprocessors but I've found
limited, new background info on the subject.
Does anyone here know what the top 4 companies that make
microprocessors in the United States are? I'm guessing it's the
same companies that are considered the top manufactures of CPUs,
such as AT&T, DEC, Intel, Motorola, and National Semiconductor.
But I have a feeling I could be mistaken.
Also, does anyone know where I can find out how many
microprocessors were manufactured in the United States last year?
Please e-mail me back ASAP if you have any info to these
questions. My e-mail address is: burtonb@ucsu.colorado.edu.
Thanks ahead of time for your help.
_Bonnie Burton_
University of Colorado
Q*NET LAN: ANYTHING AT ALL?
I'm looking for a needle in a haystack :-).... information on a
PC based LAN called Q*NET from somebody called TCS. The software
seems to be copyrighted 1984. I also need info on something
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 52
called Ethershare (I believe from 3Com) from the same period.
We have a piece of software running on this that we'd like to
interface to the rest of our network if possible primarily so
users of this software don't need 2 PC's to access both their
proprietary software & our network services.
Given the age of the network software this seems like the place
to ask this question. Pointers to other appropriate places to ask
would also be appreciated.
Thanks,
_Andy Stoffel_
oddjob@oz.plymouth.edu
Plymouth State College, Plymouth, NH, USA
SINCLAIR HISTORY WANTED
I'm working on a book on pocket electronic calculators and am
looking for an address for Sir Clive Sinclair (Sinclair
calculators, computers, and a host of other uniquely designed
electronic equipment) so I can ask him some questions about his
involvement at the time. If anyone can help, please email me at
mrcalc001@aol.com. Even if you know a friend of a friend,
anything that may help, please forward it. Thanks!
_Guy Ball_
Editor and Publisher
_International Calculator Collector_
WINDOWING ENVIRONMENTS
INFO WANTED
I'm looking for a brief history or chronology of windowing
environments -- and not just Mr. Gates' version... I'm interested
in Englebart's work, the stuff that went on a Xerox PARC, at
Stanford, MIT, Sun, etc. And oh, yes, that Microsoft Windows
thing as well. While it's relatively easy to find information
about PC/DOS-based environments....it is more difficult to find,
for example, details of UNIX-based windowing systems and en-
vironments.
The information need not go into excruciating detail -- a general
timeline would be a great start. Any help or pointers would be
greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
_Scott Fordin_
SUN BOS Information Architecture
sfordin@east.sun.com
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 53
-------------------------------------------------
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
-------------------------------------------------
_Australian Computer Museum Society Newsletter_.
#3, 13 February 1995. Committee news; Membership information;
Computer Museum Boston; Notice of General Meeting; Draft
Collection Policy document; more. 14 pp.
#4, 11 April 1995. Committee news; Membership information; Oral
history; Correspondence; Top 10 computers; more. 7 pp. From Jim
Walsh.
Charles Babbage Institute NEWSLETTER, Volume 17 Number 2, Winter
1995. CBI accepts Hurd papers; CBI on the Web; Tomash Fellowship
to Akera; New trustees; Update on Kevin Stumpf's Commercial
Computing Museum; Recent publications. 6 pp. From Judy O'Neill.
The Computer Museum NEWS, Spring 1995. AARON the Robotic Artist;
Computer Bowl 2.0; Networked Planet. 8 pp. From Gail Jennes.
Hewlett-Packard _Journal_, recognizing technical contributions
made by HP personnel.
Volume 46 Number 2, April 1995. Design and development of the PA
7100LC microprocessor; integration of MPEG video, telephony, and
multimedia peripherals; business server development; HP
Distributed Smalltalk; more. 120 pp. From the editors.
_Historically Brewed_, newsletter of the Historical Computer
Society. Issue #8, Spring 1995. Doug Jones' PDP-8 Story part II;
For the Collector; Intro to Classic Computing (blinkenlights);
Home Arcade Enthusiast; Apollo mission exhibit at American
Computer Museum. 16 pp. US$15.00 per year; Can$20.00;
International, US$24.00. From David Greelish.
_HISTORY OF COMPUTING: An Encyclopedia of Computer History_ by
Lexikon Services. Version 3.41, April 1995. Approximately 800
pages, featuring expanded treatments of early micros, Internet,
and chronologies. US$19.95. From Mark Greenia.
_International Calculator Collector_, Issue #8, Spring 1995;
Calculator Twins, HP Calculator Database, interview with Jack St.
Clair Kilby, classifieds, resources, more. US$12 per year with
membership ($16 foreign). From Guy Ball.
_Random Output_, monthly newsletter of East Bay FOG.
Volume 11 Number 3, March 1995. Computer History in California;
AOL Demo; How to Buy a Modem. 4 pp.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 54
Volume 11 Number 4, April 1995. Computer History in California;
Web glossary; Joseph Jacquard; Family Tree Maker. 4 pp.
Volume 11 Number 5, May 1995. Lotus macros; Cache buffers;
QBasic. 4 pp. From Pete Masterson.
_The Z-Letter_, newsletter of the CP/M and Z-System community.
Number 35, January/February 1995. New products; CPMUG, SIG/M and
Sound Potentials libraries; Starting to Use the Z-System;
programming, letters, resources and more. 24 pp.
Number 36, March/April 1995. AmigaZ80; Intro to aliases; Tax prep
on CP/M; Index to issues 1-34; programming, letters, resources,
more. 22 pp.
US$18 for 12 issues (2 years); Canada/Mexico, US$22;
International, US$36. From David A. J. McGlone.
-------------------------------------------------
ADDRESSES OF CORRESPONDING ORGANIZATIONS
-------------------------------------------------
Australian Computer Museum Society, PO Box 103, KILLARA 2071,
NSW, Australia. Michael Chevallier, secretary.
Charles Babbage Institute, 103 Walter Library, 117 Pleasant
Street SE, Minneapolis MN 55455. Judy E. O'Neill, associate
director.
Classic Computer Club, 42 Achilles Road, West Hampstead, London
NW6 1AE, UK. Stephen I. Walters, director.
Commercial Computing Museum (formerly Unusual Systems,) 220
Samuel Street, Kitchener ON N2H 1R6, Canada. Kevin Stumpf,
president.
Computer Conservation Society, 15 Northampton Road, Bromham,
Beds. MK43 8QB, UK. Tony Sale, secretary.
The Computer Museum, 300 Congress Street, Boston MA 02210. Brian
C. Wallace, curator of historical computing.
Computer Technology Archive, Box 4376, Stanford CA 94309. Bill
vanCleemput, director.
East Bay FOG, c/o Pat Watters, 5497 Taft Avenue, Oakland CA
94618. Tom Lewis, president.
Hewlett-Packard _Journal_, Hewlett-Packard Company, Box 51827,
Palo Alto CA 94303-0724. Richard P. Dolan, editor.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 55
Historical Computer Society, 2962 Park Street, #3 (note change of
suite number,) Jacksonville FL 32205. historical@aol.com. David
A. Greelish, director and editor.
International Association of Calculator Collectors, 14561
Livingston Street, Tustin CA 92680-2618. Guy Ball, Bruce L.
Flamm, directors.
Lambda Software Publishing, 149 West Hilliard Lane, Eugene OR
97404. David A. J. McGlone, editor and publisher.
Lexikon Services, Box 1328, Antelope CA 95843. lexikon2@aol.com.
Mark Greenia, director.
Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, 525 Alma Street, Palo
Alto CA 94301. John McLaughlin, director.
-------------------------------------------------
THANKS TO....
-------------------------------------------------
James Birdsall for his donation.
Brian Case for proposing that we attend the Asilomar Workshop;
John Wharton for making sure it could happen; and Lee Felsenstein
for enjoyable transportation.
Max "Clive" Maxfield for fellowship and good ideas.
Len Shustek and George Comstock for a fine working lunch.
Bill Terry for help with this issue's interview.
Dale, Doug, Patrick and Valerie -- the Cosmic Wombat Band -- for
putting up engine@chac.org and keeping it there.
All the great new ENGINE subscribers!
-------------------------------------------------
NEXT ISSUE
-------------------------------------------------
Mac and Me, part two? HP 3000? An interview with a micro pioneer?
Why SUN is SUN? We'll leave you guessing, but it might be the
thickest issue yet!
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 56
-------------------------------------------------
GUIDELINES FOR DISTRIBUTION
-------------------------------------------------
The ANALYTICAL ENGINE is intellectual shareware. Distribution of
_complete, verbatim_ copies through online posting, Internet mail
or news, fax, postal service or photocopying is encouraged by the
Computer History Association of California.
Excerpting or brief quotation for fair use, including review or
example, is also permitted, with one exception: Any material
copyright to or by a third party and reprinted in the ANALYTICAL
ENGINE by permission shall not be used in another periodical or
context, unless the permission of the copyright holder is
separately secured for the new use.
Alterations, abridgments or hacks of the ANALYTICAL ENGINE which
change the intent or meaning of original content; or which
contrive to bring income to any person or organization other than
the Computer History Association of California; or which contrive
to injure the Computer History Association of California, its
officers, contributors, volunteers or members; are PROHIBITED.
Reproduction of the ANALYTICAL ENGINE without its subscription
coupon is abridgment in this sense.
-------------------------------------------------
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION
-------------------------------------------------
The ANALYTICAL ENGINE solicits manuscripts of 750 to 2500 words
on the general topic of the history of computing in, or with
significant reference to, the State of California. Articles
should focus on one interesting or illuminating episode and
should be written for a technically literate general audience.
Submissions are welcome from both members and non-members of the
CHAC. Article deadlines are: July 15 for the November issue,
October 15 for the February issue, January 15 for the May issue,
and April 15 for the August issue.
Each author may publish a maximum of one signed article per year.
This restriction does not apply to letters, queries, book reviews
or interviews. Thank you for cooperating to protect diversity of
voices and topics. Previously published material will be
republished only in clearly attributed quotations or citations;
or when its publication in the ANALYTICAL ENGINE will bring it to
the attention of a significantly broader audience; or when the
original publication is materially obsolete or inaccessible.
Decision of the editors is final but copyright of all published
material will remain with the author.
The preferred document file format is Microsoft Word for DOS or
Windows, but almost any DOS or Macintosh word processor file will
be acceptable. Submit manuscripts on DOS 5.25" or 3.5", or Mac HD
(1.4) diskettes. Alternatively, please send your article as ASCII
or ISO Internet mail. Please avoid submitting on paper unless
absolutely necessary.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 57
-------------------------------------------------
NINES-CARD
-------------------------------------------------
POOR KITTY!
_submitted anonymously_....
As many of us know, cats have a special affinity for computer
peripherals, especially that are purring softly, even more so if
they're warm.
A woman in the Los Angeles area had a cat, and also owned a
LaserJet -- a IIp, to be exact, with a front-opening paper tray.
Said owner started a batch and left the room, only to hurry back
in when she heard her pet scream in pain.
You guessed it. The fascinated cat had taken a closer look at the
autonomous motion of the paper being printed; the rollers of the
paper feed had grabbed the cat's tail and tried to pull it past
the laser....and done a remarkable job. Kitty was still in one
piece, but there was no question of simply pulling its tail out
backwards.
The woman called the fire department and met with laughter, from
a dispatcher who figured that now he'd heard __everything_. She
called her vet, who came to the house, shaved the cat's tail --
presumably after administering a tranquilizer -- and extricated
it. Then HP Customer Service (the source of this story) cleaned
the cat hair out of the printer. The cat has since recovered, and
the LaserJet still works fine, but they're not often found in the
same room.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 4, August 1995 Page 58
-------------------------------------------------
ADD MONEY, MAIL....
-------------------------------------------------
and enjoy fascinating articles, letters, queries and editorials
while you support the study and preservation of California's
unparalleled contribution to computing. Annual membership will
bring you four issues of the ANALYTICAL ENGINE and the
satisfaction of working toward a world-class computer museum
for the Golden State.
____ Yes! Please enroll me in the Computer History Association
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