Software People and the rate of change

I have so enjoyed reading Soft­ware People, pub­lished in 1985, a busi­ness memoir by Dou­glas G. Carl­ston, founder of Brøderbund Soft­ware, the com­pany that pub­lished (among many others) Print Shop and Lode Runner. Lately I have found myself mag­ne­tized by this genre, which I’ll call the “tech vanity memoir”. (Another example is How the Web Was Born by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau.) As books, they have some pre­dictable flaws, but/and it is pre­cisely their casu­al­ness and self-indulgence that makes them fascinating. Reeling out tri­umphs and set­tling old scores, they let slip tons of deli­cious details — stuff that “better” writers would prob­ably omit.

I want to men­tion the main thing that has struck me in this book, then add a couple of other notes.

The main thing: Carl­ston describes a nascent industry with an incred­ible rate of change. The years from 1977 to 1984 were absolutely insane — whole new mar­kets being born, many with­ering just as fast. In terms of capa­bility leaps between generations — think of going from an Altair with a row of lights and switches on its face to an Apple II with high-res graphics — I think it was, in rel­a­tive terms, at least as dizzying as the AI industry 2018-2025. Periods that loom out­sized in tech’s cul­tural memory — or at least in my ver­sion of it — are here com­pressed into six-month windows.

And it hap­pened this fast without the ben­efit of the internet! Mag­a­zines cir­cu­lated around the country; phones rang off the hook; com­puter pro­grams on cas­sette tapes went tum­bling through the mail. Tapes! In the mail!

Can you feel it? Our tem­poral band­width broadens as we acknowl­edge that, yes, other people lived in strange and spe­cial times, too. Maybe stranger. Maybe even singular.

Likewise, it’s useful to be reminded that microcom­puters, e.g. the Apple II and IBM PC, were con­sid­ered by most pro­fes­sional pro­gram­mers (who worked on mainframes) to be laugh­ably underpowered. So, the excite­ment here wasn’t about sophistication; it was about access. That part rhymes with a lot of web history. Before a tech­nology is any­thing else, it’s a toy.

Another thing: a reader notices, among the early hobbyists, a halo of casual wealth. Nothing extravagant … but you had to be the kind of person who could buy, in 1979, a very expen­sive toy. Or the kind of person who could borrow, from their parents, a few thou­sand dol­lars to start a new ven­ture in an unproven market.

Dou­glas G. Carl­ston was that kind of person; we won’t hold it against him. Rather pointedly, he shares this story, which I’d never heard, of Microsoft’s nego­ti­a­tions with IBM:

The young hot­shots from Bellevue, Washington, were ques­tioned closely by IBM’s tech­nical experts, and by the end of the day it became clear that IBM was taken with the pro­gram and with Gates and Allen’s pre­sen­ta­tion of it. But they had another advan­tage going for them, aside from their tech­nical exper­tise and busi­ness acumen: an unex­pected per­sonal con­tact with John Opel, IBM’s new chairman. At lunchtime, Phil Estridge, IBM’s project man­ager for the PC operation, told Gates that Opel had asked if Microsoft was “Mary Gates’s boy’s com­pany.” It turned out that Bill’s mother had served with Opel on the board of direc­tors of the United Way.

Among the book’s other delights: its dis­cus­sion of the really very strange Sierra On-Line, whose games were, of course, a mean­ingful part of my childhood. I knew a bit of the com­pany’s lore, but had missed the fact that they were based in, basically, Fresno. What a world.

Anyway — I loved Soft­ware People. An absolutely ideal used book­store find.