Doug Carlston - Software People. An Insider’s Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry

In fact, the game was a fascinating intellectual exercise. It was far more fun to play than I had ever thought it would be. What made it so special was that I had never been able to play anything like it before. Without computers it would have been impossible to create such a simulation. In other words, a whole new area of entertainment had just been created. It’s hard to describe how excited I felt. I love games of all sorts. The idea that the world might suddenly be filled with hundreds of brand-new games was unbelievably thrilling.

At that time, however, I owned very little software, and Radio Shack carried almost none. It was then that the store manager told me about a wonderful chess program published by a Boston-based company called Personal Software; eventually, I drove all the way to Boston to get a copy. But one program simply wasn’t enough to satisfy my appetite. I then discovered 80-NW, a home-printed four-page computer magazine that was dedicated to users of the TRS-80. I bought a subscription to the magazine and was treated every other month to an ever thicker book filled with programming tips and advertisements for microcomputer-related products. Dozens of programs were available, and I could have bankrupted myself in a week simply by ordering all the software that struck my fancy. So one day I thought up a scheme to get more games.

I sent a copy of Galactic Empire to four companies that had runs ads in 80-NW. Would they be interested in publishing my program?, I asked. And, by the way, would they consider sending me their line of software, gratis, as part of the deal? To me, creating a game and trading it for other games promised to be an intensely satisfying transaction. It would be great fun if I could get away with it.

The scheme succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Scott Adams of Adventure International sent me his whole line of adventure games from Florida. Art Canfil of Cybernautics sent me his program Taipan from San Francisco. The Software Exchange (TSE) in Milford, New Hampshire, sent me a huge pile of games. And in return, everybody wanted to publish my program, a procedure that was a little different in the late 1970s than it is now. Then, programs were stored on cassette tape—a fairly slow and clumsy medium that was eventually replaced by floppy disks. Moreover, in those days no one thought to ask for exclusive publishing rights to a program, so with my permission Adventure International, TSE, and Cybernautics all published my game, with varying degrees of success. I was in seventh heaven, having never imagined that writing software could be profitable!

Compared with the effort of writing software, the activity of selling it was not only profitable but also remarkably fast-paced, right from the beginning. Four days after I sent Galactic Empire to Scott Adams in Florida, I received a call from Scott’s wife, Alexis. Yes, they loved the program, she said. In fact, they already had orders for it, and if I would give her oral permission to publish, they would start shipping later that day. The contract would follow later. Scott and Alexis were as good as their word. I received my first royalty check, for a couple of hundred dollars, two weeks later. I was astonished. People were actually paying me to have fun!

I started to take the whole programming business a little more seriously, and in time my obsession with the TRS-80 began to destroy my law practice. I couldn’t help myself. Even in the courtroom, I’d suddenly find myself thinking of a more efficient way to write a particular piece of code, or I’d realize that there was a logical defect in a program that wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. My legal briefs ended up with bits and pieces of programming code scribbled in the margins, and I could hardly wait to get back to the office to key my ideas into the machine to see whether they worked.

Finally, in October 1979, I dissolved my law practice. I was having a lot more fun writing computer games than I was drawing up wills. The fact that I was also making a modest but steadily increasing income from my programming efforts had something to do with my decision, but at the time it wasn’t at all clear that this was a prudent career move. I had no idea whether the freelance programming business was going to continue to be financially viable, but I abandoned my law career anyway because the microcomputer software world drew me in a way that I found irresistible.

It immediately struck me—when I realized just how possible it was to make a living at my kind of programming— that I had an opportunity to lead an altogether different way of life. It took me a while to accept that I had stumbled upon such a beautiful loophole in the rules of life, but once I did I knew that my job for the immediate future was to create fantasies and translate them into computer programs. If you think that sounds a lot more like play than work, you know how I reacted to the prospect of this new career. The kind of fascinating sci-fi sagas that had occupied my spare hours— flying interstellar craft to a thousand strange planets—was now my profession as well as my avocation.

It didn’t take long for my new career to change the way I lived my life. Something very different from everything I had previously planned for myself suddenly became possible, and I was still young enough to be tempted by the prospect of a romantic journey into an uncertain future. So I went along with the opportunity to become an electronic-age vagabond.

I didn’t need an office or more equipment than I could fit into the trunk of my car. In fact, I could write my fantasy programs from wherever I could plug in my computer, so I started traveling across America. With my dog in the front seat and my computer and a few other possessions in the back seat, I headed in the general direction of Oregon. I stopped along the way to visit friends and relatives, play with the computer, and shed the three years of Harvard Law School and four years of the juridical practice. I was free, for the first time in years.

Three thousand miles later, I arrived in Eugene, Oregon, where my brother Gary lived. He had given up his job with the March of Dimes and was now investing all his time and energy in his ill-fated importing business. One day when he was feeling particularly broke, I suggested that he try to sell some of my programs; after all, everyone else seemed to be making money doing it. By this time, I had followed up my first simulation program with another, Galactic Trader; eventually, I finished four programs in the Galactic Saga series. On the morning of February 20, 1980, Gary called a fellow named Ray Daly, owner of The Program Store in Washington, D.C., and talked him into ordering $300 worth of our products. We then officially formed a company, and, using a name from one of my science fiction simulations, we called ourselves Brøderbund. A software company was born.

That evening, Gary and I had a celebration dinner at a local restaurant to fortify us for the arduous task of filling Daly’s order. Computer software was still sold in the form of cassette tapes, and so we spent most of the next day with three cassette tape recorders, dozens of cassettes, plastic packing bags, and staplers strewn all over the living room floor as we frantically tried to copy enough programs to fill the order on time. Our efforts were successful. We packed the cassettes into the plastic bags and sent them off. At the top of each bag was our (hastily produced) business card and a punched hole that retailers used to hang the bags on the pegboard racks that passed for point-of-purchase displays in those days.

Things moved very quickly from that point. We had some financial problems in our first year, but by the third year of operation, we had moved from Eugene to San Rafael, California, a community in Marin County, twenty minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. We had hired more than forty people to help us and were occupying a fairly large building. Our company was selling millions of dollars’ worth of software annually. Software pioneers who had been only names in magazines or the heroes of hobbyist legends were now my colleagues, competitors, and, in some cases, friends.