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

Bob Leff and Dave Wagman both have clear memories of where they were four years ago. All the momentous changes that have taken place in their lives have happened too quickly, too recently, to have acquired an aura of permanence yet. As a result, they share with some people in the software industry a feeling of vulnerability. Everything could go away as quickly as it came. In the beginning, we all had been a little group of entrepreneurs going out into the wide world together. But later each company evolved its own separate strategy for survival, and Softsel in particular moved along a separate path and now must exist in a world that contains very few of those cottage entrepreneurs but a lot of very tough, very established professional businesses. There is a great deal of nostalgia for the early days. At the same time, however, no one really wants to go back.

One small group of entrepreneurs, most of them oriented toward products and services for the Apple computer, became particularly good friends of ours. For most of us in this group, our home ground was the West Coast and, more often than not, California. We shared common experiences as our companies grew, and we tended to view one another as coexplorers of uncharted waters rather than as deadly competitors. We traded information relatively freely because that was the way it was in the hobbyist days and because we had no other benchmarks by which to measure our progress. And if we exaggerated our business performance to the outside world at times, we were more candid with one another, since we knew that important decisions would be based on the information Shared.

In May 1980, four months after we had started Brøderbund, our monthly sales had declined from a high of around $900 to zero. We made all of our sales by calling stores on the telephone, but three of the four products in our line worked only on the Radio Shack TRS-80 computers, and there weren’t a lot of stores other than Radio Shack stores that carried TRS software. Radio Shack itself wasn’t entirely helpful to us either—it wouldn’t give us a list of all its stores. As a result we had to locate outlets by looking at the ads in computer magazines and copying the names of new franchises off the backs of the Radio Shack inserts in the Sunday Oregonian. This was not an enormously effective technique.

Since we didn’t have to worry about customers calling us, we spent a couple of hours each afternoon playing basketball down at the Eugene YMCA. It seems incredible to me today that we had that kind of free time then. Today, each day is a nonstop schedule of telephone calls, meetings, conferences, conventions—and I haven’t played basketball more than twice in the past twelve months.

But back then, when we weren’t shooting baskets or combing through newspaper advertisements, we were programming. And in June, when we started trying to convert the three Galactic Saga programs to run on the Apple computer, we finally had lots to do. In the meantime Apple had provided us with a bonanza and had given us something of inestimable value—a list of all the stores in the country that sold its computers. At last we knew exactly where to sell our products. What we didn’t know was how we were going to reach those stores without having any money in the first place. We were financially strapped. We had spent every penny I had saved and were heavily drawn on both my VISA and Master- Charge cards. Telephone sales weren’t working very well. And our relatives couldn’t afford to loan us any more money.

It was one of those desperate times when one relies on old contacts and friends. In this case our salvation began with several women from Gary’s Swedish basketball team. Several of them were going to be in San Francisco at the end of June and wanted to see him. They wanted to know if he could come down to the Bay Area for a few days. We just didn’t have the money to send him. So one of Gary’s friends from the Swedish days bought him a plane ticket. One way—Eugene to San Francisco. It was up to Gary to figure out how to get back. He assumed that he would hitchhike.

Getting back was easier than he anticipated. Gary saw his friends. He also sold close to $3000 worth of software to computer stores. Most of it consisted of the Galactic Empire and Galactic Trader programs we had just converted from TRS-80 to Apple format. During this trip, Gary got over to Sacramento, where he made a call on the local Computerland store. The store owner was Terry Bradley, and the manager was Jerry Jewell. They had just started a company called Sirius Software. Ken Williams, co-owner of the newly founded On-Line Systems, had just been to the store the day Gary visited, trying to sell his first programs. As it turned out, Sirius and On-Line were soon to become our most formidable competitors.

But at the time, what most interested Gary during this visit to Sacramento was hearing Jerry Jewell talk about a couple who had just left the store before Gary arrived. That couple also had a software company, and like Brøderbund, it was based in Eugene. Jerry said they had been showing their wares, and to him it seemed like weird stuff.

It was weird stuff. Their software had names like The Creativity Life Dynamic and The Life Conditioning Dynamic. Gary didn’t know what to make of it, and neither did I when he told me about it. But we were eager to make the acquaintance of anyone who knew anything about this strange new world of software into which we were venturing, and the idea that there was another software company in Eugene, Oregon, piqued our curiosity even more. Eugene is a beautiful place, in a fertile river valley between snow-capped mountains, surrounded by rolling pasture lands and forests. It also has a rich cultural life provided by the presence of the University of Oregon and a goodly number of artists, writers, and other creative people who like to live far away from the asphalt jungles. It is an exceptionally pleasant place to live, but in 1980 it wasn’t exactly a hotbed of software entrepreneurs. So when Gary returned from California we made an attempt to contact the couple Jerry Jewell had spoken about.

We ended up having to contact them by mail because that was the only way to get hold of them. They were not listed in any phone book. It turned out that they didn’t even have a phone. Their business operated solely out of a post office box—a fact we learned about after we saw a magazine ad for their company, Avant Garde Creations. So we dropped them a card and shortly afterward got a response.

The couple was Mary Carol Smith and her programming partner, Don Jones. Unlike most other entrepreneurs who were starting software companies at that time, they didn’t get into the business to get rich, or because they loved programming. Instead, they had a cause that was not immediately connected to personal computers. They are true believers, out to change the world, and they see the microcomputer as a tool that will help people to take control of their own lives. Software was merely a medium for the promulgation of information about their idiosyncratic utopia.

The primary purpose of Avant Garde Creations, as I understood it after the first few times it was explained to me, was to effect positive changes in the world by helping people look at their lives in new ways. And the purpose of much of the software was to provide a tool for this kind of personal transformation process. Much of their work always has had too much jargon in it for my taste, but then again, one develops a high tolerance for jargon if one is in the software business for very long.

You have to remember that the Carlstons are more Protestant than Transformationalist, and we come from the Midwest, not the West Coast. I had my fun with “Galactic Saga,” which was an unabashed fantasy world, and then we had some serious fun when Brøderbund got started. But neither Gary nor I entertained the notion that we were engaged in any kind of quasi-religious quest that would change the world. Still, microcomputer software is a very ecumenical religion in and of itself, embracing both the straightest mainframe Cobol-heads and the most wild-eyed raving Forth hackers.