Chapter 12, “How I Found ‘God’ on MCI (and a Few Other Odds and Ends

about Electronic Mail),” tells more about sending computer messages over the phone lines. Some E-mail nets even link up with the old Telex networks. During the writing of this book I corresponded via computer with people ranging from William F. Buckley, Jr., to Captain Zap and the MCI mail-Telex connection transmitted last-minute changes to my publisher. In Chapter 13, “Net Gain$,” you’ll learn how different computers in your own office can share the same programs and exchange information without people constantly having to carry floppy disks from one desk to another. A Michigan company may be enjoying as much as DLR $1,000 a year more in effective work time from each staffer as a result of its internal computer net. Of course, with today’s imperfect technology, such hookups can be a real struggle. But so often they’re worth it. You could say the same, indeed, of micros in general—today and in the future. It seemed especially true when, for my last chapter, I tried to reach Arthur Clarke’s micro in Sri Lanka. I wanted him to answer questions about microcomputers in 2001—the year in which his Hal was killing humans. Did our phone-computer connection succeed? Read Chapter 14, “As the Jungle Thickens.” Struggles notwithstanding, computers often _do_ pay for harried professionals and business people. “This $5,000 machine has saved me from hiring a $20,000-a-year assistant,” said a New York investment adviser using an IBM PC to write reports and make financial calculations at home. A young trader forsook the bedlam at the New York Cotton Exchange for an electronic office in his apartment. Now he can go to work in his bathrobe and delay his shower until lunchtime. “It’s more challenging this way,” he said. “More contemplation, less raw instinct.”[5] Footnote 5: The examples of the investment adviser and cotton trader come from _New York_ magazine. Another self-employed man, Jimmy Carter, composed his memoirs on a word processor—perhaps inspired by the example of a former Carter speech writer who wrote a well-reviewed book on national defense. Then there’s Isaac Asimov, the legendary science-fiction novelist, who, even with an ancient manual, could write faster than the old Teletype machines could clatter along. But he didn’t always produce the neatest copy. “How different now!” he exulted in an article. “Staring at a page of type on a television screen, I eagerly look for typos so I can have the fun of changing them.” You needn’t be a professional author, however, to benefit from computerized writing. In Maryland, an architect-consultant, once typewriter shy, is now churning out reports several hundred pages long on his IBM PC. “A boon to the small businessman” is how Hugh Hunt, a son of the late oilman H. L. Hunt, described micros. “Now he can compete with the larger corporations as far as obtaining data and processing it quickly.” Hunt himself was using portable computers in his land-development business. But he also noted their helpfulness in law: “Computers are one of the ways that small attorneys can compete with large corporations. By joining a computer bank, they can research briefs and do word processing, just as the large companies can.” Many Americans apparently shared his views. In 1985, they might buy six million computers for business use, and within two more years, that number might almost double.[6] While I was writing this book, the United States was emerging from the worst economic ordeals since the Great Depression; a few college graduates had been reduced to shopping-bag ladies, but the microcomputer business was still growing, even if at a reduced rate. You might wait three months or more for your Macintosh or IBM. Some companies died, but others took their places; and even in times of inflation most prices on micros were dropping; years would pass before scientists could no longer keep dramatically increasing the silicon chips’ powers. Forget about the physical smallness of the chips. It was as if the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley—in exploiting the scientists’ advances—were opening up a vast electronic territory. “The only thing you worry about with computers,” Hunt said, pleased, “is ‘Should I wait until something better comes along?’” Footnote 6: The estimates of the number of business computer buyers come from the Yankee Group’s Chris Christiansen. “I’m sort of a computer groupie,” said Art Buchwald, the syndicated humor columnist. He was caught up in the new pornography of the era: those luscious, ad-packed micro magazines crammed with the vital statistics of IBMs and Apples. “It used to be that when _Playboy_ arrived at the house, my wife would say, ‘Your _Playboy_’s here,’” Buchwald told an advertising magazine. “Now she says, ‘Your _InfoWorld_’s here.’ I’m not sure which she prefers. I have a feeling that _Playboy_, at least, she could discuss with me.” It was like radio during the 1920s, this micro craze. _Time_ had proclaimed the computer “Machine of the Year” in 1982, and I recalled a song that a friend of my parents, an old woman, had written years ago. “Marconi, Marconi,” the lyrics went, “the world is at your feet.” How long until the novelty of microcomputers seems just as quaint as that of radio? The parallels could be there. Two San Francisco-area authors, Andrew Fluegelman and Jeremy Joan Hewes, in _Writing in the Computer Age_, urged readers to “become full-fledged computer citizens—as writers, poets, artists, musicians, programmers, number-crunchers, networkers....” The Fluegelman-Hewes book was useful and well done. But “computer citizens”? The phrase grated. I was a user at the keyboard, a “citizen” in the voting booth. Still, I could understand why Fluegelman and Hewes called themselves “computer evangelists.” I felt the same way. After having brought us Muzak and junk food, technology for once was making life better. I say this with reservations. Educators correctly warned of the computer literacy gap between Harlem and Scarsdale—of the dearth of machines in the slums and the bounty in some suburbs. Rich and poor clashed at school-board meetings. In my own county, Fairfax County, Virginia, a well-off PTA reportedly saved up for micros, then withheld purchases until it learned whether the school board would spend tax money helping other schools catch up. And what about unemployment as automation cost more jobs? Or U.S. firms using computer-satellite hookups to pipe in the work of $3-an-hour clerks? The People’s Republic of China was even preparing to sell programming skills to the rest of the world. A billion _programmers_, maybe? So much for high tech as a refuge for the American jobless. How could you make computerization a joy to all? That was one answer you’d never find in a computer store. You could, however, set up the right retraining program for valued employees to see them through automation. You could fight the Hal Syndrome. You could work to end boring tasks. In short, you could do your best to make your computers benefit both your employees and your company’s earnings. 2 ❑ The Kaypro Phenomenon: How Solana Beach Took on Silicon Valley As _The Silicon Jungle_ was lighting up my Kaypro screen one September day in 1983, several similar machines were whirring and clicking in the Washington offices of Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign. Kaypros kept track of donations and the $18-million budget. They helped churn out news releases, speeches, and letters to voters in important primary states. Just eighty people worked at headquarters seven months into the campaign; Kaypros and other affordable micros were a major reason why Mondale wouldn’t need legions of back-room staffers in Washington later on. I didn’t know if Mondale would win or lose the primary, but whatever happened, it wouldn’t be for want of computing power. Forty-five miles away, near Baltimore, Kaypros at a Westinghouse plant were receiving computer messages from defense installations abroad. Other Kaypros sat on the desks of William F. Buckley, Jr., ex-Governor Jerry Brown’s research director, and the president of Tootsie Rolls; and still another, some months earlier, had helped study Barney Clark, the first man with an artificial heart. A Kaypro in the Midwest was tracking something else, the milk and manure output of cows. All of us, Mondale’s people, the others, and I, had benefited from the struggle between Adam Osborne and Andy Kay. Osborne, a brash ex-columnist for computer magazines, had marketed the first mass-produced portable computer. Andy Kay had soon followed with the Kaypro. Adam Osborne was a dark-haired, mustached man in his forties who enjoyed toting his product within sight of photographers. His father, a British missionary of unconventional stripe, had tried to convert Christians to Hinduism. Nor did the younger Osborne himself blend into the crowd; he founded his computer company in 1981 and was soon comparing himself to Henry Ford and the Osborne 1 to the Model T. “I give you,” he said, “ninety percent of what most people need.” His rival, Kay, was shorter, about five feet seven inches, but also slim; like Osborne, he had studied chemical engineering and was a maverick and newcomer in the personal-computer business. There, however, the resemblances ended. Kay was soft-spoken, graying, an old electronics hand; his friends depicted him as a quality-obsessed engineer and Osborne as a flashy marketing man. They said Osborne had seemed technically incapable of making a good portable with a nine-inch screen. Adam Osborne, in turn, spoke of Kay’s computer as if he were a four-hundred-pound wrestler forecasting an instant demise for a foe: “The Kaypro’s gonna die.”[7] Footnote 7: “Gonna die” is from _Popular Computing_. The Osborne statements come from oft-repeated statements to newspapers or from magazines. “Mr. Osborne,” an aide said when I revealed that this chapter was on Brand X, “does not want to discuss the Kaypro.” Andy Kay himself did not speak to me in a normal interview. His literary agent-friend, William Gladstone, feared that it might conflict with a project of their own, and Gladstone sought to deny me ownership of quoted material. Normally I would have told him to stuff it, but I needed the right quotes to tell the full story of _my_ computer. So Gladstone and I worked out a compromise. After I sent thousands of words of questions via my Kaypro over the phone lines, he obtained Kay’s replies on tape. I submitted follow-up queries when Kay’s answers did not satisfy me. Gladstone insisted on reading this chapter for accuracy but never tried to censor me; in fact, he was helpful and pleasant to deal with. He even brought this manuscript to the attention of a publisher he knew (although I placed it through my agents). Gladstone’s help, incidentally, didn’t influence my perception of the Kaypro II as better than the archrival Osborne. I bought a Kaypro at a time when “William Gladstone” was nothing more to me than the name of a nineteenth-century English statesman; I _already_ loved the company’s product. Just the same, determined not to write an extended press release, I’ve consulted with the corporation’s critics, and I have run this chapter past a _San Diego Union_ reporter named Dan Berger, who exposed some of Kaypro’s less admirable management practices. I’m as grateful to Dan as to Bill. The computer magazines had portrayed Osborne as a lone maverick taking on the Silicon Valley establishment with the portable that the rest of the industry said couldn’t be built. But Kay claimed a similar idea had hit him at the same time. Andy Kay had seen his son-in-law struggling to carry an Apple and its trimmings between home and office and decided that a market might exist for a small machine for engineers, architects, and other professionals. _Then_, Kay said, he had heard of the Osborne. Modifying their original plans somewhat, his people at Non-Linear Systems had homed in on their rival’s weaknesses, giving their own computer a better screen and a better keyboard and the ability to store more data. Adam Osborne had struck back with a jazzed-up version of his first machine. By 1983, many other companies were in the fray, including Seequa Computer Corporation, a Maryland manufacturer whose computer sold for less than $2,000 and ran most IBM-style programs. In mid-1983 an industry expert was saying Kay and Osborne might together enjoy $200 million a year in micro sales at the retail level. That was just a fraction of the $5-billion-a-year market for business micros, but the two firms then seemed the largest makers of portables in the $1,000-$2,000 range.[8] Their fight was pivotal. Lines were fuzzing between economy business computers and the home machines; the winner of the portable battle might go on to fight Apple and IBM, provided it survived the onslaught of $1,000 computers that Japan was expected to unleash. By the end of the decade, powerful portables with a quarter the bulk of the Kaypro II might jam the shelves of the discount stores. Footnote 8: The $200-million and $5-billion estimates came to me from Chris Christiansen of the Yankee Group, who said the latter figure might be very conservative. _InfoWorld_ quoted another research firm, InfoCorp, as saying that 527,000 portable computers were sold in 1982—and that 5.1 million would be sold by 1987. Kay waged his marketing war from several hillside buildings in Solana Beach, a small town near San Diego, hundreds of miles south of Osborne and the rest of Silicon Valley. His was a family business. Kay’s personal housekeeper served salads and fruit juice in the corporate lunch room, and his eighty-six-year-old father, known around the plant as “Grandpa,” repaired electronic equipment and ran a forklift. Andy Kay’s wife was secretary of the company. One son, David, was the vice-president for marketing and had helped develop the Kaypro; a second son worked in personnel, and a third ran the print shop; and Andy Kay’s daughter and her husband had designed the buildings—which were now the same light blue as the “KAYPRO II” lettering on the computer. Altogether, some 450 people worked for Kay’s company by mid-1983. That was more than twice the number a year earlier when the Kaypro II was just hitting the market and Kay was counting on a mere $10 million in sales. Bulldozers were growling away amid the expansion, and the company newspaper said equipment-cluttered grounds resembled a scene from a bad disaster movie. No longer was Kay a semiobscure maker of voltmeters and oscilloscopes and other test equipment. Sales, once $4 or $5 million annually, were barreling along toward $100 million. Even his company name soon changed—from Non-Linear Systems to Kaypro—in recognition of the success of the division making his hot new computer. Wall Street and Andy Kay were getting to know each other. That summer four million shares of common stock hit the market at $10 each; and the prospectus said Arthur B. Laffer, the “Laffer Curve” economist, would serve on the board of directors. Kay still owned most of the company personally. And now, with the new money, he could give IBM and Apple a better fight. “After 30 years in business,” _San Diego Magazine_ had said, “he’s suddenly the new kid on the block, clutching under his arms a couple of excellent bags of marbles.”[9] Footnote 9: The _San Diego Magazine_ article appeared in May 1983. Before the Kaypro, Kay hadn’t exactly been on the verge of starvation—he owned an art-filled home overlooking the Pacific and gave to the local symphony and other cultural causes—but now he’d reached the point where his admirers were depicting him as a silicon-age Horatio Alger character. That’s a little exaggerated. Kay, though poor in his New Jersey days, was never an orphaned newsboy toughing it alone. “Grandpa” prodded Andy. Frank Kopischiansky—an Eastern European immigrant and an ex-coal miner—worked in silk mills and wool factories and as a chauffeur. Frank had come to the United States from what is now Poland. Andy Kopischiansky would later become Andy Kay after his original name baffled some colleagues at work and they kept calling him “Kay” for short. The Kopischiansky home lacked a bathtub. “But,” Andy recalled, “we always had food, and I always had a nickel in my pocket.” Frank enjoyed fixing broken-down cars and tinkering with electrical equipment, and Andy himself built a shortwave radio when he was only twelve years old. Math was another love. Andy even considered a career as an actuary after Prudential Life told him he could eventually make $15,000 a year. “I flipped out,” Andy said, “because it was a lot of money in 1935.” Frank shrugged off the $15,000, however. “That’s not very much,” he said. The words, incredibly, came from a man who seldom made more than $1,000 a year during Andy’s youth and who sometimes earned just $15 a week. Andy, growing up in Clifton, New Jersey, took it for granted he could never afford college, but then the letters M.I.T. came up in a drafting class. “What’s that?” Andy asked. “I’ve never heard of the place.” Frank had lost most of his savings in a bank crash, but his wife somehow scraped up enough money to help Andy reach M.I.T. on a partial scholarship. Andy graduated in 1940 with a bachelors degree in chemical engineering, mathematics, and premedicine and worked for the Bendix Corporation and several other companies before founding Non-Linear Systems in 1953. Kay reached California through a job, although for years he’d been hoping to enjoy the warm climate there. He started his company in Solana Beach rather than Silicon Valley because he was already working in the area. Osborne himself would found his own firm while living in Berkeley—he’d locate it in Hayward, a medium-sized city within twenty miles of the Valley proper, the Palo Alto-San Jose area southeast of San Francisco. For Non-Linear Systems Kay developed the world’s first commercially successful digital voltmeter. It was the result of some memories from World War II, when unskilled workers were constantly damaging voltmeters and having trouble reading them accurately. Kay’s new machine easily survived the careless. The instrument displayed numbers and didn’t require workers to make a reading off the thin needle of a conventional meter adjusted for the right voltage. “I don’t look at myself particularly as an inventor,” Kay said. “I’m a solver of problems. There are inventors who have many, many more ideas than I get.” Instead, he tried to refine ideas in “ways that make sense from an industrial-engineering standpoint and a customer standpoint.” Kay’s digital voltmeter was perfect for the military and for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and their contractors; unskilled people could help test thousands of voltages on American missiles. “The silos are full of our instruments,” he said. But the NASA cutbacks of the Nixon era hit Non-Linear Systems hard. “The seven vice-presidents went,” recalled a trade publication, “as did their white Cadillacs.” Frank Kopischiansky was willing to help see Non-Linear Systems through bad times, loaning thousands of dollars of painfully saved money. But that was hardly enough to sustain a corporation. What about the future? How to avoid the boom-and-bust cycle of government spending? Kay decided to carve out a niche as a maker of rugged portable test gear for private industry. He wanted to offer many of the same wrinkles found in costly, bench-bound equipment, and one of those features was a microprocessor in a voltmeter: a miniature electronic brain that would make it easier to use. The idea came from an old friend, Bill McDonald, whom Kay had met decades earlier at M.I.T. Their gym lockers were next to each other’s there; both men had loved handball and hated team sports. McDonald, a husky man of basketball-player height, had worked for Non-Linear Systems in the early 1950s, then had returned East, where he had acquired a computer background. Then, in the late 1970s, he’d rejoined Non-Linear Systems, where his friend Kay hoped he would help develop a computer. Correctly or not, Kay believed that “ninety percent of the electronics business was computer and ten percent was test equipment, hi-fi, stereo, and stuff like that.” Non-Linear Systems had offered other companies’ minicomputers in systems it packaged for military contractors, but still wasn’t making machines of its own. Maybe a small business machine would be one way to enter computerdom. “Two months after Bill came to work for me,” Kay recalled, “he showed me some microprocessor-based computers for doing accounts payable-receivable at the local computer dealer’s place. “They were very reasonable, so I bought some and was very intrigued with them. And I wondered: ‘Why not make this stuff? I could make a better disk drive. And look at this: this connector doesn’t work too well.’ And Bill said, ‘We could make them, all right, but I don’t know where you’d sell them.’ This was in late 1979. I said okay and dropped the idea.” Two years later, however, Kay watched his architect son-in-law, Michael Batter, struggling with an Apple and knew the time was ripe for an easier-to-tote portable. Kay tried VisiCalc, the electronic spreadsheet, on the Apple and came away thinking the machine was too complicated, beyond being a hassle to move from home to office. So Kay told Bill McDonald, “Listen, we’re selling instruments to engineers. Let’s make a computer that we can walk in to an engineer and set on his desk and say, ‘Hey, look at this. You can use it.’” Still, Kay worried about the new technology. “It’s a fairly stylized dance,” McDonald reassured him in spring 1981. “You buy the chips, and there is black magic in getting them to work—but not in how they work.” “Okay,” came the reply, “that’s it. We’ll get rid of the disadvantages of the Apple and cram our computer into one box without cables all over the place.” In ads the Apple looked incredibly compact. Actually, though, serious computer users needed disk drives to store large amounts of information for quick retrieval. They also needed a TV-like monitor to see the letters and numbers they typed out on the computer. And Kay wisely wanted everything squeezed into one box. If you bought his machine, you’d get the whole works except perhaps for the printer, which spewed out your calculations or typed up your letter. Also, it would cost you less than a full Apple system. Kay could bring down the cost of a complete machine if he planned on every computer being one. All this was the logical culmination of Kay’s skill in shrinking gear for the military and aerospace industry. For years he had been making printed circuit boards and filling them with components. And he could order the disk drives, keyboards, and other special computer-type parts from outside suppliers. The way Kay tells it, he had no idea—at first—that he was about to take on Adam Osborne. “It was six months,” he said, “before we ever saw Osborne’s literature. He introduced his computer in March 1981, but I didn’t know anything about it.” Some would question that statement, of course, given the novelty of the Osborne 1 and its creator’s flair for publicity. Whatever happened—with Osborne in mind or not—Kay selected the same basic technology and essentially similar parts. A Z80-Style Microprocessor A =microprocessor= is simply the main brains that tie together the memory devices, the keyboard, and other parts of the computer. You can also call it a =central processing unit= (=CPU=). Okay, but why a Z80 in the Kaypro? That’s simply a style of chip from a company called Zilog. “You could buy those all over the place,” Kay said. “We wanted something proven and reliable.” The Z80 was the only kind of CPU that could run =CP/M= (=Control Program for Microcomputers=)-style programs, then an industry standard. The Z80, though, can’t handle programs as complicated as the newer 8088 chip that ended up in IBM PCs and countless clones. Here’s why. A =bit= is a “1” or a “0.” Patterns of bits form =bytes=. And what’s a byte? Nothing more than a letter or number. So how does this tie in with the early Kaypro’s Z80 versus the IBM’s 8088? Well, the Z80 processes information in =words= of only 8 bits at a time. The 8088 in the IBM, however, gulps it down in 16-bit chunks and works with larger memories—so that the IBM can run more complicated programs, like the more elaborate electronic spreadsheets for forecasting profit and loss. There’s another benefit, too. A 16-bitter doesn’t need to call up programming information as often from the spinning floppy disks, which are slower than the purely electronic memories. The Kaypro II, however, won’t _immediately_ become a has-bit—er, has-been. “Converting the Kaypro to a 16-bit machine is no big deal,” Kay observed. In fact, several months after he said it, his company announced a computer called the Kaypro II Plus 88 with both the 8-bit Z80 and the 16-bit 8088. It couldn’t run all IBM programs, especially those boasting =graphics= or pictures as well as words and numbers. Here, as in many cases, the term “IBM compatible” is grossly misleading. There are degrees of compatibility, and even if a computer supposedly uses the same style of floppy disks, you must test it with the program _you_ want to run. (Many computer aficionados test for general IBM compatibility by running a game called Flight Simulator, or Lotus 1-2-3, a program combining a spreadsheet with graphics and several other capabilities.) Some existing programs, by the way, are configured so that it doesn’t matter much whether you’re running the 8- or 16-bit version. That will change as special programs come out for the 16-bit machines and as old ones, like WordStar, begin to take full advantage of 16-bit capabilities. Already Apple and other companies are writing new software for computers like the Macintosh, which, if not universally regarded as a true 32-bit machine, contains chips faster than the IBM’s 8088. For many small businesses, however, 8 bits may be powerful enough even for number crunching as long as the right programs are available. The wisdom in the micro business is that no machine is ever obsolete—just so it does the job for you. 64K Random-Access Memory (RAM) RAM, once the power goes off, will throw out everything you’ve typed. This temporary computer memory, this electronic scratchpad, is like a bright student cramming for a quiz in a useless subject: he’s a quick learner—and a quick forgetter. Don’t confuse RAM with =ROM=, or =read-only memory=. ROMs keep remembering even after the power goes off. But you can’t “write” new material on them; commonly, ROMs store programs used over and over again. What about the RAM, though? How to get around the forgetting? You just transfer the information to floppy disks, which are slower but as stable as a music cassette. Different computers hold different amounts of information in their RAMs. The Kaypro II holds 64K; =K= is normally a scientific abbreviation for 1,000. So 64K stands for a memory capacity of about 64,000 letters or numbers. No, I won’t mess with the technical explanation of why it isn’t exactly 64,000. Okay, but why _64_K? It’s a magic number to the computer. Sixty-four K bytes is the largest memory with which the Z80 and other 8-bit microprocessors can easily communicate without too much technical trickery. Also, you need at least 64K to make good use of some popular software like the WordStar word-processing program. Moreover, the RAM must be roomy enough to handle electronic spreadsheets. Most small businesses will find that the 64K Kaypro can juggle around enough columns and rows on the sheets. But in some cases you _may_ still want a micro with 500K or even 1,000K or more of RAM. To sum things up, that’s because: