Founders at Work.pdf

Dan Bricklin 75
Bob already had equipment. He had an acoustic coupler modem and a terminal
to edit on, from his other consulting work. So we just had to pay for the
time-sharing time, and he used it late at night, when it was cheap. I mean really
late. Basically, he slept during the day.
Livingston: That was at MIT, right?
Bricklin: We used MIT’s Multics system, the one we worked on.
Livingston: Did they mind?
Bricklin: No. We paid for it. Luckily it took a few months to be billed. So
money went into that, and Bob had some money and was able to pay for it.
Eventually we borrowed some money from relatives, because we wanted to buy
our own computer. We borrowed money from a bank and from relatives, and
we bought a Prime minicomputer, which had an operating system based on the
ideas of Multics, done by people who used to work at Multics. We bought one
of those of our own, and we sublet space through some other friends who had a
business, and that’s how we started our business—in a basement. The original
business was started in Bob’s attic in Arlington, Mass.
Livingston: At this point, you had graduated from MIT and were at Harvard
Business School?
Bricklin: Right. I graduated and worked for a few years, which was important.
I had worked for DEC—Digital Equipment Corporation, a big company.
Then I worked for FasFax Corporation, a small company. I got to see the differences
and see that small companies were just as exciting and just as cuttingedge.
You didn’t have to be in a big business, which was an eye-opening thing
for me.
Then I went to Harvard Business School, which was where I came up with
the idea. I saw the need for it. But that was coming off of my experience with
word processing and typesetting at DEC. I worked in computerized typesetting
at DEC because I like practical stuff. My father and grandfather were printers.
Out of typesetting, I got into video editing for typesetting, and out of that, I
ended up in the word processing group. I was project leader of the first word
processing system that DEC did. So that got me into this whole interactive,
screen-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get type system.
When I was at business school, taking the experience of what I had done at
MIT with interpreters . . . I worked on the APL system, I worked with Bob on
his Basic system; I had done interpreters (in high school I was building interpreters).
So the idea of an interpreted language, together with the word processor—and
you’re sitting there in business school running numbers—the idea of
word processing with numbers to me was a natural thing. The traditional way a
lot of people think of spreadsheets is as rows and columns, and it really isn’t. It’s
really a two-dimensional layout of words and numbers. If you look at what we
had in all our cases at Harvard Business School, at documents you have in business,
you have tables of things, but they’re organized in a way that is appropriate
to the data, and there’s a lot of other text, and the text is just as important as
the numbers.