Founders at Work.pdf

Dan Bricklin 83
Bricklin: We worked out of Bob’s attic until around when we got delivery of this
computer that we bought, a time-sharing computer. Bob wrote an assembler
and linker for it, and I wrote an editor for it so that we could do our work. We
hired an employee or two, and they helped us finish the actual product and
then convert it to other machines.
Bob wrote most of the code, and then this person we hired, Steve
Lawrence, and myself wrote the rest of the code. I got the transcendental functions
to work, the sine and cosine, stuff like that. There were bugs in divide, and
Steve got those things working. We had the beta version of it ready, I think, in
the late summer, together with a self-running demo version of it that was actually
macro-driven—that basically had a long macro that would just run that was
just keystrokes driving the thing.
You could just put that disk in—the computer store could do that—and
people would just leave it in the window, and it would run through an entire
demo, explaining what the thing was. Personal Software sent those to every
known computer store. Some of them had no idea what to do with them and
just sold the demo. Some lost it. And some figured out what it was, and became
rich, hopefully.
In the fall of 1979, the manual was finished, production was finished, and it
shipped. I think I got my first copy Saturday, October 20.
Livingston: Were there any panic moments before October 20? Any times
when you thought, “We can’t pull this off?”
Bricklin: There were panic moments in the business, but they had nothing to
do with programming. We were working in a basement in Central Square. We
were next to the T (the subway) right near the Kendall Square Station. The T
went right by us, and every time it went by, everything would shake, because,
literally, it was a few feet in front of us.
We were below street level, so, when it rained, the toilets would back up.
When it rained, whenever you left the building, you had to remember to turn
off the toilet, or else they would back up. We missed one, and it started flooding,
and the water started pouring toward our computer. I have some pictures
of me there with one of those wet vacs as the water just missed our computer!
Our life savings are in this one computer—life savings plus some money from
relatives, plus personal guarantees on the loan.
There was getting the contract finished. Dan Fylstra came over with the
latest version of the contract. We didn’t have word processing. We had a
correcting Selectric that I was writing stuff on. Dan didn’t have a real word
processor or a good printer for it, but he was doing advertising, so he went to
Typotech, which was a place in Harvard Square where you could do your own
typesetting by the hour. So he used it as a word processor, and he would typeset
the contract. Then we would be sitting there negotiating some of the stuff, and
he would run off to Typotech and make changes, and he’d literally cut and paste
the results.
The final contract we signed—because it was up until late at night, making
some changes about advances and royalties and future versions, I don’t know,