see what it would feel like. And then we actually programmed it in assembly
language starting the winter of ’78/’79.
Livingston: When you first wrote the prototype that you did in Basic, what
surprised you most?
Bricklin: I had originally wanted the thing to use a mouse. There was no mouse
on the Apple II at the time, so I was using the game paddle and turning it. But
the way I was doing it with the game paddles, the cursor was just too unstable.
So I switched to the arrow keys, which were much more discrete.
I learned some computer things. I had it make a sound every time it recalculated
a cell, but it turned out that the making of the sound on the Apple used
up three-quarters of the CPU time, because it did it with a timing loop.
I learned little things like that. But I saw that it was a useful thing and that it
actually felt good and that I could start describing it to some classmates. One of
them was also an MIT grad and computer person, John Reese. I would tell him
how it was, and he’d say, “Well, Dan, it would be easier if you did this,” and I
said, “You’re right.” There was a lot of feedback that way.
Livingston: Were you nervous to tell anyone about your idea?
Bricklin: No, not those people. Once we started working on it and were in business,
yeah, since we thought it was obviously such a great idea. Though we realized
it takes forever for it to become big in the world. We didn’t think it would
be as big as it is now, because nothing had done that in the past, though we
thought it was real important. But you always do, as an entrepreneur.
Everybody feels that way about what they’re doing. You need that drive. And,
yeah, we were afraid that Texas Instruments would find out about it and they’d
steal the idea. So we were careful; we would have people sign nondisclosure
agreements.
Livingston: The idea of a startup was pretty new. How did you know what to do
first?
Bricklin: There were always startups. A huge portion of the economy in
Massachusetts came from people who got their start at DEC, which started as
an entrepreneurial thing. Then the same thing happened on the West Coast
with Hewlett-Packard and places like that.
But there was this other business, Personal Software, the publishing company,
which was the model that they used of how to do software. This was a different
model of author-publisher. We now know that author-publisher is not a
very good model. We were the poster child of it not being good. But we set up
that way, so when Bob and I made a deal with the Personal Software people