History of Famous Startups. Software Arts

people had to

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:55:10 -0700

people had to stay on to close down the company and all the liabilities for a year
or two; it was a mess.
All those things happen, all the time—the wonderful ups and horrible
downs, but that’s what business is all about. And it’s very personal. There are a
lot of personal things. It’s running into people. And how did I know that I
should talk to Mitch? Well, our insurance agent was also his business insurance
agent, and he talked to Mitch. So I knew that Mitch knew what was happening
with our business. He knew our business was…

couples who spat

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:55:10 -0700

couples who spat all the time, always yelling at each other. It wasn’t as bad
as some businesses, where it actually is a married couple. But our friendship
has continued to this day. As people know, in the business—like Bill Gates is
known for this, about being really tough in meetings, and arguing and stuff like
that—that’s just a way of testing your own understanding of things. By arguing
with others about it, that’s how you learn. And, if somebody can’t take the arguing
with it, then maybe they don’t really believe in what they’re talking about
and they don’t…

that.

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that.
It is worth it sometimes, if you can do it, to reach for the stars. Microsoft
didn’t reach for the stars. Microsoft was step by step by step to where they got,
and it was profitable all the way to it. So that’s the traditional way of doing it.
The Google, Netscape way, those things, sometimes it works, and sometimes—
usually—it doesn’t. But sometimes it does, and the payoffs are incredible. But,
if you’re a business person who wants your business to succeed, as a business,
because you like that business, you take a different view. So the risk…

in cash, plus

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in cash, plus stock. It was based on the numbers we had. It was kind of
bogus, but whatever. They had a division called CompuServe, and we were
going to be bought by CompuServe. We had board approval from both sides.
We got sued a day or two before the deal was consummated. This was not very
good. I was used to bad things happening at the last moment.
If that had happened, we would have ended up with all the stuff we were
doing over at CompuServe. The world would have been quite different. One of
the pioneers of…

VisiCalc; it was

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:55:10 -0700

VisiCalc; it was a mockup that they did) with Charlie Chaplin pushing a button.
When Apple ran an ad, they had Dick Cavett—who had never done ads on TV
before—and he would push a button and up would come VisiCalc on the
screen. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, I’m sure, but I thought,
“Wow! That was really cool! Dick Cavett!”
One thing that really hit home was when I was going back to the airport
from a conference where Ross Perot had spoken—he was the head of EDS. A
few of us from Software Arts shared…

he would run

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:55:10 -0700

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,
Dan Bricklin 83
whatever we were doing—we needed a copy of it, and it was late at night; there
were no all-night things. Bob had a copier. In the old days, Xerox’s patents
hadn’t run out, and people didn’t have Xerox machines at home. We had a thing
which had a lightbulb in the bottom and used this…

then convert it

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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…

a reference card

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:55:10 -0700

a reference card up, which my father actually helped me do—my father’s printing
business typeset and printed that whole thing for us. An awful lot of people
learned the product from the reference card.
It had the ability to lock—because, remember, you had a very small screen,
40 characters by 24/25 lines on the Apple II—it allowed you to lock columns or
rows on the screen. They call them panes now, I think, in Excel; you could lock
the panes. We called them titles. You could lock the title area, and, as you
scrolled, they’d synchronize, so that if you…

see is what

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see is what you get—with a separate location that showed the contents and all
the attributes of it at the top, with the menu tree being shown at the top. We
had very little memory space to give you in the way of help, but if you hit /, it
listed all the letters you could type. If you typed a letter, it would give you the
name of the command that you were doing and any options. So basically, it was
always prompting you with what you could do next, once you learned to do the
/ key. And,...

Day one I

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Day one I wasn’t thinking computer-like. The whole idea was not to think
computer-like. We used decimal arithmetic so it would act just like a calculator.
We didn’t use binary arithmetic, which might end up with some anomalies that
you might not understand.
I had Professor Jackson at the business school, and I had her look at the
prototypes as we were doing it (she consulted to CEOs of big companies). She
said, “You’re competing against the back of the envelope. It’s got to be really
easy to use.” I was constantly worrying about those things, and that affected the…