About Me

It was 1964. The Vietnam War was raging. I entered Carnegie Mellon as a physics major on full scholarship. Computer Science degrees hadn’t been thought up yet. I spent my time playing table tennis, abusing my violin, and teaching myself how to program the old Bendix G-21 in Algol. Every so often I went to a class. I was a lousy student. In my third year a skinny girl with waist-length hair and a perfect 4.0 GPA broke my heart. I dropped out.

I never did get to thank that girl. It turned out Joe G., an up and coming titan of Wall Street, was looking for a programmer to create a complex list-processing module called the Evaluator. It was the heart of his First Financial Language running on the SDS-940, one of the first time-sharing systems. I told Joe about my program that ran little beasties around a Philco CRT screen bumping into each other and making more beasties. Compared to today’s games it wasn’t much – but in 1967 it was mind blowing.

Joe gave me a shot. I was in over my head. But for me this wasn’t just a job. It was a last chance to salvage what little ego 4.0-Girl had failed to crush. I put in fourteen-hour days and three months later had working code. The key to the Evaluator was recursive programming. I had never seen recursive programming before and had to think it up on my own. It felt like magic.

Our programming team was building airplanes out of bicycle parts. All it took to create great software was common sense and energy. There were no packaged databases, no GUI APIs, no code libraries to learn. A day with the processor manual and you were good to go. Programming suited me. Soon I was managing the whole development group. I hired John D., John Z., and Tom D., a few more brilliant dropouts. I also hired a fellow with two Ph.D.’s in nuclear physics who couldn’t find work to load paper into our group printer.

My posh 31st-floor corner office at 63 Wall Street had a splendid view of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was what the gods saw when they looked down on Manhattan. On business trips I had to bring one of my staff. I wasn’t old enough yet to rent a car. Work was my life. It was a heady time for a twenty year old.

And then my Draft Board called. I went for a physical with a couple of dozen kids I hadn’t seen since high school. 4-F. My cleft palate was finally good for something.

Back at work sometimes we’d walk over to the old Woolworth Building. It was being torn down to make way for a new complex called the World Trade Center. It was just a big hole in the ground filled with rubble. I visited the site a few years ago. Sadly, it looked pretty much the same.

My code warriors and I came to work around 11:00 each morning, broke for lunch an hour later, worked until 1:00 am, and then all walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to an all-night diner. After dinner I’d go back to my apartment and listen to Jonathan Schwartz on WNEW-FM and read The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction until about 3:00 am. The next day we did it again. My Bon Appétit short story recalls some of that time.

Joseph G. spun our project off as Interactive Data Corporation. I led the assembly language re-implementation of FFL on an IBM 360/67. After the elegance of the SDS-940 Berkeley OS, the clunky IBM mainframe software felt bloated, bureaucratic – a huge step backwards in usability. Nonetheless we muscled our way through and delivered a virtually bug-free implementation of FFL in just six months.

I met my wife to be. I flew her to New York for a big date. She gave me my first kiss ever as we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. We married.

IDC grew to over $100 million in annual revenue. Professional managers came in and decided there was no room for me or the rest of my programmers in their organization. I agreed. I got a call during my father’s funeral saying they were not going to renew my employment contract. The rest of my team simply got fired.

I had been helping General Motors design a large-scale database system under contract with IDC. Upon hearing that I would soon be available they asked me to join the staff at GMAC in Manhattan. We moved to 200 Central Park South, two blocks from the GM building. A year later my son Alexander was born (see Alexander’s Dad).

A couple of years later I joined Datapoint in San Antonio as an early employee to help them enter the emerging dispersed data processing market. When our little cassette-based 2200 expanded from 8K to 16K of memory I thought it could do anything the old IBM mainframe could do except be slow. Vic P. and Harry P.’s engineering was as elegant as the IBM mainframe had been byzantine. 

My son Michael was born, a beautiful little baby boy. He was the first native-born Texan I’d met. Everyone else I knew was from New York or Florida.

Datapoint’s growth was explosive. I was a 25-year-old kid managing forty people in customer support, product management, customer education, and advertising. Having never even seen any of these functions before I was running on pure instinct. Eventually the job outgrew me. I was in a state of professional shock. I needed a fresh start.

I moved to Digital Equipment as Senior Group Manager of terminals, printers, and low-end computers – about $350 million in revenue. I knew nothing about building hardware. I met Tom S., Tryggve F., Russ D., and Jack B. Tom taught me the political perils of honesty, Trygvve taught me about world-class genius, and Jack later funded my first startup.

Russ D. introduced me to Ken Olsen. Ken’s “one step at a time” mantra served me well for the next three decades. I played midwife to the first VT100 display terminal. It was a hard labor. The Marketing Committee wanted to cancel the VT100 before it went into production. We had missed our cost goals by a factor of two with custom LSI chips for features like multiple fonts and 132 character lines (both my ideas) and smooth scrolling (Russ’s idea). Product line managers set their forecasts to zero in protest. They were wrong. Before the meeting Ken asked me, “Who’s going to stop the people who will try to stop you?” I smiled and said, “You will.” He wasn’t happy with my answer but in the end he ran interference and the VT100 went to production.

In the first year DEC shipped over a quarter of a million units. It surprised even me. DEC was a great training ground for future entrepreneurs. It was also exhausting. For every person trying to fund a project there was an equally bright person with another project fighting for the same budget. No manager ever made a decision. It was survival of the fittest idea – by design. But it relied on heroes to get things done.

I was recruited by ADDS, a display terminal manufacturer, to help them enter the small computer market. They had been producing the Tandy 1000 for Radio Shack and the product had major problems. The huge plastic desk was frequently damaged in shipment, the processor was slow and expensive, and competition was heating up.

I designed an elegant, compact, modular 8080-based computer family called MultiVision. It would run our own CPM-compatible multi-user OS. I bought a $50,000 BASIC compiler from Billy Gates when he was still sharing an office with Paul Allen in Bellevue. I was one of his first post-Altair customers. Who knew?

NCR acquired ADDS. I left and started my first software venture. It was called Business Solutions Inc. Jack B., my old friend from DEC, kicked in $30,000 to get the ball rolling. I showed my not yet famous friend Bob Frankston Sales Performance, an Apple II app I developed that tracked bookings for sales managers. Bob gave me his pre-release Visicalc (pic at right). I told him it looked cute but asked if he really thought many people would use a spreadsheet (no, really).

Sales Performance was stillborn. Computer store managers wanted general purpose apps and I had created something strictly for sales managers.

I went into my basement and started developing Senior Analyst – a kind of spreadsheet program with named columns and rows (like Sales or Profit) instead of the R1C3-style cell addresses Visicalc used.

About a month into development my son woke me to say the pool was gone. Our in-ground pool had caved in and threatened to take a wall of the house with it. Repair was mandatory. It also consumed nearly half our savings and meant that I needed to finish and sell Senior Analyst in half the time I had allotted.

I started programming round the clock, napping a few minutes every couple of hours. The timing was fortuitous. Apple was looking for software for the Apple III. They bought publishing rights to Senior Analyst for a $200,000 advance plus royalties. I hired my secretary from ADDS and three students from nearby Stony Brook University and we delivered a user manual and fully tested code two months later. All Apple had to do was design the box it would ship in.

While waiting for Apple to launch Senior Analyst I began working on our second product, The Incredible Jack. Jack B. asked if he could come over and kick in my pool.

Despite Apple having a six month head start, I created The Incredible Jack and launched it at Comdex a month before Apple shipped their first copy of Senior Analyst. Incredible was a hit. We sold thousands of copies and grew to 45 people – enough to attract vulture capital. My little basement project was valued at $11 million. I hired an ad agency and bought an abandoned 60,000 square foot elementary school. We had a gym, principal’s office, knee-level water fountains, and a 200-person basement fallout shelter. We were on our way.

Unfortunately, rumors of Peanut, IBM’s upcoming PC Junior, started. Apple II sales stopped. Our sales stopped. Our venture investors wanted to unload their software holdings and Business Solutions was sold. I learned about preferred stock the hard way.

I started over developing Chambers of MUON, one of the early first-person multi-player virtual reality games. It used Amiga 1000s and a custom real-time network protocol I hacked together. The simulation chambers were made out of particle-board, stood seven feet tall, four feet deep, and weighed 400 pounds each. After building twenty of them I reckoned I was forty-percent sawdust by weight. We did installations in New Jersey and Texas. Thousands of kids loved it. But Ms. Packman had a slightly better revenue per square foot performance and the fellow I was counting on to attract expansion financing lost interest.

After bringing Chambers to a graceful landing, John D. (from FFL days) hired me to head Easel’s aging Workbench client/server software division. I took it from a thirty percent loss to a thirty percent pretax profit in about six months by rewarding my people doing the heavy lifting and shedding the senior managers who had lost faith. After Easel was sold to VMark I left and programmed an auction game server called Prizefight.com, managed development for SilverPlatter (another John D. recommendation), and led software development as Smartmouth Technology’s CTO.

I also began my Geek Fiction writing career. My first novel was Willforce. Draft one was actually more engineered than written. I researched optical limits of miniature cameras, density of various metals, plywood made from bamboo, and the logistics of feeding the world’s hungry. It took time before I realized I wouldn’t actually have to build the machines I was imagining into existence.

I borrowed ideas from Einstein and Buckminster Fuller about converting military waste into food and housing and a better life. I built a web site and offered the novel for free. A few hundred people left comments, mostly glowing, but the publishing world failed to beat a path to my doorstep.

Next came The Wheelwright’s Son. I wrote it during the tortuous 18 months a pustule of paid-by-the-hour lawyers took to dissolve my 35-year marriage and the meaning of most of what I had worked for all my life. My house, the elaborate workroom I had built my wife for her business, the planters and gardens and other labors of love were turned overnight into dead weight, things to be sold or hauled away. I had no idea how vulnerable my world was, how easily it was destroyed. Everything I’d counted on as an anchor in my life was set adrift.

It was a dark rebirth. I moved to an apartment in the huge old Nashua Manufacturing Company cotton mill built in 1823 (pic at right). Daniel Webster himself was one of the original investors. The mill provided much of Wheelwright’s setting. I drew comfort from the solid brick walls and massive wooden beams that had stood so many years. I cried for echoes of the young farm girls, away from home for the first time, breathing cotton dust and sweating over looms that sat in my living room nearly two centuries before. As Wheelwright took form, Delphine, also recently divorced, entered my life.

Delphine and I started MonsterTanks, a small acrylic fish tank factory where the only thing digital was hoping the table saw didn’t remove one while cutting an eighty-pound sheet of acrylic. We rented a thousand square feet in an old shoe factory in Nashua and began building worktables and fixtures to help assemble large acrylic tanks. The big surprise working with physical material instead of computer bits was discovering there was no backspace key. A bad cut, a spotty weld and I was in the abstract acrylic sculpture business.

One of my designs was featured in Freshwater & Marine Aquarium magazine. I incorporated waterfalls, hiding places, custom filters, and specialty lighting into most of my designs. In a final effort to pump up sales we rented an island display in a large Nashua Mall. For a month Janice and I took turns putting in twelve hour days attracting crowds of strolling admirers staring at the tanks and asking if the fish were real. A veteran mall worker told us if we really liked people – really, really liked people, working a mall cart would cure us of that. Unfortunately, after delivering dozens of tanks, I was unable to find anyone willing to pay more for the tanks than it cost me to build them.

I took a part time job helping my friend and fellow writer Mike H. at his little electronics factory and wrote The Lorelei Effect and Ergo $um. Both won awards. Lorelei won a Book of the Year award by the British Arts Council and was published. Actually, it was more like printed. There was no discernible promotion other than an announcement by the publisher. I wasn’t in a position or of a temperament to devote my life to attracting attention to it.

At the same time I created a series of web servers for writers using ASP, Javascript, Python, and DHTML (CurrentDraft.com, MineFallsPress.com, TrailerMill.com, GotPlot.com, SlushMe.com). I joined the army of aspiring writers ravaging forests with an endless stream of unanswered query letters. I eventually came to the conclusion that rather than invest my energy trying to woo mainstream publishers, I might have substantially more fun looking for readers.

Delphine and I decided to retire our digital and aquatic ambitions in favor of concentrating on writing while we restored an abandoned farmhouse on five acres of rugged New Hampshire mountainside. These days we draw our strength from the ponds and canopy of oaks and maples running down our little dirt road where car-sized granite boulders have stood watch over the Valley of the Ancients for thousands of years before the old Nashua cotton mill was even a gleam in Daniel Webster’s eye.

We’ve hung drywall over cracked plaster, built roofs and chicken coops and bunny compounds, installed toilets and sinks, and replaced the old oil furnace with a stove burning cord wood cut from our own property. Nothing connects you to the land like hauling firewood when it’s ten below zero.

I wanted to call our farm The Greenville Home for Unpublished Authors and Incontinent Pets but Delphine named it Journey. We maintain it for the benefit of two dogs, three cats, nine chickens, a six foot Monster Tank filled with tropical fish, a large vegetable garden, apple, pear, peach, and cherry trees, and the ghosts of various bunnies and ducks who succumbed to predators unknown.

Besides diabetes, arthritis, and occasional internal bleeding that emptied my bank account a few years ago  (see Wanna Get Physical), my sixty-four years have given me something which was missing at the start of my career: perspective. So many assume the struggle is between Right and Left, Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Muslims, Liberals and Conservatives, Rich and Poor. I’m convinced that the real battle is between Corpo Sapiens and human liberty.

The one-note corporate profit masters that exploit our vulnerabilities to feed their avarice occupy many disciplines: politics, religion, media, industry, medicine. Diabetic, need insulin? Insurance companies pay $90 an ounce. No job, no insurance? That will cost you $490 for the same ounce. What kind of a culture sucks that kind of profit out of its least advantaged? Truth, justice, and the American way. Superman would definitely not approve.

Big pharma, transnationals, mega-banks, oil barons, war profiteers – living, breathing Corpo Sapiens preying on the little guy, the easy meal. That struggle is the scaffolding upon which my characters chase their dreams.