Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [122]
Apple recognized that software would help expand the market for its computer and gave large discounts to programmers who promised to write programs. Time and again programmers discovered ways to stretch the limits of the computer. Apple was receptive to programmers, particularly since most of the programs that were demonstrated did not always work properly. And Apple was also seen by some programmers operating off a shoestring as a large company that could bankroll their diversions. When programs were completed and Apple chose to buy them, Jobs frequently did seat-of-the-pants calculations and arrived at a price by counting the lines of code. Exchanging software or copying some interesting new program became the most important part of many Apple user-group meetings. In 1979 when Fred Gibbons, who had started Software Publishing Corporation, needed an Apple, he picked it up at Jobs’s home. Others relied on their own steam. Phone phreak John Draper developed a word-processing program, Easywriter, for the Apple and then hawked it to San Francisco Bay Area computer stores.
Others were attracted by the computer. Bill Budge, then twenty-two, had declined job offers from Intel and was studying for a doctorate in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley when he saw an Apple II. He promptly spent $2,000 of his $5,000 teaching-assistant salary. “It was the best toy I ever had.” Necessity became the mother of programs and Budge said, “There was no way to get enough software to keep you occupied.” When Budge, at the end of 1979, took his first game, Penny Arcade (an adaptation of Pong), to Apple he traded it for a $1,000 printer. Within six weeks Budge had written another three programs. In 1979 Apple also published a word-processing program dubbed Apple Writer. The program was written by Paul Lutus, a graduate of San Francisco’s hippie movement and a one-time panhandler who had helped design lighting systems for the space shuttle Columbia before turning to programming. Lutus wrote the first version of his word-processing program, Applewriter, in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot log cabin on Eight Dollar Mountain in a remote part of Oregon.
But the one program that did more for Apple than all the others combined was Visicalc. At a time when nobody at Commodore would take his telephone call, Daniel Fylstra, the head of Personal Software, a pint-sized company based in Boston, managed to gain a hearing at Apple. Jobs offered Fylstra an Apple II at dealer price to ensure that Personal Software, which was selling a chess game, would develop programs for Apple. At the time, two acquaintances of Fylstra’s were working on a program to simplify budget forecasting. Daniel Bricklin, a Harvard MBA student, wanted a program that would eliminate the tedious recalculating required after revising financial budgets and enlisted his friend, Robert Frankston, a fellow computer programmer, to help make it work. A finance professor scoffed at the commercial prospects for Bricklin’s idea but did suggest he contact Fylstra. Bricklin wanted to borrow a computer from Fylstra and because the Commodore and Radio Shack machines were being used, wound up with Personal Software’s Apple. Bricklin wrote a prototype program in BASIC for an Apple with 24K bytes of memory and then, said Fylstra, “We all decided he might as well continue on the machine he had started on.” Visicalc—the name derives from visible calculator—was demonstrated to Markkula and to officials at Atari in January 1979, Fylstra recalled: “He interpreted it as a checkbook program. I don’t think Markkula or the others had an inkling of what it could be but they did encourage me.” But the electronics analyst Ben Rosen, impressed by the power and speed